So I am poking around the internet looking at different kinds of jobs I might want to have after I get my MSLIS and I found this one: Ship's Librarian. The posting is outdated (that ship has very literally sailed) but still, I think it's a cool job! It's for a nine-week training cruise at SUNY maritime college -- they went from New York to Antwerp to Istanbul and now they're on their way home. I think that would be really interesting.

Library of Congress subject headings, why are you so weird?

According to the LCSH, we should not use the term "Cheese antennas" but rather "Microwave pillboxes". Hee.

That clears things right up, doesn't it? Seriously, though, how many people in the history of the world have gone to a library catalog and looked up EITHER "cheese antennas" or "microwave pillboxes?" (Other than catalogers and people in cataloging classes who were like, "'Cheese antennas'? 'Microwave pillboxes'? The Hell?" And just so you know, it looks like Robert C. Hansen wrote the definitive work on cheese antennas microwave pillboxes back in 1964.)

In case you hadn't guessed, we're doing subject analysis this week (which, btw, I should properly call "Content analysis (Communication)," "Indexing," or "Subject cataloging"). I have been using the LCSH for two hours and I am already perplexed, amused, and annoyed.

Cheese antennas. Microwave pillboxes. Cheese antennas. Microwave pillboxes. Cheese antennas.

Oh, and "Women figure skaters." Well, where's "Men figure skaters", then? (Answer: I guess we just call them "Figure skaters.") That sort of thing is bad enough when you're talking about fields where women are rare, but it's just silly in figure skating, where there are as many world-class women as men, and vastly more women amateurs.

So, the college where I work is perhaps 100 yards from the college I am currently attending. I have a lot of downtime at work, and I like to try to get schoolwork done there. I thought that I could take reserve books from the college I am attending to the college I am working at, but apparently no. I am bummed. I have to spend large amounts of pointless downtime 100 yards away from books I should be reading. Argh.

I'm going to have a talk with the person at the circulation desk and see if maybe she is willing to bend the rules for me. Maybe? Please? I probably wouldn't let me do it, though. Although I wouldn't have to, because we allow people to take reserves outside of the library.

So, last night was rather exciting, if deeply annoying. Between nine and eleven, enough water leaked through the library ceiling to fill a few small trash cans (and to get the floor soaking wet besides). I felt like I was in Florence in 1966, except instead of moving priceless Italian manuscripts and incunabula to higher ground I was shifting Merriam-Webster's 10th Collegiate Dictionary and The Merck Index into empty study rooms. So, not much like Florence at all, really. But between me, student worker Jen, and a friend of Jen's who I guilted into helping us, we probably moved 300-400 books, which I think is reasonably impressive.

I think very few books were seriously damaged, and as long as the ones that got damp don't get all moldy we should be good to go. There was a Slovak-English dictionary that was already pretty puffy by the time I got to it, but other than that I only noticed a few books that looked like they were in really bad shape.

It's a very good thing this happened when it did -- if it had been a few hours later no one would have noticed it until it came through to the first floor, or maybe even until morning (I think under the reference section is a teaching lab which would have been unoccupied all night). Or course, if it had happened a five or six hours earlier there would have been other people there to help me deal with it, which would also have been nice.

Once I got home I was all adrenaliney and I couldn't sleep. I'm tired now. I've got to start on that assignment I meant to get to 13 hours ago.

So, that assignment I was going to do? Probably not going to happen tonight. I had just started working on it when one of the student workers came back and said, "Some guy says that there's water leaking on the books." And indeed there was. I have now (with the aid of the student worker) shifted several shelves worth of reference collection to the empty study rooms (good luck to whoever has to put those back), I have commandeered all the trash cans, and I am currently in negotiations with security to get some trash bags to block off the rest of the books for when the ceiling tile crashes in (as is, I fear, inevitable). Also, I am all wet. This sucks. And the security guy says that the leak is on the fifth floor. The library is on the second floor, which suggests to me that if this water has already made its way through three floors, it is not stopping any time soon.

Any new expletives you would like to teach me will be welcomed with open (though slightly damp) arms, as I have used all mine up (under my breath, of course, in proper library fashion).