Tuesday, April 06, 2004

The waiting game and an introduction of sorts

Well now I'm finally going to make this blog it's own beast. This is the first post to the Library Ass that is original to this blog, and not merely cross-posted from the Jersey Exile (my homestead in the blogosphere). First and foremost, welcome! This is meant to be a blog devoted to library matters, and in specific my slow and painful crawl from library assistant to librarian, which is finally underway. At the end of last month I applied to the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College; with any luck I will begin classes this Summer, and finish within a couple of years.

Library school has been a long time coming for me, the end result of over ten years of oscillating back and forth between being a student and working at a library. For the longest time it didn't occur to me that instead of choosing one or the other - the ivory tower or the Dewey Decimal System - I could in fact combine both into a career that was at the same time interesting and tangible, but somewhere along the way my path became clear and I started down it, however tentatively. Now I wonder why on Earth I didn't figure this out about ten years sooner!

So if all goes well, this will be my dojo for the library sciences - a place for me to ruminate, fulminate, and attempt to digest what I'm sure will be reams upon reams of theory and method. If you are considering a career as a librarian, or if you've already drunk the Kool-Aid, or even if you're just interested in books and the shleves that hold them, then let me bring you along for the ride. Misery loves company, after all...

On the importance of accurate stampmanship

A pet peeve of mine: when we stamp due dates here at the Circ Desk, we stamp them on little slips of paper with four panels on them. As each panel has ample room for our stamps, theoretically speaking one should be able to circulate a book four times before having to add another due date slip (they have adhesive backings so we just slap them on top of the old slip). Unfortunately sometimes people get a little sloppy with their stamping and end up taking up two panels of space, which although annoying isn't the end of the world; but every once in a while some dingbat stamps the blank slip right smack in the middle, making it virtually impossible to get another due date on there.

In the name of Melvil Dewey, I ask why? Is it bad aim on the part of the stamper, or is there a hint of malicious intent here? Either way it's a royal pain in the ass.