Part of our lunch meeting today: discussing our shortage of catalogers. We definitely need a deeper bench. Willing to trade away future top round draft picks if necessary.
Today at the Reference Desk
Coworker: It's a madhouse today.
Me: I think it's because Wikipedia's on strike. The public finally remembered about us.
I really love this neighborhood’s “little free library” box:
For more than 15 years, the box has provided neighborhood residents and visitors with an ever-evolving selection of titles, free for the taking. In exchange, neighbors restock it with their own books, giving new life to stories that otherwise would rest forgotten on a living room bookshelf or coffee table.
I need to contact the Offerman Woodshop and see if they’ll take a commission to make one of these.
Jessica Francis Kane, on Why She Writes in Libraries... →
But there is one more reason I work in libraries. I have a section of a poem about solitude by Jennifer Michael Hecht copied in one of my notebooks:
“bestial from not being seeing;
staring out the window with wide, immortal eyes”I’m fairly certain that would be me at home, alone. The date mutterer and the throat clearer and the woman who wears black cardigans (she must have twenty!) and the young man with a spectacularly loud space bar, they are doing me a service. I am grateful to them. God knows what they’re working on, but I see them, and I know they see me. Being seen keeps me sane.
And maybe others feel the same. I’ve just watched a woman come in and sit down in the seat next to the older gentleman who so often works in my current library, the man with the portable word processor, an unusually upright bearing, and wide eyes. He is away from his seat and she has taken one of his books and is browsing through it. Could she know him? I’m hungry and would like to leave for lunch, but I feel I must wait to see this played out. If he doesn’t know her, what will he say? Will he ask for his book back?
He returns and they smile at each other. He says, “Why, where have you been?”
To me, that is worth not having a special pencil cup on my own desk at home.
