Good peoples

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I’ve reached a verdict on one of the library blogs I’m following: I really like the Free Range Librarian. K. G. Schneider’s posts are laid-back, easy to read, and chock-full of little gems of knowledge. She doesn’t write explicitly and in-depth about each gem in her blog post; what she does its describe its present relevance to her and link to a site that goes in more depth. She sort of points the way down branches and branches of resources.

It probably doesn’t hurt, though, that she wrote a post about how to be a good role model. OK, so it wasn’t entirely about being a role model; it was about how to be good peoples at the same time as being well-known, but what I took away from it is that she cares about the next generation down, and now this little peon loves her.

One of the things I like about Cornell, actually, is that there’s so much less social status gradient through the boss hierarchy than I expected. Sure, there are cliques, and there are muckity-mucks whose radar I’m nowhere near being on; it’s a very, very large library, and people are people. But everybody smiles in passing or says hello, everybody’s willing to stop and talk and get to know you, and nobody looks down their noses at you for being a mere peon. (Not anybody who actually has me on daily radar, anyway; it’s hard to tell with the ones who have no reason to interact with me and look harried and busy all the time. But I assume they’re just, y’know, harried and busy.) But one of the high muckity-mucks who never works with me remembers my first name and calls me by it. I told him I was very impressed with that, when he sat down with me and my fellow newbie at one of the Christmas parties. He said it wasn’t hard; our names were on our cubicles. But here’s the thing: only our last names are on the cubicle. He cared enough to hold on to our first names from meeting us just once on our first days. That tickles me.

Also, as I may have mentioned in an earlier entry, I often get asked if I’m bored as an inputter (often by people who held the job themselves, actually). I’m not bored in it, but I really appreciate the way that they ask: as though they think the job may be a peon job, but I am not a peon, and they’re quite certain I’ll be moving up into something more interesting down the line. That will be cool; I’m looking forward to getting my fingers into more library things. But I’m happy as an inputter right now, too; I sort of think of it as a baby cataloger position, and I’m paying attention to all the weird things that happen in my bibliographies to try to learn what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s just old-style, what’s a new development, which institutions write reliably good records and which make me want to throw a temper tantrum that they even bothered uploading that crap to OCLC when even a mere peon like me could have written a better one in thirty seconds, etc. There’s a lot to learn!

I wonder what career path I’ll take in the library. Every new tour or workshop I take reveals some new aspect to the goings-on in the library that I hadn’t known about. (The other week I got to see the physical processing areas; I could have stared for hours at the guy removing scotch tape from an old leather-bound book with acetone and a paintbrush. That’s just cool!) I wonder where my skills would be most useful – or what my useful skills even are. For example, I had no idea that my foreign languages would be so useful until I got the interview here and they quizzed me about my knowledge of Russian; I had mentioned it in my application only because the job description said Preferred: fluency in Vietnamese and I was trying to display my love of languages and willingness to learn Vietnamese. I really had no clue that if they’d known I was out there, they might have written Preferred: obsession with languages based on non-Roman alphabets, the weirder the better. Intent to stick with the library for life like an adoring puppy in exchange for opportunity to learn more weird languages a plus.

Right now, from what I know of the library, I think I would be a good NetAdmin and a good cataloger. But it is entirely possible there might be other cool things too that I just have no concept of at the moment. It’s sort of mind-boggling to have so much beautiful possibility laid out before me after so many years of not knowing “what I want to be when I grow up”. There are people who never get chances like this, you know.

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