magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

so it turns out that when recataloguing a book to be sent to storage, you have to change its location in the cataloguing software twice. once in the individual item record, where we had been changing it, and once in the bibliographic record (where stuff like author, title, and publication information are stored so that multiple copies / volumes / etc can reference the same information without duplicating it). apparently the software isn't smart enough to cross-reference a bibliographic record's sub item record(s) for location information.

so when i come in, i'm told that we have to go through this stack of printouts that list every book that we've changed (luckily we have only been sending oversize books to storage, and as this is the first time that this has been done, they were all receiving a previously unused location, rstov--risd storage oversize, so that they could all be cross-referenced from that code), and edit the bibliographic info for each entry. and i said waitaminute, what if there's multiple copies and one is staying in the regular stacks? editing the bibliographic info would affect both sub records.

actually it's worth pointing out that i hadn't even been told to edit the bibliographic information, just to enter into the system and press "e" then change the location field "in the other place". i realized that this was the bibliographic information because i've been poking around in the system and changing little inconsistencies and such, even though i probably should just be handing them over to someone "qualified" to deal with such things.

and so, i poked around some more to try and find a solution to this problem of multiple locations. and lo i came across the location code multi. and played around with it and figured out how it worked. there was still the task over figuring out whether or not a given book and multiple copies, short of looking up each one by title rather than barcode, which adds another whole degree of conscious effort required. language recognition rather than just numerical pattern recognition.

so when carol, the library director, came out and asked me if i had heard about our new challenge, i said yes, and it's even more difficult than i had been told. and i brought up the issue of multiple copies. she said "oh, don't change it in the bib record if there's more than one copy." and so i told her about my discovery of the multi location code, and that i was working on a way to easily distinguish if there were in fact multiple copies of a book (i did find a fairly simple way). and she says to me "have you ever thought about becoming a librarian?"

---

i got another one of those personal information survey sorts of emails (fill in yr own info, send it back and on to whomever else) from nikki this morning. and i though about filling it our and posting it here, as i did with the last one, to fill what's been a lot of empty space recently, but as it turns out, i had an actual story to tell today. i started filling it out anyway, and a lot of the questions were really quite bad, but a few actually made me think, i even had a hard time answering a couple, so i might put some of those up over the next few days. and maybe a few of the inane ones too.

got email from sam tonight, he got his new computer. one of those fancy new dv imacs. he's planning on actually doing some video editing, definitely a pursuit worth encouraging, i think.