Whew, back to my own beloved job

There's nothing like a week or two of manual labor to make one appreciate the many pleasures of school and library life. I have the scrapes, cuts, and bruises to show for the tiny dent I made in installing 800,000 volumes at the University Library's Oak Street high density storage facility. I did my share of wiping, vacuuming, sizing, and accessioning the most obscure tomes ever. We had a big rush of chemistry-related titles - old volumes of Chem Abstracts, of the Egyptian (Israeli, Indian, European, you name it) Journal of something-something Chemistry, and so on. There was an endless run of gigantic things in (I think) Dutch that appeared to be logs of colonial imports and exports. And then there was a spate of Italian and French literature. One day I found myself looking at a book of Italian poetry that had been translated into Spanish. Looking at the photos of those earnest-looking authors on the back covers, I kept thinking how sad they would be to see their work relegated to remote storage (loving and tender as it is). I'm well aware that my own treasured opus is doomed to suffer the same fate.

This blog will slow down now that I'm away from students and into my regular summer schedule of writing projects, keeping up with various library things, traveling, and gardening. Next up is the annual ALA conference, this time in Chicago.