A little motivational message from the elevator.
Tag: work
Game Changer
That may not look exciting, but free tampons at the main university library? That’s kind of a big deal if you’re a ladyperson. I don’t know if this is going to be a campus-wide thing or library system-wide, or if it’s only being instituted at the main library, but it’s kind of amazing.
Exterminate!
Every cubicle should have a Dalek.
NACO Training
I’m learning how to create name authority records, at work. As the person teaching the class warned, the material is “excruciatingly dense.” Tomorrow we’re covering corporate bodies, which actually sounds kind of interesting to me, since I used to catalog gov docs.
Praise Houses
Source: Image Collections Online – “Prayer house on Coffin Point trip”
I’ve talked about this before. One of the projects I’m involved with at work is adding metadata to a collection of photographs by Frank Hohenberger. It’s fun! And I occasionally blog about some of the photos I’m working on. There are two photos in the collection of praise houses. Only Hohenberger called them “prayer houses,” and his titles are sacrosanct, so we can’t edit them. We also couldn’t add a subject heading for “praise houses,” because the term did not exist in either the Library of Congress subject authority file or the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials subject list, and we can only pull terms from those two sources.
Maybe that doesn’t seem like a big deal. The terms praise house and prayer house sound fairly similar, right? So people could find the praise house images by just doing a keyword search. But it is a big deal. Praise houses are a very specific, unique thing, and no one who is searching for praise houses will think to search for prayer houses, instead. So without being able to add a subject for praise houses, a keyword search for the term won’t work (our keyword search is literal and cannot understand that prayer and praise are synonymous-ish). That means that these images, which might be of interest to folks studying African American history or the Gullah people, would not be findable. They were basically hidden from view.
So I’ve nagged and nagged and nagged, over the course of the last 5-6 years (yes, really), until I finally was able to hash out a plan of action with a SACO cataloger. I gave her all my research on praise houses, and last February, she started working on submitting a proposal to LC for a new praise houses subject heading. We didn’t expect it to pass on the first round, but it did, and it is now live.
This may seem kind of wonk-ish and boring, but it is a big deal to me, personally.
Feet Bouquet
The baby bear made a feet bouquet, while he was napping. Is there anything cuter?
We have our yearly all day in-house conference at work tomorrow. They are allegedly serving pastries and coffee in the morning, but the last time I attended, they said the same thing and there was bupkis.
They won’t tell us what the lunch menu is, but every year they serve the same revolting vinegar-drenched artichoke heart veggie wrap. It’s absolutely inedible, so I’ll be packing Pop Tarts and a PB&J sandwich. Better safe than sorry.
Tuesday’s Work
I finally got through everything on the bottom shelf of my book truck. It was all old stuff with minimal or crappy records, so I’d been putting off working on it.
I also got a promotion, effective in two weeks. My new official title will be “electronic resources cataloger,” but I’ll
still be working with some printed materials. I’ll also get to train to do name authority work and will be doing more original cataloging. Très excitant!
Work
That may not look like a lot, for a day’s cataloging output, but they were skinny and mean.
Renovation Progress
I worked today, and since it was the weekend, I had to enter through the “renovation hallway.” Progress! This is the area with the crossed out walls. They’re all gone now.
XXXX
Oh look! More renovations at the library!
red paper boat 