Realia

Archive for July, 2010

I’ve been very intrigued by Library Day in the Life in its previous four incarnations, but I never quite got around to participating.  I was determined to change that this time around.  Technically, the official Day in the Life was yesterday, so I am going to tell you about what I did yesterday, even though I didn’t get around to writing about it until today.

For those of you who don’t know, I work as a cataloging librarian at the Nebraska Library Commission, and the following is a fairly typical day in my life.

Like most Mondays, I started my day by catching up on reading email that had accumulated over the weekend and logging into Google Reader to catch up on the blogs that I follow.  Actually, I start most days this way, but it generally takes a little longer on Mondays, since more stuff has piled up over the weekend.

I am going to be teaching a day-long class on cataloging e-monographs in two weeks, and so a good portion of my time yesterday was spent in preparation for the class.  This is the fourth class that I have taught since I started my current job (the second full-day class), and I am still amazed at the amount of preparation that it takes.  I am trying to work ahead and get it completed ahead of time, but I know I will be making changes right up until the last minute.

I also spent some time being an involved member of my state library association, fulfilling some of my duties as chair of the Nebraska Library Association’s New Members Round Table.  I spent a short bit of time looking over the minutes of last week’s meeting, which were sent out by the secretary for approval.  I also spent some time crafting an announcement to send out to recruit library science students to participate in a poster session at NLA’s annual conference in October.

As many catalogers are doing these days, I would assume, I also spent some time trying out the recently-released RDA Toolkit.  Coincidentally, I also got an email question from a Nebraska librarian asking about a presentation I gave recently on RDA, and asking for my opinion on how to best make use of the trial period for the RDA Toolkit.  I suppose that this very accurately captures one aspect of what I do in my position.  I’m lucky enough to have the luxury of time to explore new developments in cataloging, such as RDA, and disseminating information about these developments to librarians in the state and answering their questions is an important part of my duties.

Last, but not least, as you might expect for a cataloging librarian, I did some actual cataloging.  The majority of the cataloging that I do is state government documents (since my library is a repository of these documents), and today was no exception.  And seriously, what’s not to love about cataloging state documents? With titles like “Assessment of Adult Crappie Abundance During the Spawning Season”,  could you ask for anything more exciting?  I am joking about that; as easy as it is to poke fun at the, um, esoteric nature of government documents, I really do enjoy this part of my job.  I feel that my library is providing an important service by making these documents available, especially because they are available online.  In addition, working with these documents means that the majority of the cataloging work that I do is original cataloging, and I realize that it is becoming more and more rare that catalogers can say that.  Because I get to do so much original cataloging, this job has been an excellent place to learn the hows and whys of cataloging, and my work is consistently challenging.  As if that wasn’t enough, the variety of the material that I catalog means that I encounter a number of entertaining Library of Congress Subject Headings that I had no idea existed – like “power line bird strikes,” which I used the other day.

Looking back on it, I would say that yesterday was fairly representative of my job as a whole.  My job is generally an even split between doing cataloging work and helping others do cataloging work (through formal training, as well as answering questions as they come up), and yesterday captured that split pretty well.  It also reflected the division of my duties between my library’s purpose as a state repository and its mission to provide services to librarians across the state.  All in all, it was a pretty typical day in my work life.

When I was growing up, my younger sister and I spent more time than I care to admit playing a Barbie-themed computer game on our Commodore 64.  The premise of the game was simple; Ken would call Barbie up for a date.  Barbie would always cheerfully respond, “That sounds like fun!” And Ken would say, “Great! See you in an hour!” The object of the game was to get Barbie ready for her date (buying clothes, getting her hair done, etc.) before the hour ran out and she missed her date with Ken.  Some of the ever-so-thrilling action of the game can be seen here:

What this short snapshot of the game fails to capture is the fact that at least half of the time, once you got Barbie ready for the planned date – say for example, the prom – she would arrive home to get a phone call from Ken, who would say something like, “Sorry, Barbie, plans have changed.  Let’s go to the pool!” And she would have to go through the whole process again, replacing her prom gown with a bikini and her high heels with flip flops.  And did Barbie ever complain about Ken’s last minute changes? Of course not – she just repeated her cheerful refrain of “That sounds like fun!”

When we first got the game, my sister and I played to win, dutifully dressing and re-dressing Barbie to comply with each of Ken’s whims.  After the novelty wore off a little bit, we began to play a little more subversively, making Barbie arrive late on purpose, or having her show up to the prom in a bikini and blue hair.  While the lack of an appropriate outfit did not change Ken’s reaction one bit, it did make the game more amusing.

I was reminiscing about this game the other day, and what I was struck by (other than complete amazement that I managed to grow up without taking this game’s wonderful gender sterotypes to heart), was the fact that there are times when being married to a soldier makes me feel like I’m living this game.  I’m Barbie, and the Army is Ken, changing plans at the last minute without any regard to the preparations that I’ve made.  My husband’s reserve unit wants to send him to anti-terrorism training, oh, next week? Great! He’s going to have to stay at annual training a week longer than planned so he can train the rest of his unit when they arrive? That sounds like fun!

I know I’m not saying anything that other military spouses don’t already know – the one constant in our life is change. And I know that since my husband is fairly new to the Army and we haven’t been through a deployment yet, being a military spouse will disrupt my life in the future in ways far beyond the small annoyances I’ve experienced so far.

So, fellow military spouses, I suppose my question to you is, how do you deal with the many last minute changes that are a part of military life? Do you have any mantras you repeat to keep yourself sane? Any tricks that are the equivalent of Barbie showing up to the prom with blue hair?

Some of you may be wondering what the title of my blog refers to. If you are a cataloger, you may be familiar with the term already, but, judging from the fact that my husband asked “What’s realia?” while reading my blog for the first time, I assume that people may not be familiar with the term. Realia, in the cataloging world, is a term used in a catalog record to describe a three-dimensional object.

So why did I choose this as the name of my blog? I was looking for a cataloging-related word to reflect my job. I admit that it probably came to mind, at least in part, because I was preparing a workshop on how to catalog realia when I started this blog. Beyond the cataloging-related definition of the word, realia can also be defined as “Objects from real life or from the real world, as opposed to theoretical constructs or fabricated examples,” and I think that spoke to me as well, since I want this blog to be not just about my work as a librarian, but also about all aspects of my “real life.”