I knew it was all going too swimmingly lately. I've been getting a bit giddy with it. It had to come to an end. And inevitably, it was a meeting of the Shadowy Cabinet that brought me back down to Earth.
The past few meetings had been pretty good. Possibly because, in the absence of T.Aldous and with Library Policy & Strategic Management Team (this week)'s complete and abject inability to work as a team, Warner had asked Julia to fill in for a bit pending the latest restructure of the Assistant Directorate. The moment has passed and she's now back in tight defensive Group Librarian formation, conveniently forgetting the moments in the recent past where... [Oh, it's no good, I'll have to start a secret blog to do the stories justice.]
Anyway...
Most of the business of the meeting was unremarkably remarkable save that I'm appalled by what we consider to be normal these days. Where I came a cropper, and badly, was the photo library.
We have a lot of photos. We have a lot of photos in digital format held in files on the computer. We have a lot of photos in digital format held in files on the computer in a file and folder structure that can at best be described as random to the point of wilful obscurity. This has suddenly become a problem for the Library Service because it has inconvenienced a member of Library Policy & Strategic Management Team (this week).
"We need to sort them out so that we can find pictures we may want for publicity."
Now, if you're reading this blog you can come up with at least one perfectly good way of solving this problem. And I have already presented them with three of those solutions. I made a noise then shut up.
"Yes this is a problem."
"Is this something we could get volunteers to do?"
I'm sat at a table surrounded by librarians. Will somebody please tell CILIP that I did this next thing. I said:
"Isn't the selection, description and organisation of materials and the building of the means to retrieve them the sort of thing a librarian should be doing? I mean, it's good old-fashioned librarianship, the stuff that you've been trained properly to do."
I looked around the table.
It was all I could do not to say: "I'll get me coat."
8 comments:
Yes. That little inconsistency has always struck me as strange. But so has the number of librarians who've told me they didn't really understand classification...
I love it when there is a deathly silence.
You could get Keith Richard in to help - all he really wanted was to be a librarian, I read the other day. He even started to teach himself the Dewey system, although not sure that's useful with images. I don't have his telephone number, but I'm sure someone on here does.
Don't go settling for Mick though:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-10-best-pictures-of-mick-jagger-at-the-world-c
Spookily enough, here in Cheesetown the librarians are hosting digital music workshops for the over 14's...
{I'm not making this up!}
No sighting of either of the Glimmer Twins yet though..
Shouldn't they have got their coats?
I have become resigned to being that person, in fact sometimes I have my taxi waiting outside the meeting room before I even go in...
Webrarian: wouldn't it be nice if that wasn't so very common?
Pat: you'd love some of my training session Q & A's
zmkc: he gave up on learning Dewey, though, as it was "too complicated." So he could well have become a librarian.
Macy: I blush to admit that I tried setting some up a few years ago!
nota bene: they have flunkeys to get them for them.
Frog & You: I can sympathise with that sentiment.
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