Day 62: Opening a book and seeing its spine through the pages

Something about that pains me, the spine of a book showing bare. And it hurts even more to hear the crackling tear of the spine breaking. Any yet, the things I do for my job... Today I started tattle-taping journals, and ideally, the stuff needs to be right along the spine which means... I'm a sad panda. Sad panda, indeed.

But there's no real lesson there. Anyone who has ever opened a new book knows whether or not breaking the poor thing's spine hurts them... Except piano books... They need that lesson or their pages will try to close as you play.

Still, I digress.

Today was exam numero one!

The dread pirate Cataloguing.

Tedious as ever, and yet I still enjoyed it.

The multiple choice and definitions were reasonably easy, with joke answers strewn in... often as the answer. Going over the class slides and post-it noting my AACR2 was all the studying needed to be sure.

Pro tip: Emily Post's Table Manners for Adults has nothing to do with cataloguing if you couldn't have guessed.

Dewey is tougher when you can't check your answers like a math problem. That is, when you can't use Dewey online to see what the number you've built leads to, it's tough to be sure of the answer you've given.

But all in all, I feel that that particular exam went well, all things considered. Nothing in particularly really stumped me, it was just a long slog to create the Dewey Decimal Classifications and the Machine-Readable Cataloguing records.

Next up: Information and Society, tomorrow morning!

Study, study, study!

Day 55: Cinémathèque Québécoise

Honestly, I have a lot of feelings. And a lot of them can be summed up with nothing but long strings of vowels.

But I'll try to be brief.

And coherent.

Today the McGill Student Chapter of the ACA (Association of Canadian Archivists), which I am on the exec for as a member of the Commsquad, went on a field trip. And no, I wasn't the one who suggested the destination, as perfect for me as it was.

We went to the NFB's Cinémathèque Québécoise. And it was glorious.

Honestly, I knew I wanted to work for the NFB, because of my film background, and I'm so glad I got the opportunity to visit one of the places I could work if I do wind up there!

I learned a few things, more fun facts than lessons, but bear with me!

Lesson 53: The Cinémathèque developed its own thesaurus which it uses for indexing, and uses a modified version of the AACR2. Their organization system is (modified) Library of Congress.

Lesson 54: Not all libraries weed their collections.

For that second lesson, I had always hoped it existed, but I was worried it was just a silly, idealistic dream. But no! The Cinémathèque Québécoise aims to maintain a complete retrospective of film throughout time, so if they get rid of a document it's only ever because it has fallen into unusable disrepair, or is being replaced with a new copy. But preservation is a large part of what they're about.

Also, they're huge into making their collection digitally accessible.

A library after my own heart! *swoon*

Day 54: And so it begins again.

Let it be known: Today was the beginning of the end of the first half of my first year of library school.

My last cataloguing class.

Cue the over-dramatic sobs.

Seriously though, I liked cataloguing. And if I ever have a labelmaker and a bunch of free time, I'm totally going to Dewey-decimalize my entire non-fiction book collection. And if it's that much free time, I may just do the same to my fiction.

Because, yes: I am that much of a nerd.

Looking even further forward than the mere end of semester...

Work wanted to know my holiday plans to get December/January tentatively scheduled, so I had to actually check over my schedule for next semester.

Lesson 52: 3 weeks off for Christmas, and four-day weekends all semester.

I thought I only had 2 weeks off for Christmas, but I've actually got post-New Years recovery time!

I feel like I planned really well! Or... well, we'll see how I feel about that when next semester rolls around.

All my classes crammed into two days, with no breaks, makes me feel like every day of school next semester is going to be like my Wednesdays... Except even more condensed. Rather than class from 8:35-5:25 with leisurely lunch 'n library breaks, it'll be 8:35-2:25 with no breaks but the ones my profs give me.

Better start packing lunches more consistently!

Also, I guess the posting is going to become very sparse next month... The only days that will count as a day of library school will be my exam days. And I'll really just be a rain cloud those days.

Unless I can reign that in to provide an analysis of the difficulty of the exam in question and the apparent effectiveness of my studying... Hmmmm...

