Playing With Stickers Is Not a Job, Or Why I Could Never Become a Cataloger

Cataloging is the bane of my existence. Plain and simple; I hate it. I find it boring, repetitive, and stationary. I like to move in my job and cataloging is not something that can be done moving around. When I started my job in January, I also started a cataloging project with another student worker. The Reading Room in the College of Communications handles all the archiving for the Center for Public Television and our task was to catalog all of their videos. It took us almost all semester to finish and I thought that I would finally be done. We use a library automation system called Athena which is not browser-based and requires all cataloging information to be manually entered. We had about 2500 records to catalog and did so using information given to us from the Center for Public Television. The records were often unclear and unspecific and required some repair; thus the incredible length of time it took us to complete the project. I was thrilled when we finished. I hated spending time entering data into Athena; it was so incredibly boring to me. Therefore, I was so excited to leave the project behind. Or so I thought.

Today I was informed that all the tapes needed to have barcodes on them. So I will be spending the next month (depending on how long it takes me) fixing barcode labels and its cover to the tapes. Could this job get anymore boring? I'm so glad that I'm spending time in library school so that I might one day have a job where I enter data into a computer and play with stickers all day. I could never be a cataloger.