The Meeting

So, I been so busy actually doin' work at work that I haven't had a chance to post about the meeting with the Commissioner on Tuesday. In this thing were myself, my boss, my Assistant Director, the Digital Cataloger and the Director. Now, my AD did the smart thing and just sat there, only speaking up when he was directly asked a question. My Director, on the other hand, was a spastic ball of nerves, which, for her, means running her mouth as much as possible. Although she had seemed to see our side in the pre-meeting meeting (which was after the pre-pre-meeting meeting with my boss), she was so busy assuring the Commissioner that no harm would come to the books that she ended up at complete cross purposes with us. For example- I must have said 150 times in our pre-meeting get-together that we were a library, not an archives, meaning that we were there to save the content. She agreed. But what did she show up with? Two handouts on document handling from the National Records and Archives Administration on document handling. As per the norm for this archives stuff, it was all about saving the paper and how no harm must EVER come to it.

Anywho, we spent an hour of talking over her, demonstrating our knowledge on the topic of low impact digitization, and explaining the various forms of disbinding, including the reasons why we only ever relax a binding, not use the other two methods (decasing and guillotining). At the end of it, after Claire expressed her concern for the collection and told us about the upcoming Rare Books Vault (set for ribbon cutting Oct. 03), it all boiled down to one thing. "I can tell you will give this a personal touch. You really CARE about the collection, and won't just apply clinical methods. Carry on". Egad, I spent a week readin' technical info to add to my AD's 300 pages of standard digitization procedures for this? Couldn't I have just stayed in my office and gotten an email?

So, I'm currently in the throws of planning the next phase of outsourcing. Our budget's at least 100 grand, though we only needed to pull together enough to renew the contracts by today. I'm also up to my armpits in 14 boxes of scattered issues, dating back to the 1700s (although most are in the 1810s, 20s and 30s), figuring out which ones can be sent out. Most can, as they're on rag. But they'll all have to be recorded, a number of them cataloged, then boarded by individual issue and labelled before they go out. Guess I know where my next 6 months are going.

On the amusing link front I got this article on the Library foot kisser, to add to the library jerkoff. Enjoy.