A Day in the Life

This is not going to exactly be Sunday Song Lyrics but it is taken from a title to a song. I hope that is close enough to count. This is a pictorial review of my life in the Digital Library. Since January, I have been working in an academic library in the part of the library called Digital Library Services. It is in the basement of the large central academic library. The university is working on a large initiative to convert all audio visual materials to digital formats. The Library of Congress has a similar initiative on a much grander scale. This is what my work station looks like in the DLS...not fancy but it does everything I need for it to do. I do not spend much time at my station.

In the next picture, I am logged onto my favorite site which has nothing to do with my duties (OED).

These next pictures are from the Special Collections offsite storage location. Essentially, it is a climate controlled warehouse specifically built to hold library materials. I am not concerned with digitizing all of the libraries audio visual materials but only the items in Special Collections. Special Collections is largely a collection of donated materials. It is where you would go to find genealogical items. There are other items there as well such as donated record album collections and art work. The items are treasure troves. For example, there is a donated home movie from the 1950's of a personal tour of the Pope's Summer Palace. There are private photographs of President Kennedy, President Johnson, President Roosevelt just to name a few. This warehouse stores materials that have been weeded and are not yet prepared for sale to other academic libraries. It also holds materials that have recently been donated but are not yet catalogued. It would be safe to say we really do not know yet what treasures are in here. Here is where my job comes into play. Remember I said I was working on a digital initiative? It is my job to find all audio/visual materials contained here then, map it in a fashion so that it may be found again here when it is time for digitization. As I said, these items are not catalogued yet, they only have an accession number. It may not seem like hard work but it is. It is very physically demanding to climb to the tops of these stacks, pull out boxes and go through the contents. It is necessary to get on an electronic picker to reach the tops of these rows. This is not all of what I do or where I do it. I will post more about this digital initiative at a later date. The pictures at the very bottom are examples of what happens to art work that has no place to be viewed currently. Items rotate in and out of these cages as needed. There is a lot of physical work to librariaship and contrary to what you might read, librarians are not going away anytime soon.