July 7

Workwise, I again don't have anything new to report. We did get a bit of a break from the usual schedule because we interns had a little orientation meeting/tour with the Acquisitions & Bibliographic Access Directorate. We learned a little about how acquisitions are made at the Library and a little about how cataloging is done. The cataloging information was really not new to me at all since I work in cataloging every morning, but I did get somewhat of an understanding how the divisions are broken down (by subject or by language). As for acquisitions, there are four ways that the Library gets material: from the Copyright office, through exchanges, from gifts and from actual purchases. By and large, the majority of items come from the Copyright deposits. We got a tour of the mail room then, which was kind of interesting. Most of the mail room houses all the books that the Library does NOT keep - either those being sent to "pulp" or those being set up for exchanges. They have more books eligible for the exchange program than I've seen in many smaller public library branches. I'm not kidding. There were SO many books there. If I ever start a library, now I know where to go for books! We also got a tour of the fifth floor cataloging division - which is where I work in the morning so it wasn't that interesting. Honestly, I don't think anyone found it that interesting because it's just walking around cubicles. We did not go in the SpecMat department where I work specifically, but the entire fifth floor consists of Cataloging units and they all seem to look the same.

The other events of the day were those in London, with the public transportation terrorism that occured there. I happened to turn on the TV while I was getting ready in the morning and was aware of the extra security that would be facing me as I rode public transportation, but I didn't really sense a whole lot of it in the morning. I did see someone in a uniform with a dog, so I assumed it was a bomb-sniffing dog, but that was about it in the morning and everything went off without a hitch. By the afternoon, things seemed to have gotten more secure - probably due to the raising of the threat level to orange. We noticed at lunchtime that the outside garbage cans had been taken away, so we had to bring our garbage back into the building with us. I assume they were trying to prevent garbage can bombs? And, on my way home, I passed a man armed with a HUGE machine gun. It was gigantic and really kind of scary. I've never been inches away from or actually even seen a weapon like that before. Wow. But, again, no problems.