Its the end of May

Well it's the end of May. My family got through all three birthdays, pretty much ok. My son turned 6 years old, and got a Star Wars light sabre (a big one with lights and sounds) and a guitar for his birthday. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we also purchased a new computer as well. The 9 year old PC had to be replaced because it had insufficient RAM and hard drive memory. Which meant that the boys could not play the newer video games on it. (the boys being my 6 year old son and his dad). We have now purchased both a memory card and a video card for the new computer, and the new games are running very nicely now.

May however was not complete without a major upset along the way. About a week after my birthday, I was dismissed from my job. This was the first job I had found after my surgery. So I am back to hunting for yet another job. I hate looking for new jobs.

Because there are no jobs out there that allow me to actually do what I love doing. And what I love doing is surfing, blogging, reading books and reviewing books. I would also like to do bibliography, but with no experience, I cannot make any progress in that direction.

There is one job in Toronto involving books that I would love to do and that is to be a book scanner. For the Internet Archive. They have an office at the University of Toronto (in the Robarts Library) where 12 people do nothing but scan in books (page by page) for the archive. Old books, Rare books. This is one job I would love to do. I have applied twice so far, but all I get is silence. Not even an interview.

My New Bibliography Career

For those of you who remember that I said a few months ago, that I wanted to be a Bibliographer. I have slowly been investigating how to do this. I have enrolled at my local college to do an Archives and Records Management Certificate, part time, starting in January. I know it's not a Library degree, but at my age, I just don't have the time to spend 6 years doing an undergraduate degree and then an MLS. So I have settled for an Archives and Records Management Certificate instead. Hopefully I can do all the coursework for this certificate in one year. I have also finally joined the ExLibris mailing list.

Actually I am getting quite excited now, and am also wondering WHY I didn't think of doing this back in New Zealand. That's easy. Because I didn't ask the right questions. I just knew I didn't want to be a public librarian, dealing with students and the public all day long. I had no idea there were any other areas away from the customer service that I could do. Archives, Records Management, Reference, Bibliography, Cataloging, Indexing (which is another area I am interested in. I'm thinking I might like to do the USAD Indexing course - but that can wait).

Now I hear you asking. What brought this on, and why am I reading all this today? Because yesterday in the mail, I finally received my copy of Old Books in the Old World, by Rostenberg and Stern. I dropped everything else and have spent the last 24 hours reading this book. I'll post again when I review it.

I did apply to work in the Toronto Public Library some years ago, but when they called me and asked if I was interested in working as a page, and I was told that a page shelves the book, I was silly enough to say NO. I was more interested in working in the administrative area, and surely I didnt need to shelve books to do that? It turns out that I did NOT do my research very well, and have since discovered that ALL jobs in the Library system, start as a page at the entry level and that is more or less the only way (except for those with an MLS probably) to get into the system. At my local library, NOONE has an MLS. They ALL started as pages, and have worked their way up.