the secret adventures of the amazing gilesbot9000 because he's giles

I meant to mention that in last night’s class, I also told everyone that my goal in the program is to do at least one assignment in every class related to dogs.

Today, my library day consisted of work at my preservation internship. First, I helped unpack some boxes of books and journals from the commercial bindery. I matched the books to their dust jackets and information slips with barcode stickers.

Then I got to use a stapling machine to attach some booklets of sheet music to protective covers. First, I removed an extraneous adhesive flap in the center of the covers with a very sharp blade.

Then, I used the nifty stapling machine to attach the booklets to the covers.

I spent the rest of the time doing research on books pulled as “brittle books.” The process involves looking over the books and recording types of damage (markings, torn pages, missing pages, etc.). I also do a double fold test, which involves folding a small bit of a corner of a page back and forth until it breaks off, and I count the number of times I fold the corner. (Worth noting is Nicholas Baker’s book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, which argues against this method of testing the brittleness of paper. Baker finds it appalling that preservationists destroy the materials they are meant to be saving but is particularly unhappy at the move by libraries in the last few decades to jettison paper copies of newspapers and other materials in favor of digital preservation.)

I then search the book in the library’s system to see if there are other copies and reprints available. I search WorldCat to see how many copies are available in that aggregated catalog (counting in particular the number available in the five-state area around Minnesota). And then I search BookFinder.com to see if copies and reprints are widely available. Most of the books I work with were published and printed before 1920 and are fun to flip through to see photos, illustrations, and other things that show the age in which they were written.

Here are a couple of images of books that I researched today:

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So my library day began today with that brief visit to the library where I interned last semester. By chance, I stopped in (shortly after lunch) when all five of the librarians were present, so I got to chat with all of them.

I left that library to go to the Hosmer branch of Hennepin County Public Libraries where I have been volunteering a couple hours each week since the beginning of last fall. I work primarily with shelving nonfiction books (the library uses the Library of Congress classification system) and CDs. I have also processed books coming in from other branches for the holds shelves and searched for missing/flagged books as part of the ongoing collections maintenance work.

Today when I arrived, the door leading to the behind-the-desk area (where the materials get sorted) was closed. The library director was sitting at the reference desk, and he said that there was a bit of excitement going on. One of the other librarians saw me from behind the closed door and opened it for me. She was extremely effusive and expressed delight that I was there to help out. She showed me the book trucks ready for me to shelve. I noticed a sullen young man in the corner of the room with the library’s security guard hovering by him. After I put away my bag and jacket, I heard the young man whining as the security guard berated him for stealing something from the library. Apparently, they were waiting for the police to show up!

Anyways, I spent the next couple of hours shelving nonfiction books. I like the task as a break from the other work I do (editing, writing, and reading). I find the shelving to be soothing, almost meditative. There is a kind of joy I get form putting things in order, which is perhaps why I want to become a librarian.

After the volunteer work, I went back home to finish reading for my second class–Management of Libraries and Information Centers. The first day’s readings for this class focused on teamwork and what management of such work entails. I was a bit put off by the business-oriented mentality of the readings (something I fear will be persistent the entire semester), but I did enjoy the class this evening. I had the professor last semester for the Introduction to Library and Information Science class, and I liked how she ran our discussions. It appears that our major semester-long project will be team-based. (Such is the educational system more broadly, I think, these days–group work is the new lecture.)

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I’m already playing catchup!

Yesterday, I didn’t do work in the library, but my second semester of library school started. I spent the afternoon doing the reading for the first class–Reference and Online Services. The textbook chapters briefly discussed what reference work is and the importance of the reference interview. Then I had the class in the evening. I think I’ll like how the professor runs the class (plus, she’s officially the first Asian American professor I’ve ever had for a class!).

Reference work is a fairly important aspect of public and academic libraries. Essentially, it’s the work that librarians do to help people find books and other materials. It increasingly involves teaching people how to find information themselves rather than just providing the information directly. I had the opportunity last semester to do an internship at another local university library as a reference and circulation assistant. The primary reference duty was to help students begin their research in the library’s scholarly databases. I actually stopped in at that library this afternoon to say hello to the wonderful librarians I saw a couple times a week last semester but have since the end of my internship not seen. They were so friendly and fun!

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Dog on ice.

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This week, I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life Project. I’ll be posting brief comments about what I do in the library (or in library class) each day.

Today, I went in to the downtown Minneapolis Central branch of Hennepin County Libraries where I am a Preservation Department Intern this semester. I started a few weeks ago just after the new year started. I chose this internship because I thought it might be fun to work more directly with books and other library materials. The department fixes the binding of old books, organizes serials to be sent out to commercial binders, makes decisions about brittle books, and deals with a host of other things related to making library materials last longer for public use.

One of my main tasks is to work on a large project to put old piano sheet music from the early twentieth century in polyester sleeves. I use an ultrasonic welder (a Minter encapsulation machine) to create seals on two sides of a pair of polyester (clear plastic) sheets. I then trim the ragged edges off the sheet music and insert them into these sleeves. It’s fun to see the different songs published. Some of the sheet music have illustrations on the covers. There’s an interesting research project there in doing a rhetorical analysis of those covers, considering the different cultural mores of the time period. For instance, I came across a number of songs about “pickaninnies” with illustrations of little black boys. Others have romanticized images of American Indians (“Nakomis” and “Hiawatha”) or exotic images of Japanese women.

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