Day 49: WARNING! Cyborg puppies conspire to separate New Brunswick from Canada!

Today was our first lab about Dewey Decimal in my Cataloguing class. I've always loved Dewey. I worked in a library, and I know how to find everything I could possibly want in a Dewey system without a catalogue. But having never learned it formally, I learned a great many things today about this odd, rather outdated, system.

Lesson 47: Dewey Decimal Classification holds some very bizarre things to be true.

These things include, but are not limited to:

all domesticated animals being technology. Mechanical puppies? Check!

a New Brunswick free Canada.

conspiracy theories being affiliated with computers.

Actually, that last one's not really that odd, given the rise of conspiracy-culture fuelled by the internet.

But my favourite thing about Dewey? This rap:



Also, do you like the new picture of myself I've included along the right side? It's from our Quidditch Yule Ball Poster photo shoot last night, and I thought it'd be nice to actually have a good picture of myself on my blog... I'm normally the one behind the camera, so there are very few good pictures of me. And in this one I'm flying a broom! Huzzah!

I edited it, but the photo credit goes to Lindsey P. Cameron, aka Widget.

Day 40: 3 days in, 300 words behind.

Ya, I'm already falling behind in NaNoWriMo. Maybe I can catch up after I've finished all my researching and annotating and presenting. Maybe not. We shall see.

I'm hesitant to use the lesson I had decided upon today, at the risk of speaking too soon. But then again, I said that I liked cataloguing, and that has stayed true enough. Consider this as an extension of that lesson.

Lesson 40: Designating subject headings is not as difficult or daunting as I was afraid it would be.

It feels very logical to me, and it just makes sense. I imagine it will be harder when I'm trying to do it from a hard copy list in the quiz than it is when I'm using the fully searchable LC subject headings catalog, but I rather like it.

It's like compromising a need to complete a search. It's something my brain does automatically. I look at a title, I have a question, and I immediately break them down into their component parts. In some ways it just allows me to classify them in my memory and remember them better; "Oh yes, that book! The one about women's psychology and its application to healthcare, it's right over here..." or "I have often wondered that myself! Why just the other day...". But it also allows me to optimize a google search at lightning speed, and apparently, to divine subject headings with relative ease.

Although, why isn't it more helpful with Dialog?

Ugh, Dialog. The love-hate relationship I have with that thing.

There's a lesson for another day. "Be Careful What You Wish For".

Day 32: Everything is Obsolete

In cataloguing, we use a set of rules called the AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd Update [with 2005 revisions]) to create and structure all our data in a standardized way so it makes sense, is consistent and is therefore easier to use.

However, these rules are largely a throwback to cataloguing for card catalogues, old technology with distinct limitations; space and size being the most obvious ones. So there are a lot of rules that we use that don't make much sense when you're cataloguing on a computer. For instance, if a book has more than three authors, you only list the first one. Even though, since we're using computers now, we could list every author a work has, even if it had 100 of them. Evidently, these rules could use some updating, and that's where the RDA (Resource Description and Access) comes in. A new set of rules for a new age, or some such business. Basically, the 130$ I just spent on the AACR2 will be going by the wayside in 2013 when the RDA comes into force. I'm not bitter, honest I'm not!

 Anyways, to the lesson! With such a major overhaul on the horizon, and one that we aren't really learning specifically right now, there are a lot of things I don't know about it. But I learned one thing today that I found particularly interesting.

Lesson 32: With the restructuring of cataloguing rules, works will have their own authority records.

We currently have authority records for people, so that if they use different names, or people spell their names wrong, it still directs to the one official, approved (authority) record for that individual. Doing that for works as well will allow us to find all the editions, translations, adaptations, etc. of one work in the same place. For instance, whereas now you'd have separate, and likely unconnected, entries for The Two Towers as a book by J.R.R.Tolkien and The Two Towers the film by Peter Jackson, despite the fact that they are the same narrative entity, with these new rules, you'd have a record for "The Two Towers" and it would link you to the book, the movie, the 50th anniversary edition, the french translation... everything! We'll see how it works out, but for now, I think that's pretty cool.

