Library Day in the Life: Day 1

Well, readers, from now until the Friday, I am doing my best to participate in the Library Day in the Life, Round 8.

Here’s the brief about the project, taken from their website:

The Library Day in the Life Project is a semi-annual event coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.

I am sharing the work week with you, readers, so hold on and enjoy.

I arrived at work at 7:30 and turned on the computers in the library. Several staff members don’t have computer access at home, so we like to have the computers on and ready to go if they come into work early to use the computers. I checked my work email (something I rarely do on the weekends) and checked the general library email account to see if there was anything I needed to address in that account. I had one viewing request for one of our rare books to schedule for a weekend in April. Should be fun - I will pull some of our related Rockwell Kent items (and he’s one of my favorite American artists).

I went down to the all-staff meeting at about 8:15, and this lasted until 10:00. This is about my least favorite meeting here, but at least I get to see some new faces (mostly gallery attendants and folks working in the restaurant).

After the meeting, I returned to my office and met a new library volunteer. I gave her a brief orientation and welcome (she had already been trained). We have about 30 volunteers that help us staff the reference desk, shelve books, etc. I then cataloged 9 books - 8 copy-cataloged items, and two original records the first is here.

One of the artists I listed in the record was extremely difficult to track down to establish a heading for in our catalog, and I had no luck. Spent about 45 minutes doing this. Art catalogers can sympathize with me - artists so infrequently share information about themselves that would help us disambiguate their names (middle name, birth year, etc). And this information is not readily available online. This is part of the reason I am hoping to make the library where I work a NACO contributor in the near future - so that the work does not go to waste.

After this, I went to lunch and read two articles in the New York Review of Books. I try to keep up with events and books through that and The New Yorker, and they make for great lunchtime reading.

The second original record I created was much more fun, as it directly relates to an exhibition coming soon to the museum. Here’s a screenshot of what the record looked like in MARC:



(I hope these pass muster with you catalogers reading!) This record took the bulk of the afternoon, along with getting our afternoon volunteers settled in their tasks. One of them is placing new books tags in our books for the monthly display we will have for the books I cataloged in the previous month. As it stands now, I cataloged 122 books - 3 original records, 6 enhance records, and 113 copy records. If you are curious to know what I mean by those, let me know in the comments and I’ll be happy to share.

That is pretty much my day. I need to wrap up with some shelving and checking on our volunteers. I look forward to sharing my day with you again tomorrow!