June 16

Today was back to the old routine that we will basically be following all summer - mornings upstairs in cataloging and afternoons downstairs in reference. The cataloging is kind of boring and definitely monotonous, but at least we have specific expectations. We even have to track production, although I’m not sure what is expected of us. My trainer told me earlier in the week something about having to do like 4 an hour, which seems utterly ridiculous. I mean, you can do four in like fifteen minutes if you are actually dedicated to it so to take 15 minutes to do one seems CRAZY. Although, we were given some statistical reports about the number of items processed and cataloged in a given month and it’s remarkably low. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of careful consideration of each item, of slackerness, of me not realizing exactly how difficult the job can be, or if it’s something else entirely. Coming from a job where we were expected to read entire journal articles, write abstracts and add indexes in the time span of about 3 minutes makes me a little skeptical about it being anything other than slacking off. I mean, the rate of speed expected of us at Gale was ridiculous but this seems ridiculous on the other end.

Anyway, the best part of the cataloging is that we get to physically handle the CDs and I like looking at them and listening to them. We've been doing a lot of bands from the 80s and early 90s and a lot of the albums I remember actually being released. Heck, I’ve even owned a few titles – or knew someone who did – so it’s like a walk down memory lane listening to some of the stuff. Today I listened to some umm, Debbie Gibson (yeah, I admit it!) and Foreigner ("I Don’t Want to Live Without Your Love"), to name a couple. We are going through musicians on the Atlantic label.

The sad news of the day was that I found out that apparently the much ballyhooed checkout privileges are really not all that - in fact, we interns are apparently not really allowed to check out books after all. So says the person at CALM (Collections, Acquisitions and Loan Management, I think is what that stands for - hard to keep all the acronyms straight). Intern management personnel claim that we can but they can say that all they want - if the person issuing loan accounts won't give me one, then obviously I can't check out books. Someone told me they would work on it for me but I am pretty doubtful they will. I'm really bummed about that - not so much because I was planning on checking out one-of-a-kind rare books or anything but more just because I'm already finished with the two lousy books I brought to read and was counting on a library card from the LOC to provide me with reading material. Now what am I going to do?