The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

I Has A Work

In that vein of telling everyone about our awesome library jobs, I'll just go ahead and tell you about mine.

Originally, it was supposed to be an internship, which, mostly due to my being lazy, didn't happen in a timely fashion, which turned into a conversation between my department chair and I along the lines of:

Her: So how's the internship?
Me: Well, actually, I've been a little slow, and don't really have one, and...
Her: Oh, well, we'll just line you up with some work downstairs in the library! Come with me!

...a short time and 3 floors later...

Her: Tech Services people! This is Erik! Hire him!
Them: We are powerless to stop your Jedi mind powers.

And that's roughly how I wound up working in Buley Library's Tech Services department. Which has, contrary to popular belief, little to do with, say, computers in any way shape or form besides database access, and everything to do with being the folks who catalogue, label, prep, and do minor repairs on books. Thus far I have:

- Labeled books, which involves getting a sheet of labels and matching them with the correct book via penciled in call numbers or a printout, then taping the label in place using one of a couple of trillian different sizes of pre-measured tapes, which prompted this conversation:

Mary: Yeah, we used to get one size tape and it worked great. Now they changed it and we have to get all these different sizes.
Me: Man, they must make a killing off that.
Mary: ARGH! I never thought about it like that!

I note that this has so far involved children's books, meaning there seems to be some law that no matter what library I work out, I will always be the guy working with the kids' books. I don't know why.

- I've deleted old books from the system, in particular the entire US legal code circa 2000-2005 or so, which aside from the Very Heavy Books was pretty awesome, and presages the reign of revolutionary lawmaking that Marechal and I will usher in upon our ascension to power. I also got to throw them all in a dumpster, which everyone else finds a strange part of the job, and I was like "Woohoo! Throwing out law books! Rock on!"

- The third and most involved part of my job involves a little backstory. You see, Buley library is getting a whole new building constructed in back of it, and has for a while now. This necessitated moving some books from where they were and putting them into storage elsewhere in the library, which happened to be an auditorium on the ground floor of the library, where things like journals are also stored. So far so good, right? Well, the Monday before Thanksgiving, some construction guy broke a water main, which then leaked into the library. Ultimately by the time it got turned off, most of the journals and such took about 6 inches of water - enough to screw up every bottom shelf ever.

Remember that auditorium with all the books stored in it? It took seven FEET of water.

The recovery process involved bringing in a fleet of refrigerator trucks, freeze drying all the books, and then some company went through and tried to fix some of them. But some things you just can't fix, which is where I come in. It's my job to delete all of the books we can't keep, be they water damaged, moldy, dissolved, or what have you. It's a tragic sort of job, which brings us to the pictorial section of our post.

We're set up in what used to be the old student center cafeteria. Those are journals all stacked up in what used to be the faculty dining hall. Others are on the student side, and the kitchen is now a work room for the company that's triaging books and journals and for us library folks.

See all those boxes? That's about 20 books per box, all the way down the hall. All of those books are done, finished, dead. Some of them have almost literally dissolved.

My job is to grab a cart, get a couple few boxes, bring them to my computer there, scan them into the system, and withdraw the item from our catalog. There's another step involving withdrawing from OCLC as well, but I don't do that because it's a gigantic slowdown, so people who aren't me do that step.

Some of what we lost is pretty tragic. Buley, as a rule, has a pretty high proportion of pre-20th century books still on the shelves (or in a rare book collection, as these were), which is why I have an 1888 copy of Phil Sheridan's memoirs waiting for me to read. These are a collection of English theater of some sort or another from 1796. All in all, I've come across about 15 boxes of this sort of thing thus far, which is monumentally tragic. Perhaps fortunately, we may be able to save some of them. I hope so.

And now instead of talking about work, I must get ready for work.

Posted by Dwip at June 20, 2007 7:38 AM