one small corner of the universe

Having complained so vehemently about the hell that was cataloguing class this fall, I feel it is my duty to tell you I received my final grade for the course last night: A. Before you congratulate me, be advised that I didn’t learn anything in this class that can’t be “borrowed” from the Library of Congress website. Let me rephrase that: I didn’t learn anything in this class; I “borrowed” everything from the Library of Congress website. Those of you who are librarians know that the true beating heart of cataloguing collections has little to do with MARC records and call numbers and nearly everything to do with making your collection accessible to your users. That last part there–I have figured that out on my own or through working with an experienced school librarian. The dude teaching the class never mentioned users or accessibility, but his excitement about LOC classification was damn near euphoric. It’s nice to find such joy in one’s job, but I work in a school library where, at least once a day, I have to remind students that our fiction collection is arranged by author’s last name and is in alphabetical order. Heaven forbid they need something from the nonfiction collection. All those numbers. Bless their hearts, they just can’t take it. It hurts me to think about what LOC classification would do to their brains.

My point is that all that talk of MARC records and LOC classification was a waste of precious time–time I could have spent on more noble tasks, like playing peek-a-boo and pat-a-cake and watching old episodes of “Friends.” That “A” will be a nice addition to my transcript, but I didn’t really earn it so much as I paid dearly for it. Next time you wonder what you could do with a thousand bucks, consider adding “buy self a pay raise” to your list.