ANTs in My Brain - Yuck!

If I posted more regularly, I wouldn't have to talk about what I did last week.

Last week, I dressed in business casual clothes, got in my car, and went to work - at least for the day. A K-8 art school teacher from outside of Massachusetts had contacted me looking for a basic workshop on cataloging and MARC format. She had been assigned responsibility for the library and wanted to do a good job. Her school is in the process of purchasing Follett's Destiny as their online catalog.

The previous librarian had also been a teacher assigned to take care of the library and things are organized in a somewhat idiosyncratic way. My student had found the Catalogers Pages on the CMRLS website and wanted to know what options she had during the summer. I pointed out some links on the site to free tutorials and also told her I was available to give a one-on-one workshop.

It was fun. My student was bright and had already done a lot of work looking at bibliographic records and trying to identify the fields she needed. She asked lots of good questions (like Why are biographies sometimes shelved together and sometimes integrated with the rest of the non-fiction collection?). We spent several hours together talking about cataloging and what she needs to know as a minimum to keep her library running adequately.

We had met at a public library that was convenient for the two of us and we spent time in their children's room looking at the way books were organized and cataloged even though a school will do some things differently. At least she now has a foundation on which to build.

The ANTs? ANTs stands for Automatic Negative Thoughts according to Dr. Daniel Amen in Change Your Brain, Change Your Body. They are all of those lies (Dr. Amen's word) for those thoughts that just pop into your brain. If you believe them, they can undermine all of your goals. Fortunately, I haven't been plagued with a lot of them recently. I'm having too good a time reading, deep cleaning my house, doing a (very) little yard work, trying new recipes and just enjoying myself.

However, soon I'm going to have to get serious and begin a real job search. I realized as I headed for the workshop with the school librarian how much I miss going to work. Even if I'm not assaulted with ANTs, it's going to take some Positive Thinking to keep me energized for the trek.