From Umployed to Newly Employed

As I alluded to in my last post, I've gone from being unemployed to being newly employed. I now work for a slightly larger academic library in the greater DFW Metroplex. I'm still in Texas, but a long ways from my native Houston. Houston's still where my heart is, and my long term plans now include a triumphal return to Houston, to one day finally land the cushy, prestigious Librarian gig at either Rice University or the University of Houston, that have thusfar eluded me at every turn.

My current objective therefore is to excel in the new job and gain enough valuable and varied work experience in my new Library to make myself attractive to bigger and better universities in Texas or elsewhere.

It was with some trepidation that I continued applying for cataloging positions alongside Reference jobs. And yes, this new job is a cataloging job, too. But it is ONLY cataloging, not Tech Services Librarian as before. So the scope of my responsibilities is somewhat more narrow. And what a difference a dedicated Library I.T. staff makes!! Yes, I am dealing with the same Voyager ILS as before at TAMUG, but this time, the damn thing WORKS! and when it DOENS'T, I have people who actually know how to MAKE it work, so I can get back to doing my job. There is admittedly a lot of overlap with my 2 copy-catalogers, as I do my fair share of the copy cataloging as well. But now that I am on the scene, all original cataloging shifts to me, and I have already done some, which was kind of a rush! I've even gotten to handle a Russian book and a German book! Pretty neat! I'm told that there will be music scores and other odder stuff on its way to me soon, all of which fills me with further trepidation but all of them are just good learning experiences, too. If I actually get to be any good at music cataloging, that would be a rare set of skills to acquire and should serve me well in future job search pitches.

I also answered a cataloging question from the Circulation desk about AUDN codes in MARC denoting the intended audience of a particular work. Since the institution of higher learning whose library I work in serves in part to train new teachers, it has a substantial children's collection in the lower level, so this particular fixed field in a MARC record becomes pretty important. The CIRC person was not familiar with it and was most thankful to me for pointing it out to her. It all boils down to cataloger judgment, of course, so let's hope most of the copy cataloging we download from OCLC for kids books first received their original cataloging from a school librarian cataloger who is conscientious enough to fill out the AUDN fixed field with care and due thought given to the audience beyond "blank" or "juvenile".

I'm still a little unsure of myself, but I have my copy of AACR2,R2 close by, and OCLC's BibFormats page (which I like the layout of better than LOC's MARC21 pages) is saved as a favorite in my Firefox browser, while I use IE to open the browser-based version of OCLC's main bibliographic Connexion database. I also downloaded the latest version of IE with tabs so I can open LC's Classification Web next to the OCLC Connexion display.

I'm planning to get on the Saturday rotation for the Reference Desk. I'm fortunate to now have a library job that affords me to the opportunity to do this, so I can get my feet wet in Public Services work while learning cataloging in depth, on the job.

A lot of my initial anxiety has gone away after having realized that our local iteration of Voyager actually works and would not be the bane of my existence. Also, I'm not nearly as obsessed with the collection and collection development here as I was back at TAMUG. It's in the hands of a team of dedicated professionals and sufficiently broad in scope to not overly pique my interest unduly.

I'm writing this in Houston, but will return back to the Metroplex after the MLK holiday.

It's too early on to speculate on future jobs, but the long-term game plan is still to work for Rice University or UH back here in Houston, either in cataloging or reference. It's a worthy goal, something new on the horizon to strive for, which I believe we all need ahead of us lest we get listless and bored. The concrete things I can do to realize these long term goals is to learn as much as I can on my current job, especially the "hard" cataloging of "strange" materials like musical scores, maps, etc. There's no point in running away from "hard" cataloging tasks, you have to jump right in there and do them, and learn. Easy to say, potentially terrifying in real life, but probably nothing really worth doing is ever easy, right?

I don't know how often I will keep this blog updated now that I am actually working again. We'll just have to see.