The Library

At my school, not only do I teach Conversational ESL, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade literature, and music, I also work for a couple hours in the school library. This is not quite an idyllic an assignment as one might think. A library may not be the best place to employ people who speak English as a 2nd language. One of my jobs has been to sort catalog cards (yes, we still use those on the island of Saipan), and so I have the privilege of authoritatively informing you that about 80% of the cards have errors on them. I'm not just talking of disformity* of formatting, which is entire. Many of the errors are spelling errors, but not all. Some cards have subjects in the author or title line. Some cards leave off half the title of a book. Some cards include only the first word of the title. Some cards list dust jacket illustrators as authors. Some cards list authors who in no way coincide with the book.

My favorite card had 3 different spellings of the author's name, accompanied by an indecipherable title and vague publication information. I tried Googling every possible spelling of the author's names with the two words of the title I could make out, "Abraham" and "times," but I was unsuccessful. When I pointed out this card to a fellow library worker, she got a little upset with me. I'd tried telling her that the title on the card was no such thing, and she kept gesturing impatiently at the title line of the card. I tried a different tactic.
"It doesn't mean anything," I said. "It's nonsense."
Yeah, that didn't work.
I asked if I could see the book, but I was told that I wouldn't be able to find it since the book was entered this summer with many other books that had yet to be shelved.
So much for the book by John Dee, Dea, or Dec.**
The title and author cards provide another problem. Each book should have both a title and an author card, filed separately under its respective categories. Notice the word should. While sorting through the author cards, I found a good-sized handful of Title cards in the mix.
"Not a problem," I thought, "I'll just set them aside and file them in with the Title cards when I go through those."
Tiny problem. There wasn't a duplicate Author card misfiled in the Title card place. No, I had 2 Title cards. Or sometimes just 1 Title card, in the wrong place. The reverse situation worsened. Whereas I might have only found 5-10 Title cards per letter in the Author section, I found 20, 30, 40, Author cards in the Title sections.
Sigh.
I've told you a lot about the library. But actually, I could have summed up my entire library experience in one story.
I was typing a borrowers card when I realized that the source card was incorrect. First, the editor was listed as the author, a common enough error, but this was a magazine and it was listed as a book. To top it off, the periodical was listed by its title, with no mention of the issue title (which it clearly had) or volume/date identification. So I brought it to the librarian and pointed out these errors to her. She dismissed both the author/editor and the book categorization confusion, so I submitted, but I tried convincing her that she needed some issue identification.
"This is a periodical," I said, "so you can't just file it by its name, since there are other issues."
"But we only have one issue," she said.
"I know," I answered, "but we may get another issue, and then what will we do?"
"If we get another one, then we will pull this one from the shelves and then we will have to get it a new number and reprocess it."
"Okay," I said.


*no, it's not a word. But it could be.
** Googling did produce a result for John Dee. He's a mathematician and physicist from the 1600s. Not my guy.