Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Serials, work and weather

Fourteen hours spent learning to catalog serials and I'm not too much the wiser. All I remember is that mostly they have 362 fields with either a first indicator of 0 or 1, which means that they are either formatted or not. It's so fortunate that the 'teachers' have a good sense of humor and reality and don't get so caught up in the rules that they don't see the big picture of publishers (and/or catalogers) being ridiculous. I could have used a lot more practice, however.

I kept thinking, "When we migrate, I can kiss this knowledge goodbye, since I won't be allowed to do it anyway. What's the point?"

That alternated with "Omigod, I haven't checked our magazines to be sure they're on good, current, appropriate records in ... uh, well, I haven't EVER done it!!" New project.

Met some nice people, but I'm not wondering how much this course was worth (to me) since I was the only one from my 'section' of the system (Hurrah the "Y" team!) to go.

Since I'm still at home as I write this, I have no idea what has happened at work since last week. I suspect I will show up this morning and be faced with large stacks of stupi ... er, questions about items, a demand order, and "job security" (i.e. a bunch of new stuff to catalog). At some point I really have to get to the fly box, the backpacks, and the dreaded Bottom Shelf of Doom (where all non-OCLC stuff goes to wait to be cataloged).

It snew last night. Kinda. Winter arrived in less than a week.

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