Cataloging: Day 3

Today's observations:
Ok, so I was a little a little late getting in to Union today, in part because I stopped at a place in Philadelphia ("Taste and See") where I found lattes! Also, when the cashier asked me where I was from and I said Los Angeles, the only other customer in the place said "I'm from Pomona!" For those who are unfamiliar with Los Angeles County geography, that's about 35 miles from where I live or 25 miles from the Huntington. We chatted for a bit and I may hear from her about meeting again some time before I leave. That, combined with the discovery that Taste and See opens at 7 AM every weekday made this little detour well worth it.
I brought another load of books from Scooba in today (it turns out that staying is Scooba is handy, though it's a bit of a hike), which Gigi, the student worker from the local community college (local to Union, that is, so not EMCC, where I am staying) was able to go through them and attach barcodes, and I can catalog them tomorrow. Rita showed me how to print spine labels, so I was able to make those for all of the books and DVDs that I have cataloged so far. I'm not sure what it is about printing labels, but the process is never easy. When we're doing it at the Huntington it takes about half a dozen steps. It's slightly easier using the VERSO catalog system, but it's impossible to make corrections after you have assembled the list. You have to back all the way out, make the corrections in the separate item records, then recreate the print list. I'm going to have to print some corrected labels tomorrow, but most of them should be alright.
We discovered that the portion of the cataloging process that may slow us down the most comes in Brodarting the books. The dust jackets that make our hardcover books look so pretty take a beating from library patrons, so to protect the covers they are enclosed in plastic. One of the companies that sells this plastic wrapping is Brodart, so the process of wrapping dust jackets is referred to in some circles (i.e. the Huntington and Book Soup) as Brodarting. It can be a tedious process, but the books are so much more alluring with those carefully designed covers. Barbara, who left the Huntington to move up to Washington, was the go-to person in our department whenever a books needed to be covered. Perhaps, if she hasn't found a job there yet, she could come to Mississippi to lend a hand :)


Titles cataloged today: 72

Titles cataloged total: 213

Audio entertainment during the drive: Negotiations and Love Songs - Paul Simon (cont'd.); Led Zepplin II; JoCo Looks Back - Jonathan Coulton (for those who are unfamiliar with JoCo, he does comedic music based around geek culture; one of my favorite songs of his, "Re: Your Brains" is about office coworkers turning into zombies and trying to eat each others' brains - there's also a very low-budget video)

New Southern discovery: Lumber is a big industry in Mississippi. I'm not sure why this surprises me, I guess I just assumed that the entire South ran on a church-based economy, though I'm not sure what that would entail. Anyway, Patricia, the women I met from Pomona this morning, said that her family used to grow cotton near Philadelphia, but at one point the market was so flooded with cotton that the government paid them to NOT grow it, and came in and planted their land with trees for lumber.

Something I miss from California: I miss sitting on the couch with Manny and watching bad movies. Jaws 2 was on at the place where I had dinner last night, the Pancake House of Philadelphia, and we must just leave that on whenever we come across it at home, because I swear I've watched it four or five times already this summer. Poor Chief Brody. Why won't anyone believe him when he tells them there's another shark?! The man knows what he's talking about!