WeeMee Librarian

My blog now has a WeeMee, and the wee me has a pile of books. I might have mentioned that I'm a Librarian.

I'm not to sure what this thing is for, but it certainly brightens up the page, don't you think? Sunshine and grass and a butterfly. A cartoon version of me looking a bit embarrassed and shy, holding a pint of Guinness.

I feel a rant coming on: It's crap being shy and being a Librarian, because everyone nods knowingly when you tell them what you do. For your information, smiling-knowingly people, all the librarians I work with are incredibly loud, outgoing and wouldn't say ssshhhhhh if you paid them. Well, maybe if you paid them.

librarians|WeeMee|stereotypes|shyness

It's almost like being a Librarian

Want to find out what it's like to be a Librarian? Visit LibraryThing and catalogue all your books. Copy catalogue that is. Don't worry, it's LibrarianSpeak.

Among other cool things you can do with their service if you so desire is create a widget for your blog to show people random books from your collection. I fooled the system to have it show only the one book that I'm reading now, which was very clever of me. I did this by only bothering to add one book to my account. Sneaky.

Tomorrow I get to catalogue things for real, and classify them too. Labels, lots of labels. Tidying. Chocolate biscuits (sorry, that should read no eating in the Library). Talking on the telephone to very odd people. Fixing the computers. Phoning the IT guys to ask them to come and fix the computers properly. Laughing at other people's cataloguing errors. Finding missing books. Writing reports about missing books. Moving things. Writing incredibly informative leaflets and deciding what colour paper to print them out on. Delegating the photocopying and folding of leaflets to someone else. Organisation, that's what it's all about.

I love labelling

The Librarian in me loves Google's new image labeler. I don't care if I'm basically serving as cheap labour for an image labelling project, it's fun an addictive and this post is going to be short so I can get back to it.

The idea is that you and one other person are shown the same image from the web. You both type in tags (or index terms in librarianspeak) that you think are suitable for the image, and when you have a matching tag, the image changes. This goes on for 90 seconds and you get points for each match. When the time is over, you can see your score, the top scores for the day, and a list of the top all time scorers. Note: you'll need to sign up for a Google account if you want to appear in the lists as something more interesting than guest.

Sometimes it's unbelievably frustrating, for a few reasons. The "game" doesn't know what the image is; that's the point - a large proportion of the images on the web appear to be really boring groups of people standing around having their photo taken, or worse company logos and the like. My screen is tiny and sometimes I can't tell what the piccy is actually of. And sometimes you get paired with a complete idiot who doesn't know what the moon looks like.

But I love it. Unfortunately I've spent so long writing this post that I have to go to work now and be a real Librarian. Hmmmph.

Procrastination is the thief of my soul

After days of unproductiveness, self-induced lethargy and a general leanings towards laziness, I actually had quite a productive evening this evening.

I spent two hours sliding pieces of paper into plastic wallets and putting them in files. On occassion, just for variety, I took documents out of one file and put them into another. I also introduced some brightly coloured file dividers to my folders, which will surely be the thing that clinches my status as a fully-fledged chartered librarian.

Tomorrow, I may make lists.

Broad biscuits

Are you a librarian? Do you find Informationspeak intruding in your everyday thought processes? Did you walk past Ben's Cookies today and muse over the status of "cookie" as a subdivision of "biscuit"?

You see, on this side of the Atlantic that hard baked and (usually) round thing is a biscuit. Not a cookie. Stick a few chocolate bits in it and it becomes a chocolate chip cookie, but it's still a biscuit, in the same way that Ciabatta is still bread. So Bluenettle's thesaurus of sweet snacks has "cookie" as a narrower term under the broad heading "biscuit", along with "custard cream", "rich tea" and "chocolate hobnob", among many others.

But then Ben's Cookies made me think. Bake it so that it's still soft and yummy and oozing delightfully messy chocolate and it's most definitely a cookie. But is it still a biscuit? Shouldn't a biscuit have some crunch?

And just where do we put the Garibaldi's???

Observing a librarian

So, turns out I'm a really bad blogger. Bad, neglectful blogger. But today I had inspiration. A tiny spark that flickered across my brain while I was contemplating the Philosophy reading list on my computer screen. Precisely, what an odd, odd thing work is.

Other animals have got it down pretty simple. They sleep, they look for food, they eat food, they manage to keep warm, and they sleep again. Humans do pretty much the same thing, except we do a complicated dance around it, and add on a few extras just for fun. Can you imagine if some higher being was watching my day in a wildlife documentary?