A good example of this concept in action is if you look at goodreads. There are flaws in the execution, which goodreads librarians like myself work to tidy up, but in general, all the editions of each work are combined into one listing. Which is particularly handy for the way you're meant to use goodreads, because it seems silly to say that I've read "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" and have it suggest that since I liked that, maybe I'd like to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". Instead, the system knows that those are really just different sides of the same coin.

Though I'd like to know how they're dealing with boxed sets...

Bonus unnumbered lesson: What my program feels is a full course load (4 courses, or 12 credits, a semester), is only considered 80% of a full course load by OSAP. It doesn't really affect or ruin anything, it's just an oddity.

Day 27: Everything's going so well!

Today's lesson is a bit of a remnant from last week, but I figure you can handle it. There's an odd thing about library school: The vast majority of the work is group work.

This often means headaches and logistical nightmares of trying to divide the work fairly and always feeling simultaneously like you're slacking and your partner thinks they're doing all the work, and feeling like you're doing everything yourself. But so far, that hasn't been my experience at all. In fact, today just taught me.

Lesson 26: Buckle down! If you just sit with your partner and talk through the whole project, some things can be done in an afternoon.

My partner and I just sat down and did our authority record project between class and our lab last week, and even though it isn't due for another two weeks, we handed it in today. I can honestly say that I don't think I've ever completed something so far in advance of the due date. It feels amazing!

Day 18: This book was written from BEYOOOOND THE GRAVE

Cataloguing class, work and the first Quidditch practice I'm actually participating in (I wanna be the Keeper!); it's a long yet awesome day.

Had a particularly interesting lesson in Cataloguing about books written by mediums.
 
Lesson 18: The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) have a rule for cataloguing books that were written by spirits through mediums. So if you're ever looking for a book by author and see a few options, one of which has "(Spirit)" next to it, that particular option will contain all the books written by that person after their death related through a medium.

Some examples from McGill's catalogue include Sister M.G.'s "The purgatory manuscript : the relations of a nun with a soul in purgatory" and Sitting Bull's "message from spirit life" written by (from?) him the year after he died... The spirit of one Robert Hugh Benson seems to have had a particularly active afterlife.

...

The More You Know....

Day 13: Tedium, not always a bad thing

Hooray for cataloguing class! Frankly, I quite like it. Maybe I just have a weird standard, but there you have it. I also had work again today, which I also rather enjoy. Today's lesson is related to difficulty and tediousness.

Lesson 15: Cataloguing is not hard. Cataloguing is tedious, but it is not difficult. It's easy to confuse the two, something being tedious usually makes it hard to do, but only in the sense that when something is tedious, the mental energy necessary to really get down to it and complete the job, is higher. But that does not make it difficult. In fact, I'm finding I'm rather enjoying the tedium. It's even... soothing.

Day 4: Classes? We no need no stinkin' classes!

Off-center day of classes! My class that's normally Wednesday was actually today (a Friday?) because next Wednesday the professor's actually in Greece, so we need to get started so as not to fall behind. Confusing. Following that trend, my lessons today were all about confusion.

Lesson 5) People are generally uninterested in libraries and as a result seem to think they are organized by magic. They are also incapable of understanding interchangeable use of the terms "bookshelves" and "stacks" without a whole song and dance.

Bonus unnumbered lesson for non-library people: you know bookshelves. Bookselves are shelves for books, you've seen them in the library and you probably have at least one in your house, even if you don't use it for books. Point of interest though, when we have bookshelves in the library, we also tend to call them "the stacks". I don't want you to be confused when we refer to "that stack over there". We aren't talking about a pile of books, that's just what we call the shelves. Same thing when we refer to entries, we're talking about catalogue entries, usually on the computer, not entrances.

I feel that sometimes we can be confusing without meaning to. Just remember that we are professionals, experts if you will. Just like I wouldn't necessarily understand if you started talking about things from your field with the terms you use with your colleagues, we will use our terms when talking with you because that's how we speak when we're in the library, and sometimes we forget that we're not just talking to another colleague. So please accept my apologies for this in advance.