My, My, My

There are lots of titles that begin with the word "My" and I've reached that section in my alphabetical list of possible duplicates. That means very soon I'll be half way through the alphabet (M being the 13th of 26 letters). I began the letter M in mid-July - seven months ago. I began working on the letter L a full two years ago. I'm speeding up :-)

Rest assured I've done much more than merge titles beginning with the letter M. There are the typos and those weird characters that are supposed to be accent marks that I've corrected, the skimpy bib records that I've upgraded. Plus the files of records sent to me from MassCat libraries I've imported. And I've searched for many, many records that MassCat library staff haven't been able to locate. Sometimes I've had to create records from scratch. Well, that's my job.

One major transition I've made is to stop teaching continuing education workshops for librarians. Yes, after a couple of years of ambivalence, I told my contact at the Connecticut State Library that I just didn't want to do any more. Since I've been teaching so few, it gets harder and harder to rev up.

I haven't been attending any workshops or training or conferences myself, so I feel as if it's getting harder and harder to keep up. I can handle the MassCat cataloging because it's pretty simple and it's mostly copy cataloging. The original cataloging is usually straight forward.

I continue to subscribe to the various cataloging e-mail discussion lists, but I find I'm deleting more and more of the posts without reading them thoroughly. Very few of them address issues that I face.

I'm still enjoying my work at MassCat. It's enough of a challenge to keep me interested but not so challenging that I get frustrated. It's only 18 hours/week, 5 miles from my home and I get free coffee. What more could I ask?