Carleton and St Olaf share a catalog, so there are several working groups between the two schools designed to make this collaboration possible. I’ve been on the Public Access Working Group (which oversees the function and appearance of the catalog itself), and there are various other groups (Cataloging, Serials, Gov Docs, Etc.) that work to keep the two schools in sync as much as possible. And generally these divisions make sense. We either know what falls under our general purviews, or we know which other groups we need to work with to get a particular project done. My group, for example, often has occasion to work with the serials group and the cataloging group, since the catalog interface is fairly directly influenced by those two groups.

But every once in a while, these divisions are a little bit vexing. And no, it’s not when there’s a major issue that cuts across all of our areas of interest. That’s easy to solve: just call a mass meeting and make sure that representatives from each group are there. No, what’s vexing is when there’s a little problem, a little change, that could fall equally under the domains of half a dozen working groups. It seems like overkill to call a mass meeting, but lots of people need to know about the changes, and no one group is guaranteed to have a complete grasp on the issue.

Such is the case with a MARC field that was recently brought to my attention. It’s the 035 field, and we sometimes need it for gov docs so that MARCive records get overlaid properly. But apparently it’s recently been reassigned by the people who assign fields in MARC, so now [See comments for clarification] It’s a “system number” full of what looks to me like gobbledygook. So, already this affects the gov docs group and the cataloging group, right? Well, in our case it also affects the Public Access group because the 035 field is set to display with the label “Gov Doc #” in our catalog. (See the bottom of this record, for example, or this record for a government document.) Each group thinks it’s somebody else’s issue, so none of us are thinking about it, but it’s such a teensy little problem it doesn’t seem worth the effort of organizing a meeting of all three groups. And the catalogers who are actually working with the problem didn’t really know who to talk to about it in the first place.

It’s it funny how it’s so easy to collaborate on the big issues, and so thorny to try it with the little ones?

The way things have been going, I could have just come to work for a few hours on Monday and then not come in the entire rest of the week. Every day, I was thwarted in my attempts to work on my projects, and what’s worse, all the work I did do (and I was remarkably focused this week… lots to do) ended up vanishing before the end of each day. Sounds incredible, I know, but it’s true.

We have a guy who lives in town and spends hours and hours each summer in the library looking up the lives of the rich and famous from the days of yore. He’s mentally unstable, a little bit frightening, and incredibly time-consuming for whomever happens to be on call for reference duty. And this week, that unluckly librarian was, you guessed it, ME.

That would have been enough to throw off my productivity for the week, but no. I also got to experience the Revenge of the Evil Content Management System. Every so often (usually a couple of times a day), our CMS would misinterpret my clicking on “Save” to mean “Erase All My Work, Purge All the Saved Versions of My Work Back To Last January, And Then Save.” The general mantra for avoiding loss of work is to Save Often… Yeah, well that’s exactly what would kill me with this bug. What is a girl to do? So I developed a habit of switching to HTML code view (which the web developers have given only a few people access to see), copying the code into a text file, and THEN saving. But here’s the kicker, just before it decides to erase all my work, it also won’t let me into the code view. So today the web people set me up with an error console and instructions on how to copy code from several different places whenever these errors happened. Well, apparently I had enough errors today that they think they’ll be able to locate the bug… which means I had quite a few errors today… which means I’m not a happy camper.

Then there were all the normal interruptions that come with being the reference on-call person. … The phone rings and an innocent voice says that she’s off campus this summer and wanted to download EndNote and get started setting up her reference library in preparation for her senior thesis project. Heh. Oh the fun-ness. Downloading, installing, creating a library, figuring out how to log in for off-campus access to databases, searching databases, saving records, and importing them into EndNote. Thankfully she thought she could probably wait till she comes back to campus learn how to cite while she writes or create stand-alone bibliographies. … add to this finding maps from the mid-19th century, finding research on free musical improvisation and it’s link to different world cultures, and figuring out what obscure African language a speaker was referencing when he gave a talk that now has to be transcribed. It was quite a reference week, and there’s one more day to go.

With all of this, the only thing that’s saved me from finally losing the last shreds of composure was my weaving (pictures). For the first time since moving here, I’ve warped my loom and spent half an hour or so every evening weaving dishtowels for a gift. The rhythmic swish… thunk… swish… thunk as each thread slips into place is incredibly therapeutic. My cat doesn’t agree. He spends most of his time sticking his paw under the loom room door and whining that he wants to help play with strings. But for me, it’s been the best excuse to think about absolutely nothing for stretches of time every evening.

While I was on vacation last week, I marked a bunch of posts to “keep new” until I’d have time to go back and read them in a way that would do them justice, and this week I’ve been slowly chipping away at my marked list. I’m not done yet, but so far I’ve been really impressed by the amount and quality of the writing that happened that week. Apparently librarians think and write well on the last week of June.

Anyway, one of the posts that I marked to read later was Mark’s post about keeping up. “Why does keeping up always mean looking forward?” he asks. Why can’t it also include looking back to learn from our past.

I’ve always been a big fan of looking back and figuring out why people think/thought the way they do. As a new professional, a large part of my “keeping up” time is spent “catching up” so that I can understand the world in which I’m making my home. In fact, it’s such a big part of my subconscious work (and I think also that of the other new professionals I work with), that I’d argue it’s lack of face time in the library literature does not, in fact, mirror the reality of professional activity. Instead, I think catching up happens in the background, and I think it stays there for a couple of reasons.

First, for those of us that aren’t new, a lot of this stuff is old news, so the newbies among us tend to catch up in private so we don’t bore our colleagues with information we think they already know. (Notice, they may not actually already know, or remember, but who wants to run the risk?) This is precisely the reason I was shy about an essay I wrote responding to a two-year-old article on blogging. It was new to me and I had a strong reaction to it, so I blogged my reaction, but I was pretty sure everyone would be bored by it or annoyed with me for wasting their time with old news.

Both keeping and catching up both take time, too, so prioritizing becomes an issue.

And then there’s the less-functional reason for keeping history in the background: it’s uncool, unshiny. People don’t get speaking invitations for explicating extinct library theories.

I’m not saying that these are good reasons for not emphasizing the library lit of yore. They’re just reasons. And I’m not quite sure why I felt the need to come up with those reasons, but I guess I was intrigued by Mark’s observation and wondered what might explain it. I’m often discouraged with how little “keeping up” I can do in a week/month/year, and I’m naturally disinclined to like change (I know, I know… I deserve 40 lashes with a wet noodle for saying that, please wait while I administer them and explain that I’m not against progress, just against change…) so conversations about these ideas pique my interest.