June 13

A new week, a new job. Today we started our jobs in our divisions. For me, that meant Special Materials cataloging. AKA SpecMat, which sounds so much cooler. On a normal day, I will be splitting my time between Special Materials cataloging and Recorded Sound but for the first day, I spent all day training in Special Materials. Specifically what we did was go through what is called the "Retro" CD collection to see if these CDs were in the Library's Voyager cataloging system. We pulled up MARC records and modified them when necessary (added certain fields and corrected grammar mistakes). It also involves processing the CDs by putting various labels and stickers on them. These CDs have been sitting around for like 15 years or so relatively unprocessed. If someone showed up at the Library wanting to listen to one of them, the CDs would have been grouped only by record label. Presumably, they are by number within that label but there were no bar codes or numbers or any type of access information put on them by the Library itself.

So, we each were assigned a trainer (or mentor, I think, is the word they used) and mine is someone named Cindy or Tran, depending on who you talk to… She is Asian and although very nice, her English is a little lacking so I spent the morning totally frustrated by what she was trying to tell me. She also seems to be in a very big hurry, which added to the frustration. I’m by no means a slow worker but when I’m just starting to learn something new, I think most people agree with me that slower is better. There is basically a process to follow when we get each CD but Cindy/Tran seemed to do each one differently. I soon found out she’s only been here a year, too, which might seem like a long time but in the grand scheme of the Library of Congress, that’s ridiculously new. Most people have been here like 20 or 30 years and I’m not exaggerating. One guy in the Motion Pictures division joked that he was a newbie and he’s been around 8 years. It’s really kind of crazy how long the average tenure is, but I suppose once you are at the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, where else would you go?

Anyway, after lunch, I devised a new tactic and asked Cindy/Tran to do a bunch of records while I just watched and learned and took some notes. Soon, I totally understood the process and was left alone to work on it the rest of the afternoon and I rolled along. Phew. I know I’m not a total idiot but in the morning there, I was starting to feel like one.

Apparently, we are allowed to listen to CDs when we want to… however, none of the music I had in front of me looked the least bit interesting. It was nothing I ever heard of and nothing I really wanted to. Oh yeah, and I didn’t bring my headphones. Bummer. I'm not going to forget those again.