Cataloging Twilight

So on Sunday, I headed three hours south of my home library to a three-day group of cataloging courses through OCLC. Not only did this turn out to be a physical vacation (I got to stay in a hotel on my employer's tab), but also a bit of a mental one.

Now, I did find out plenty of important things that will enable me to do my job better, and that was good. I can look at a MARC record now and more easily pick out flaws or understand exactly what it is that I'm seeing. This is kind of awesome. But the material itself . . . you don't know the definition of dry until you sit through a cataloging class. About the only interesting thing about it was the view-of-Earth-from-space wallpaper at the very back of the long room and the "Transporter Room" sign taped to the nearby elevator door.

The time I wasn't in class was mostly spent reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. Between swimming and sleeping, I burned through the first book and a half back at my hotel. Meyer is a masterful suspense writer--her ability to pull you into the world is flawless; her character development is terrific. Her authorship is the only thing powering this "girl falls in love with a vampire" plot and turning a cheesy premise into something so involving.

Getting addicted to this series inspired my creativity too. I felt a desire to write that I haven't felt in years. Juxtaposed to that was the cataloging . . . it's stifling, really. I am so grateful that there are people out there who love it. It is necessary--the backbone of libraries. But despite my detail-oriented nature, I find cataloging to be soul-sucking. There is little room for creativity or imagination in this man-made system constructed to capture man-made knowledge.

Fortunately, my degree can lead me to other areas of librarianship. Navigating this system of knowledge holds much more interest to me than constructing it and making sure it runs correctly.

And with all of this reading about vampires, I think I will feel the urge to bite the next person who asks me, "what do you do in library school? Learn the Dewey decimal system?" I will tell them to come back and ask me the same question once they can tell me what all of this means. Seriously.

This is your brain on Google.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Atlantic Monthly)

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this?

Haven't these people read M.T. Anderson's Feed?

I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to think that Google is, in fact, evil (and I'm only partially being tongue-in-cheek).

Book Collectors

I'm not a snob about books, but I'm probably a show-off -- as who isn't? My showing-off is of a pretty low-key if not completely abstruse sort, though. No one has ever noticed -- much less commented upon -- my collections of minor German Romantics, accounts by UFO abductees, books by and about hoboes, or memoirs by former employees of the New York Evening Graphic.

So states Luc Sante in his article The Book Collection That Devoured My Life. Very entertaining--take a look.

I can somewhat identify, although my own library remains steady at about 400-500 books. It's not likely to get bigger anytime soon either, as I've sadly curbed my desire to own books for the sake of owning. It is still good to keep my favorites, the collectible ones, the ones that have sentimental value, or the ones that I really want to read but that a library is unlikely to have. So many books, so little time!

Some trivia: I like it that Mr. Sante uses the term "library rat" to describe himself at the end of the article. He states earlier that he's bilingual in French, and "library rat," or un rat de la bibliothèque, is a French term equivalent to our English "bookworm."

Library Job Titles

This link will give you an idea of all of the jobs out there for someone with an MLIS degree--and perhaps also why librarians need to know more than just the Dewey Decimal system.

TS

This is like the place where I work, except that this is massively bigger. It looks like they have about twenty tech. serv. staff, whereas in our library we have two--me and my supervisor. Our library is a lot smaller, so my supervisor and I do all of the acquisitions, cataloging, processing, mending, and stacks maintenance (which you don't see in this video--consists of inventory, shifting the collection to make space, some shelving, dusting, etc.). Kind of a goofy video, but it gives a good idea of what we do.