Death by Cataloguing

The Daily News: This just in, a volunteer at the Crocker Art Museum Library was crushed to death by the AACR2 (Anglo-American Rules for Cataloguing 2002 edition).

Well, not quite, but that's what I felt like. I am now volunteering at the Hansen Library at the Crocker Art Museum in downtown Sacramento on Saturdays. I met with the Librarian yesterday to see what he wanted me to do, and he ended up giving me a 2 hour crash course on cataloguing. I had no idea it was so complex. MARC (MAchine Readable Catalogue Record) format is a long list of numbered fields that you fill in with everything under the sun so the computer can read the record and show the user what we normally see, a normal bibliographic reference. The librarian loaned me his edition of the AACR2. It is a binder full of about 300-400 pages of cataloguing rules. How to describe something, what a delimiter is, what goes in which subfield, how to catalogue things that are unclassifiable (i.e. ephemera, maps, individual letters, etc). It is certainly more than I ever expected, but I'm reading that and doing a lot of research this week so I will have some idea of what I'm doing next saturday. I hope. Needless to say, he needs cataloguers. There were about 20 boxes of books to catalogue, and he just brought in the first box of 3000 books that some artist in Berkeley donated.

Splash! Here's to getting my feet wet by just plunging right in. Any experience will look good on my resume when I want to get a library job, and any experience will give me a leg up on my classes for my Masters in Library and Information Science that I'm starting in January.

Hopefully the schedule will work out, because he has two other cataloguer volunteers and with me as a third, he said they might be able to have the library open to the public on Saturdays, instead of only 4 hours on Thursdays. But there are thousands of books left to catalogue, and miles to go before I sleep.

The Muddle of the Middle

I read "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom a few months ago, and one thing that he said has really affected me and I can't get it out of my mind. He said that when death takes someone, whether through illness or accident, there is more to it than just the taking of that person; that in the "taking", death misses someone else. There is more to any death event, there is a middle ground, where the person may not even be aware that they were missed, but there is some thing that ties them intrinsically to the one taken (though they may not find out until they get to heaven too).
Now, I may not agree with his version of heaven, but this idea of primal give and take has stuck with me. Now, whenever I see or hear of a fatal accident on the freeway, I think of all those people who may not even be aware that they were missed. Had they not forgotten their jacket and went back home to get it, had the kids not slept in late, had hit that green light, they might have been the one dead. They are in the middle now. They were missed. They should be thankful.
But, our human mind really isn't equipped to continually deal with the realities of death, so we forget about that "close call" on the freeway last week, and just go about our lives. I just can't get that idea out of my head everytime I hear about a death. Rather morbid, but I think it really shows the interconnectivity of all life. How what I do affects what everyone else around me does, though I may not be aware of the how or why. If I have a bad morning on the commute to work, and cut someone off, will that person have a bad day, and then go home and fight with their family?
Certainly food for thought.