It's morning time on earth. Watch as the human librarian emerges from its nest of brick and wood and makes its way, bleary eyed, along this intricate maze of open air pathways. Other humans are on their travels too, some in large metal contraptions that pollute the air but enable members of this hard working species to choose from a larger number of places in which to labour.

The librarian works busily in a nest constructed of stone, which also serves as a place of education for the human young. It spends its day staring at a bright, flat light known as a "computer", handling communication devices made from pulped wood, and smiling at other humans.

For this labour the librarian is rewarded in return. However, the reward does not take the form of any physical item; rather, the personal number known as a "bank balance" automatically increases. Part of this number may then be exchanged for food and nest rent. It may also be exchanged for wide variety of items whose purpose currently remain a mystery, although we do know that some of the most popular items are flat shiny discs. This human librarian has also been observed to voluntarily consume large quantities of toxic liquids, and spends much time watching groups of human males kick a small sphere.

See what I mean? We're a mad, mad species.

Bad library fiction is really really good

There are some things that only incredibly skilled people can do well, and writing very badly is one of them. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest showcases the best of the worst, for our amusement and entertainment.

What the competition seems to lack, however, is a library catagory. In fact, now I think about it, the library setting is sadly neglected by fiction writers in general. How about The Dewey Code, The curious incident of the rat in the stacks or The hitchikers guide to the information galaxy?. But, back to the point.

Well, actually there wasn't much of a point. This is all pretty much a preamble to this terrrible opening to a terrible novel penned by my own fair hand:

She didn't become a librarian for money, for ambition, or even for Dewey. She became a librarian because the moment she cast her eyes upon the papery pages and ink black words of a monograph for the first time, she felt true love. Now, adrift in a sea of shelves, she once more caressed The history and social influence of cod, fondling the masculinity of deep purple buckram with a trembling hand and cursing the readers who had left his pages dog-eared and spilt contraband Ribena on the tp verso. As salty tears began to fall and mingle with the sinful stain of sticky red beverage, she knew she had failed him and every other information resource she cared for. It was then she realised her aching soul could not bear to see this evil happen again, not to a book, a periodical, or, Library of Congress forbid, to the keyboard of a faithful opac. She gripped the keys to the library in her pocket tighter and tighter until she felt the jagged edges gouging her palm. The gaping door beckoned and she knew what she must do.

Pretty bad, hey? Anyone think they can compete with that for library-based twaddle?

Is Dewey dangerous?

At the risk of sounding like a dour stereotype licking her lips at the sight of a dictionary and breaking a thin smile when a lost book emerges from the depths of the dusty shelves, I'm going to tell you that it takes very little to get this librarian excited. I practically cried with happiness when I found 025.431: The Dewey blog.

If I carried a copy of Dewey around in my head, this would be where I would make a list of my favourite Dewey numbers. But I don't, so I won't. Except to tell you that I'm a fan of the 320s, 092 is my favourite standard subdivision and the 810s make my head hurt. Oddly, that last sentence strangely conjures up an image of me being hit over the noggin with volume two, but I'm pretty sure that's never happened... has it?

Librarians across the world are today being urged to be on their guard after a rogue copy of DDC leapt up from the desk and attacked a librarian in Oxford, England. While the librarian in question was not injured, she has no memory of the incident and has since displayed some unusual symptoms, including reciting long numbers in her sleep, spending weekends sorting tins of food into complex hierarchies (of which everything is a subdivision of baked beans), and the inability to write any number without a decimal place after the third digit.

The Library of Congress have insisted that this was a simple malfunction and is not an intentional design feature of DDC, and have requested that any other librarians who feel their Dewey may be trying to influence their every day thought processes should return their copy immediately. No faults have been reported with the online version, but an inside source was quoted this morning as saying, "It's just a matter of 115."

You know you're a librarian when...

... you worry about punctuation
... you tell people to be quiet in bookshops
... you use acronyms more than you use real words
... you know what all the acronyms you use stand for
... people are amazed that you need two degrees to stamp books all day
... you read dictionaries for fun
... you know when you're breaking copyright law
... you've left your friends in the pub to go and look something up
... you can tell what someone is going to ask you by the look on their face
... 245 00 $a makes perfect sense
... you have dreams/nightmares about Dewey
... you know what the last digit of an isbn is for
... you pride yourself on not conforming to stereotypes
... you smiled at at least two of the above