It was the best of service, it was the worst of service – a tale of two cities, Chicago and Boston – the Poetry Foundation and Harvard University.
I don’t know if this just happens to me, or if others experience this too, but whenever I submit a question or a clarification to the Poetry Foundation, I get nothing in return. Zilch. Zero. Nada.
It’s not like I bombard them with questions – I’m basically talking about TWO inquiries – but the first one went on for MONTHS. If interested in the details, check out this post, HERE.
Back in August, I submitted a second question.
**crickets**
I followed up today with a second request for help, and I added additional email addresses on the email too. So far I’ve received one automatic “out of office” reply, but that’s it (BTW, the reply stated, “I'm currently out of the office and will not be checking my email until September 9, 2025. I will reply to you as quickly as I can when I return.” We’ll see.)
Also, this morning, I sent notification to the online Emily Dickinson Archive – via a Library Technology Services Support form at Harvard University – about an error on the Dickinson site (by the way, the error was the focus on my post today, HERE).
I made my submission at 9:45 a.m. At 2:59 p.m., someone named Julie at LTS forwarded my inquiry to someone named Leslie. At 4:21, Leslie emailed me: “Thanks for taking the time to report the error. You’re right, it’s definitely an OCR error. It will eventually get corrected, in the next round of updates.”
Of course, the next thing I did was search, “What does OCR mean?”
Turns out that OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, the technology that converts different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, image files, and PDFs, into editable and searchable machine-readable text.
Well, that makes sense (considering what I wrote about today, HERE).
There you have it folks. Two inquiries, two institutions, and two approaches to customer service.
I don’t know if this just happens to me, or if others experience this too, but whenever I submit a question or a clarification to the Poetry Foundation, I get nothing in return. Zilch. Zero. Nada.
It’s not like I bombard them with questions – I’m basically talking about TWO inquiries – but the first one went on for MONTHS. If interested in the details, check out this post, HERE.
Back in August, I submitted a second question.
**crickets**
I followed up today with a second request for help, and I added additional email addresses on the email too. So far I’ve received one automatic “out of office” reply, but that’s it (BTW, the reply stated, “I'm currently out of the office and will not be checking my email until September 9, 2025. I will reply to you as quickly as I can when I return.” We’ll see.)
Also, this morning, I sent notification to the online Emily Dickinson Archive – via a Library Technology Services Support form at Harvard University – about an error on the Dickinson site (by the way, the error was the focus on my post today, HERE).
I made my submission at 9:45 a.m. At 2:59 p.m., someone named Julie at LTS forwarded my inquiry to someone named Leslie. At 4:21, Leslie emailed me: “Thanks for taking the time to report the error. You’re right, it’s definitely an OCR error. It will eventually get corrected, in the next round of updates.”
Of course, the next thing I did was search, “What does OCR mean?”
Turns out that OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, the technology that converts different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, image files, and PDFs, into editable and searchable machine-readable text.
Well, that makes sense (considering what I wrote about today, HERE).
There you have it folks. Two inquiries, two institutions, and two approaches to customer service.
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