What’s Normal?

What is supposed to be my “normal” job?

Over a year ago, a donor promised his collection of jazz-related recordings and books. The size of the collection is over 40,000 items, including obscure formats of audio recordings, and some incredibly rare or unique items that would make the collection a major draw for researchers. All-in-all, it would finally make the library’s collection worthy of the faculty and students in the jazz program.

Logistically, moving 40,000 items from someone’s home to a library with $0.00 to spend equals a small team of library employees, an extraordinarily generous facilities department, and a university-owned cargo van going above and beyond…multiple times. But, as any librarian knows, that’s just normal.

Though the size and scope of the task is daunting, I was truly excited about the prospect of organizing the process myself from start to finish. It was the first audio donation to come through the doors since I had started, so I could take ownership and do it right. For decades, gifts would come in, get dumped in boxes somewhere on the floor or on the shelves, never to be touched again, Until…the library moved to a different space and they were re-dumped.

The AV collections space and technical services department were littered with mishmash piles of miscellaneous formats resembling a famous tower in Italy. Handwritten notes were heavily taped to shelves, some with descriptive phrases, some with last names, and some with initials (which also happen to be the acronym for “to be announced”). Some were even mixed up with others meaning things were misidentified. The status of most were only known in the minds of former students who had created inventories and categories unsupervised for a class project, without any guidance or feedback on library theory or organizational principles (I know, because that’s my own student handwriting on that still-unprocessed collection).

Anyway, where was I going with this story? Oh, yeah. Figuring out what’s normal. After a first trip to the donor’s house and a van full of overloaded, over-heavy boxes, I got to tell everyone where to dump them and how. And I got to devise a plan for unpacking the boxes and arranging the items in such a way that, if a user wanted to know if we had something they found listed in a jazz discography or somewhere online, I could immediately tell just by looking at a very specific spot on a very specific shelf. This was so far unheard of here, but my plan was based on the successful organization and arrangement of jazz archives around the country. It didn’t take much time to do, and it was teachable to others. So, it could be done on a student budget.

But, just like everything else in the audio collection, most of it was going to be digitized in our massive project–which is way ahead of schedule and possibly overstaffed, meaning that they are always in desperate, last-minute need of content to prepare for digitization. This translated to me having to drop everything on a regular basis to cobble together thousands of uncataloged items in particular formats from all over the department, and give each one a sticker with a unique number on it.

I knew that this was a task I needed to accomplish. I even knew about how many things needed these stickers. But, I didn’t realize until today that I had just spent 15 months doing this and little else.

Ok, there were some other things I did, like be on a couple of committees, put together six newsletters, orchestrate some data cleanup projects, figure out what was here and what needed to be done, and sundry other tasks. But you know what? In those 15 months, I hadn’t actually done much of my “job”. Did you know I was hired to mostly do cataloging? My time is supposed to be spent working on getting things properly described in our library catalog so people could find and use them. Over the course of about 400 days, I’ve done that about 40 times. On average, that’s about one thing added to the library catalog every 10 days. Do you know how long it normally takes? as little as 20-30 minutes, even if you are being picky. (Though, with audio and video, it’s probably more of an average of 1-2 hours depending on the complexity of the recording).

So, today, we were supposed to get the second delivery of that jazz collection. I was supposed to be spending the day unpacking and labeling those recordings. But the weather made it impossible, and I suddenly had a whole day free. After I had gone through the usual email and Facebook check, I thought to myself, “ok, what’s next?” I looked around my desk to see what kinds of notes I had left myself, or what things were on my to-do list. Back and forth I looked from one end of the desk to the other. And it started to dawn on me that all of those “other duties as assigned” were done. And I didn’t have anything on my to-do list. And I could actually start to do my job.

15 months. After 15 months, I have finally cleared up the decades of unknown, organized and arranged everything in a way that would allow me to work efficiently, determined the status of all of those unprocessed items. I have finally reached the day where I can start. Start doing my job, start doing what’s normal. Start being productive and efficient. Just start.

Disclaimer:
All words and images are my own. If they are not, they are cited as such to give proper attribution to the intellectual property owners.
No words or images reflect the opinions or viewpoints of my current, former, or future employers and educational institutions. They are from my own viewpoint.