A mild plea (and parenthetical whinge)
Apr. 25th, 2010 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138If for some reason you have a surplus of empty full-sized CD jewelboxes, please consider donating them to your local library. You should ask them first if they really need them, but there's a good chance that they do-- at least in our local library system, an unhappy percentage of our CD jewelboxes have broken hinges and are held together with rubber bands.
Thin jewelboxes are less useful because they can't accommodate all of the inserts-- in our case, the optical barcodes are on the back insert, the RFID tag is inside it, and the cataloguing label is on the front. When the back insert is the only one left, it's possible to stick a cataloguing label onto it and cram it into the front of a thin jewelbox, but it doesn't quite fit unless partially folded over and taped in, which tends to obscure whatever information is near that margin (usually the track list).
[I seem to have become the unwilling guardian dragon of the CD collection of the library I'm volunteering at, which has been laboring under nasty budget cuts.
Some preliminary background-- when I started there a year or three ago, the CDs were almost completely non-sorted. There was a vague general area for classical music, a vague general area for popular music, and a vague general area for Xmas music; these had minimal sigposts for these areas, considerable slopover among them, and absolutely no order within each area despite the theoretically alphabetical but cryptic cataloguing labels.
Eventually, I got sick of this and found a comprehensive list of the ANSCR codes-- A is music history (Renaissance and earlier), B is full-length operas, BH is single-opera highlights, BX is multi-opera excerpt compilations, and so on. I used this list to *make* a complete set of category dividers by printing them out onto individual sheets of paper and wrapping them around sheets of scrap cardboard, put the dividers into alphabetical order, and sorted all of the CDs around them. It took several more months for the librarians to requisition a complete set of permanent plastic dividers, which I had to re-wrap with a new set of paper sheets until we got the proper printed section labels to stick onto them. When I was finally done, all of the categories were finally in alphabetical order and the CD catalogue labels were alphabetically sorted within each category. Every so often, I go back through to check; usually things are okay, but sometimes things have gotten randomized. The worst examples are randomized in a particular pattern, where large blocks of unalphabetized CDs are bunched together near the front of each row of their category section.
Theoretically, I'm not supposed to do anything that the paid library pages normally do, and the whole CD-sorting saga was something that fit perfectly well into that gap. But recently, the guy who normally overlaps with my volunteer hours has been ticking me off by (A) asking me to help him with routine stuff he should be doing on his own, such as determining alphabetical order, and (B) getting those things wrong whether I'm helping him or not.
I am not kidding about (A). I do give the guy a great deal of credit for being operationally fluent in English, which can have fiendishly random spelling and is not his native language (at least to the extent that it's not what he speaks when I've heard him chatting to similar-looking acquaintances or on his cellphone). I'm certain I'd be even worse at attempting to maintain equivalent orthographical sorting in his native writing system (Urdu?)... but on the same grounds, I'm also certain I couldn't possibly be the best-qualified person to fill that sort of position.
As for (B)... this past week, while I was talking with the reference librarian about possibly expanding the CD storage area in general, the guy kept leaning across to read CD labels at me and ask where they should go. "Where is QC? Do they go in C?" etc.
He does this sort of thing every so often, which I've tended to write off as perhaps the weird sort of ingratiating flirtation where you ask someone about something that you already know perfectly well, just to flatter that person with a sense of helpfulness and get them to engage with you. He's a genial retired guy and does this with minimal physical contact, so I've been shrugging it off as well-intended though annoying.
But during that particular conversation and set of interruptions, he asked me to find the C (concerto) section for him, I pointed it out, and he promptly stuffed a handful of discs into the bin without checking them against the discs that were already there. When I walked around a few minutes later, hoping to avoid confirming my apprehensions, it turned out that I was unfortunately right-- his handful of discs was unalphabetized, randomly stuffed into the existing alphabetized sequence... and on the *wrong side* of the C divider, in the middle of the BX section.
I went back to the reference librarian I'd been talking to, who'd also been right there while the guy was asking me to find categories and then shoving down CDs, and tentatively said that maybe the guy might need some reminders about keeping the labels in alphabetical order.
To my surprise, this prompted a mini-rant from her about how the library's branch manager had previously tried to keep the guy from doing certain tasks because he would always screw them up, but now that the guy had been there for so many years, there was very little chance of improving his performance and that he definitely seemed to be getting worse, whether because he didn't properly understand some things or just didn't care. (There's def'ly some of the latter. I've spotted him numerous times among the back shelves, browsing through magazines while sitting on a stool beside a full cart of books he's supposed to be reshelving. I haven't mentioned that to anyone there.) And that between the library's budget crunch and the union trying to get pages a minimum of 15 hours/week, he was going to be spending a lot more time there, the shelving would fall into utter chaos, rocks fall, everyone dies.
The upshot of which, if there is one, is that we (and probably your local library) more CD jewelboxes to replace dead ones to help keep things from getting any worse than they already are. It's bad enough to have the CD collection randomly (un)sorted without also leaving lots of individual CDs vulnerable to loss or damage because the spindle can't hold them inside or the lid keeps falling off.
