Sarah Theimer
Description and Discovery Strategy Librarian
University of New Hampshire
Introduction
Essay writing is a well established method of reflection and understanding. Library workers often do not have time to process the meaning that surrounds their work. The rush to get work done and on to the next thing, competing demands, and outside commitments all compete for attention and energy. These essays use writing as method for understanding professional practice. They record thoughts about cataloging and discovery work. They enable meaning to emerge through details and reflection. The essays do not tell people how to catalog or how they should feel about cataloging. They provide a way of recognizing how meaning is generated in library work through attention to systems, constraints, and decision-making.
Essay #1- (Speed)
I wrote all my bad thoughts down, then ripped the pages out of the notebook and sent them into the recycling stream. At work I’ve been told recycling is a myth because everything ends up in the large dumpster outside my window. But this notebook claims to be made of recycled paper, so someone is misinformed. And by bad thoughts, I mean not good: stale, boring, or disappointing. Since the ideas were written down, I theorize they are now exorcised out of me, free to rest peacefully in the crowded afterlife of discarded ideas.
Today I almost assigned “Fast Zombies” as a subject heading so patrons could tell the difference between supernaturally fast zombies and traditionally slow ones. It isn’t a real LCSH term, and I’d have to justify it as a local need. Is it a local need, or is it just me? The movie 28 Days Later is widely credited with reinventing the zombie genre by making the undead freakishly fast. Both 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead begin with a main character waking alone in a hospital and discovering that something terrible has (quickly) overtaken the world. I want to research why these beginnings mirror each other, but I haven’t had time. I recently ran across the theories that fast zombies are fast because they are sick zombified people who didn’t die. The slow ones actually died and then turned to zombies That is what differentiates them. The fast ones aren’t dead yet.
It seems like everything now moves faster than it did. Did Einstein predict that? Or maybe Freud? Baseball changed rules to speed up the games. They now have a pitch clock and certain defensive shifts are banned, because the younger crowds couldn’t be expected to pay attention to games where pitchers took their time and defenses could adapt. Now everyone is forced to go quickly without thinking because that is more entertaining. TV shows like Chopped give a limited amount of time to cook. Exerting unnecessary pressure and rewarding a specific personality. In football, coaches call timeouts to ice the kicker before an important field goal attempt. Making him wait is considered harmful as time invites self doubt and negative talk. Patience, like your abdominals is a muscle that is hard to exercise. The workouts are not fun, so people avoid them and accept their weak core. That choice will come back to haunt them, like the zombies.
We are waiting for trick or treaters to come. We are on the driveway so they do not need to come upstairs. Concerned primarily for their safety, not for trick or treating speed. We wait with our next door neighbor who let us know she is selling her Corvette and that her very large inflatable spider had to be used at a different party and so isn’t on top of her house this year. I think a few small children will be relieved that the spider who eats the house is not lurking above tonight. I will create that local subject heading. ‘Fast Zombies’ is unauthorized but true. At least then someone searching will know when the bad comes for them it won’t crawl, it will sprint. There won’t be time to wonder whether the recycling bin was ever real, or whether those bad thoughts are actually gone. Monsters move much faster than they used to.
Essay #2 – System failure
The gnome riding a bike in my backyard is about to fly into the river. The fiberglass stake that gave me splinters last winter is now in a full downward-dog pose. I was the designated driver for a biopsy appointment today; it went faster than expected. Now we wait.
At work I am waiting for the Indians of North America Subject Heading to officially change. A better heading has been approved, but the government shutdown halted work at the Library of Congress. The idea to keep subjects consistent across catalogs is less important as technology changes. Libraries have less obvious control. Or someone is in control, but it isn’t one of us. It is one of them. I can control what the library users see; the title, the author and the number of pages. This control requires judgment, assumptions of power, and creating a presentation that will help some, but by no means all. Some users will have to be jettisoned overboard, like the unicorns who missed Noah’s ark.
We have several options depending on the results of the test. Perhaps radiation. Meanwhile, the power is flashing on and off. Interrupting my internet and my source of heat. I must save all my changes as a preventative measure. And bring water upstairs. We have a basement filled with other people’s stuff. Not just any other people, but our adult children. A developmental stage, I suppose: learning when you are and are not in control. Although we are not in control, we can always be prepared. And store stuff in our parents’ basement.
My laptop has been going to the wrong printer and now the printer is in an error state. (Says my laptop. My printer thinks it is in a fine state.) I want something warm so I move large branches off my driveway to get to a Mexican restaurant. The windows are painted with fall leaves, so I can’t see out. I get a text that the power may be back at 4:00 pm. I am sitting alone but my waiter always addresses me as “my friends”, as if he is imagining other people sitting at my table. I watch some football highlights and ask for free refills for me and my friends.
When the power returns, it hums like a reminder that my control was never lost, only borrowed. The printer blinks again, and the gnome in the yard still leans forward pedaling to China. Systems resume their routines, the lights are steady, but the waiting never really ends. Everything depends on something unseen coming back online: the grid, the body, the library catalog. I save one more draft, just in case.
Essay #3 – If meaning is a web, is hope a web too?
I want to give away this book, but I haven’t given up on it yet. There are certainly bad parts. In fact, most of it. But it could redeem itself at the end. My childhood priest told us that Judas could have been saved if he repented even seconds before death. My father said our priest was wrong about that and a few other points in church doctrine. The priest’s heart was in the right place; the same cannot be said of the church. Anyway, we walk into every situation dragging our past behind us.
When someone talks about a generic dog, without describing it, I adopt my culture’s assumptions about dogs and my own personal dog past. All my dogs have been large and untrained. Where else am I walking into a situation dragging my personal history? We now own an ugly electric car. Its primary feature being its ugliness, its electricness is without question a secondary characteristic. It is the color of mud mixed with blood, and perhaps wild animal scat. It had a flat tire the second day we owned it. Other than that it has been well behaved and it can’t help its color. It was born that way.
This football season is a disaster for my beloved team, but luckily basketball is starting and eventually there will be lacrosse. We do not depend on any one team to buoy us, we have three options that may come through some day, if we are lucky, before the apocalypse. There are some teams you grow up with and others that you adopt as you move. The sporting roots you are born with are deep, they destroy sidewalks and ruin septic systems.
At work it is time to rank the enhancements for our systems. The vendor will then decide what is possible and would have the most impact and garner praise and adoration from the masses. Meanwhile the clients who pay for the service hope the features eventually chosen will have a positive impact and not require too much implementation time. After all we have few people, many demands, and the giant boulder of AI about to crush us all. It is part of the shittification of the world, the idea that online platforms degrade over time. This happens in a three-stage process resulting in a degraded product with a worse user experience. Crapification is part of the lifecycle process. That may be research I regret.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t given up on the book. Things fall apart, systems are made worse and most stories never get better, but maybe there’s a paragraph near the end that will redeem the mess. It may be possible to find a light in the darkness. Judas could be redeemed. The world, my car, the football team, the computer software, all may move through the stages of promise and disappointment. But maybe it’s worth turning the page, if only to see if redemption can run faster than the gloom.