PSA: will all the librarians stand up please?

[anotheranon]

In the same spirit as my comic book fan post, I've also realized I have a lot of friends who are librarians, catalogers, or others of the information science/info moving and shaking ilk. If you want to pop up to say hello, share reading lists or book tips, or just gab about the latest Librarian Book Cart Drill Championships results, feel free to do so here.

Librarian groupies/wannabees [YouTube] are also invited to peek in, but be respectful - librarians are pretty hardcore.

Comments

[jlsjlsjls.livejournal.com]

Ooooo ... crossover time! I qualify for this one as well as the comic book post.

I'm a library technician (a pretty much Canadian profession, though I've heard that there a couple of states that have an equivalent ... up here it's based on a 2-year college program in library science) and cataloguer. I started out being taught the basics by my high school's librarian, did my get-the-official-bit-of-paper gig, then did a one year contract recataloguing 3 small municipal public libraries, put in just shy of twenty years as the one-person cataloguing dept. of a community college, and have just passed my sixth anniversary as team leader of the cataloguing dept. of a book wholesaler that specializes in supplying shelf-ready books for libraries (we produce over a million customized marc records per year for several hundred school and public libraries).

On the scary outside-of-work side, I also have my personal book, movie, and music collections catalogued and listed online (was doing this before LibraryThing came along), compile and post booklists at catdesk, and occasionally teach a workshop that shares all the never-taught-in-the-classroom stuff I've figured out over the years. So yes, I'm most definitely a cataloguing geek (or "diva", as our boss calls us), but just as most definitely the good type of geek that firmly believes that the catalogue is for helping people find information (and that the software and code should be abused/mangled to enhance that purpose) ... not one of the scary obsessive-compulsives that believes the quest for the perfect marc record overrides findability.