I don't want to look after the damn CDs. I'm not supposed to do it, and I shouldn't have to. But if I don't, they're just going to revert to chaos and drink-coasterdom.]
Thin jewelboxes are less useful because they can't accommodate all of the inserts-- in our case, the optical barcodes are on the back insert, the RFID tag is inside it, and the cataloguing label is on the front. When the back insert is the only one left, it's possible to stick a cataloguing label onto it and cram it into the front of a thin jewelbox, but it doesn't quite fit unless partially folded over and taped in, which tends to obscure whatever information is near that margin (usually the track list).
[I seem to have become the unwilling guardian dragon of the CD collection of the library I'm volunteering at, which has been laboring under nasty budget cuts.
Some preliminary background-- when I started there a year or three ago, the CDs were almost completely non-sorted. There was a vague general area for classical music, a vague general area for popular music, and a vague general area for Xmas music; these had minimal sigposts for these areas, considerable slopover among them, and absolutely no order within each area despite the theoretically alphabetical but cryptic cataloguing labels.
Eventually, I got sick of this and found a comprehensive list of the ANSCR codes-- A is music history (Renaissance and earlier), B is full-length operas, BH is single-opera highlights, BX is multi-opera excerpt compilations, and so on. I used this list to *make* a complete set of category dividers by printing them out onto individual sheets of paper and wrapping them around sheets of scrap cardboard, put the dividers into alphabetical order, and sorted all of the CDs around them. It took several more months for the librarians to requisition a complete set of permanent plastic dividers, which I had to re-wrap with a new set of paper sheets until we got the proper printed section labels to stick onto them. When I was finally done, all of the categories were finally in alphabetical order and the CD catalogue labels were alphabetically sorted within each category. Every so often, I go back through to check; usually things are okay, but sometimes things have gotten randomized. The worst examples are randomized in a particular pattern, where large blocks of unalphabetized CDs are bunched together near the front of each row of their category section.
Theoretically, I'm not supposed to do anything that the paid library pages normally do, and the whole CD-sorting saga was something that fit perfectly well into that gap. But recently, the guy who normally overlaps with my volunteer hours has been ticking me off by (A) asking me to help him with routine stuff he should be doing on his own, such as determining alphabetical order, and (B) getting those things wrong whether I'm helping him or not.
I am not kidding about (A). I do give the guy a great deal of credit for being operationally fluent in English, which can have fiendishly random spelling and is not his native language (at least to the extent that it's not what he speaks when I've heard him chatting to similar-looking acquaintances or on his cellphone). I'm certain I'd be even worse at attempting to maintain equivalent orthographical sorting in his native writing system (Urdu?)... but on the same grounds, I'm also certain I couldn't possibly be the best-qualified person to fill that sort of position.
As for (B)... this past week, while I was talking with the reference librarian about possibly expanding the CD storage area in general, the guy kept leaning across to read CD labels at me and ask where they should go. "Where is QC? Do they go in C?" etc.
He does this sort of thing every so often, which I've tended to write off as perhaps the weird sort of ingratiating flirtation where you ask someone about something that you already know perfectly well, just to flatter that person with a sense of helpfulness and get them to engage with you. He's a genial retired guy and does this with minimal physical contact, so I've been shrugging it off as well-intended though annoying.
But during that particular conversation and set of interruptions, he asked me to find the C (concerto) section for him, I pointed it out, and he promptly stuffed a handful of discs into the bin without checking them against the discs that were already there. When I walked around a few minutes later, hoping to avoid confirming my apprehensions, it turned out that I was unfortunately right-- his handful of discs was unalphabetized, randomly stuffed into the existing alphabetized sequence... and on the *wrong side* of the C divider, in the middle of the BX section.
I went back to the reference librarian I'd been talking to, who'd also been right there while the guy was asking me to find categories and then shoving down CDs, and tentatively said that maybe the guy might need some reminders about keeping the labels in alphabetical order.
To my surprise, this prompted a mini-rant from her about how the library's branch manager had previously tried to keep the guy from doing certain tasks because he would always screw them up, but now that the guy had been there for so many years, there was very little chance of improving his performance and that he definitely seemed to be getting worse, whether because he didn't properly understand some things or just didn't care. (There's def'ly some of the latter. I've spotted him numerous times among the back shelves, browsing through magazines while sitting on a stool beside a full cart of books he's supposed to be reshelving. I haven't mentioned that to anyone there.) And that between the library's budget crunch and the union trying to get pages a minimum of 15 hours/week, he was going to be spending a lot more time there, the shelving would fall into utter chaos, rocks fall, everyone dies.
The upshot of which, if there is one, is that we (and probably your local library) more CD jewelboxes to replace dead ones to help keep things from getting any worse than they already are. It's bad enough to have the CD collection randomly (un)sorted without also leaving lots of individual CDs vulnerable to loss or damage because the spindle can't hold them inside or the lid keeps falling off.
I don't want to look after the damn CDs. I'm not supposed to do it, and I shouldn't have to. But if I don't, they're just going to revert to chaos and drink-coasterdom.]