The Annals of a Student Librarian; or, Manual Typewriters, Ghostly Communications, and Peter Pan Bras

It's been hell week in library land. Mostly because of my Design of Complex Websites class. The course is "front loaded" so we have two homeworks due per week: one dealing with CSS/HTML and one with programming. I've brought away one life application: In addition to an accountant and a mechanic, I now hope to someday employ a programmer.

Cataloging is equally as tedious, but less frustrating and work intensive. Except when it turns out the AACR2 has entries about how to format communications with spirits, but not about how to format Native American names.

Finally, my work at the Herbarium has been an interesting "melding of technology," as my supervisor likes to call it. I use the ipni.org computer database to decipher the botanists' illegible scribbling of plant names (they have to keep up the scribbling- on- a- notepad- in- the- middle- of- the- wilderness mystique, I guess). I asked for a typewriter to fill in the annotations on the labels, and they found me a manual one from the top shelf of a storage room. They all think it is very funny and keep telling me to put it on my resume. The ribbon was dry, so I had to change it. I'm 23. None of the old botanists could tell me how to change it. We're talking about people in their 50s, 60s, and even 90s. Anyway, I figured it out, albeit while making a very inky mess. It's A LOT easier than a cascading style sheet.

The specimens I'm working with are not mounted--meaning they are loose, fifty-year-old weeds nested in old editions of the Ann Arbor News. I must admit it is easy to be distracted by the container. Media is message....or...well...that doesn't really work. Anyway, the Peter Pan Bra, for example. This baffled me so much I had to look it up online. Why would they call an enhancing bra that? Wouldn't that be a minimizer?