I haven't written in ten forevers because each time I sit down to write, I try to think of something to say that doesn't sound all self-centered and dumb, and nothing comes to mind. But I was inspired today by work, so now you can read about what I do on random afternoons instead of going and doing my 6.002 labs.
I work in the RSC - that's the Retrospective Collection, and we pretty much handle all the old books that none of the other libraries want to deal with. So I spend some time checking books back in and reshelving, but that's all overshadowed by the DDC Recon Project. The RSC has thousands of old books that need to be brought up-to-date by having them barcoded and catalogued so they can be checked out by barcode instead of by hand. I think this project's been going on for more than five years now, and there's still plenty of books to go through. The RSC is working with some sort of cataloguing company - the deal is that the RSC needs to barcode and scan in 250 books every week and the company takes those and documents them all and checks for duplicates and such. Then when the whole process is complete, the books get sent off to Harvard Depository, where everyone can conveniently forget about them until someone actually wants to check one out. :D
So I spend every Wednesday barcoding one batch of books. We work in sets of about 125 - so we go through two sets in a week. Barcoding is quite easy - you just have to look up the number of pages in the book, write it down, and attach three barcodes in different places (two go on the book, the third on the form that you write the page numbers down on). And that's about it. Easy-peasy - I usually study Japanese while I'm doing this since barcoding is pretty mindless. Actually, it's been kind of useful recently since we're learning numbers in Japanese - I've been trying to remember the numbers in Japanese instead of English. It's really hard to go straight to Japanese without thinking about them in English though!
The other major part of the DDC Recon Project is the scanning of the books. Today, I did some more scanning since one of the other student assistants quit or something, and now I have to do the work that she isn't doing any more. <_<; Oh well. If I get to sit around and listen to music and get paid for it, I can't be too unhappy, right? Of course, it would be even better if I could draw at the same time, but I'm afraid that's completely out of the question. Scanning is very time-consuming and annoying because you sit around for a long time but you can't actually do anything while you're sitting around because there's only about fifteen seconds of downtime between each scan. And it adds up to a lot of time when you're through since you have to make three scans for each book. But you can't do anything in there because you have to keep waiting to flip pages and hit the scan button! I guess I'm much faster than my supervisor or pretty much anyone else - everyone's always surprised at how quickly I go through a set of books. I think it's because if you set me down with some headphones and a CD or three, I can keep myself happy for hours. It's easy to focus if I'm listening to something that I really like. I'm afraid that if this goes on for much longer though, I'm going to run out of CDs to listen to that I'm not totally sick of. That could be very bad because without anything to listen to, I'd go nuts. Oh well. So I'm stuck with the job that nobody else wants. But it's not too bad. And I get paid. Heh, I should get a raise. ^^;
Besides the barcoding and scanning, there's also a bit of database work to do, but that's stupid and easy. You just read stuff in by barcode and write down their Dewey Decimal number and fun stuff like that. And I sort out mail and stuff. But... that's about it! Now, wasn't that exciting? Actually, working at the RSC is pretty darn cool. I mean, how many other people regularly come into contact with books that are more than a century old? I've glanced through a few old science books (eh, well, they're pretty much all about science - this is MIT after all) and they are pretty hilarious. One talked about the formation of the moon: The Earth was spinning around and it formed a pear shape. The spinning put so much stress on the Earth that the top part of the 'pear' broke off and that became the moon. Uh-huh... Dream on folks... It was kind of cool though - today I scanned books by Percival Lowell (the guy who discovered, or at least looked really hard for, the planet(?) Pluto), Svante Arrhenius (that guy who came up with the idea of electrolytic dissociation - acids and bases), and Newton (the Principia of course, though it's a reprint from some time in the 1870's... certainly not the original! :P). And I'm pretty sure I saw one more book by some famous dead guy, but the name eludes me at the moment so I'll let it pass. Still, isn't that great? Handling all these old books written by famous men before they were even famous. They have all those old fuzzy pictures of Saturn and stuff that looks so quaint and silly (we're going through all the astronomy books right now...) and books discussing whether those dark marks on Mars are vegetation or not, or how exciting it would be to travel into space. Even though all the dust and grime makes my hands filthy after every workday, I'm still excited to see what I'll be handling next. It makes me wish I had time to sit down and actually read some of the books passing through my hands. But alas, there is always more work to be done, and those sad dusty tomes that haven't been checked out in the last half-century or more must remain unread. Such is the life of an overworked librarian and an underused library.
- Flykyr Skysong
Current song: Lost Child OST - Black End (The best song ever! ^_^)
Current mood: Content
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