I’m into my third week at the new job and I must say: I really, really love it. The people are fantastic. The space is wonderful and the campus is just unspeakably attractive. The nature of the work is more or less to my liking with plenty of opportunities for moving around and physically working, as opposed to just sitting at a desk all day.

I have to admit, though, that there have been more than a handful of confusing/frustrating moments and I’m beginning to realize that the majority of my time will be spent solving little library mysteries. For instance, a lot of patrons submit requests but can’t provide much information. They might not remember the author’s name or might not know the exact title. This makes my job really challenging. Part of the problem has to do with library tools not being quite as user-friendly as say: Amazon or Google. I don’t get any help if a word is misspelled, and title indexes are pretty picky about format and word order. Fortunately, I like a challenge. I feel a small sense of defeat when I resort to Google, and a huge sense of accomplishment when I manage to locate a circulating copy of some obscure reference work.

For those who are interested, there is an online resource called WorldCat that essentially strives to be a fully functional catalog for the whole world. It is the number one resource for my work. Go to worldcat.org and enter your zip code and then search for books, CD’s, movies and more. WorldCat will show you all the libraries in the world that own those titles and how far away they are from your house. Pretty neat, huh!