A Few Quick Notes 28

-It is raining but warm today. As I was walking to school today I ran into a classmate of mine. She said that she wasn’t really enjoying the unseasonably weather in the sense that she found it hard to dress for it.

-Over the past few days I have noticed that news stories mentioning the Harper nationalism motion keep referring to it as a “pre-emptive strike.” To call it this seems rather odd. Not only has the issue been on the table for weeks if not months, since Ignatieff first brought it to the fore. Furthermore, Harper’s motion was clearly in response to previously brought forward by the Bloc. Whatever this is I don’t see how it can rightly be called “pre-emptive,” as far as I can tell it didn’t really many to pre-empt anything.

-Earlier this week, for an assignment, I was looking at a few cataloging records in the McGill catalogue. I was struck by their use of certain MARC fields; the records just didn’t make sense. They were using 830 fields to represent information that was identical to that contained in the 490 field. It seemed to me that they should have just used the 440 field and saved themselves the hassle of re-entering the same data.

A classmate of mine works in the cataloging department so I asked her if she knew of any particular reason why this was happening. She didn’t know but offered to check with her boss for me.

The next day I ran into her and she gave me an update. It turns out that McGill had taken the records from another catalogue, the library term is copy cataloging, and not noticed the error. As of right now this should be fixed in the record that was presented to the cataloging supervisor.

The problem is, according to my classmate, that 6/7ths of the catalogers have been cut in the past year. Now there are only 3 fully trained catalogers supervising 20 technicians and students. It seems that there just aren’t enough people checking to ensure that a certain level of quality is maintained.

-In class today assignments that we handed in a few weeks ago were handed back. The mark was written on the front page of the assignment in pencil. I quickly noticed that something had been written and then erased in the same place that my current grade was located. With a little work I was able to see that the first number written was a 10 and that the number now showing most prominently was 9, I felt robbed. Though, to be honest, I did deserve to have lost that one mark and not have received the 10.

-If one has a bit of time on their hands one might want to check out www.jacksonpollock.org or www.mrpicassohead.com. It turns out that this is what library school students with laptops do while in class.

-It was brought to my attention that for filing purposes it would make the most sense if dates were presented year month day. This is because we want the like years grouped with like years, and so on. What we don’t want is like days grouped with like days. This filing arrangement would get us nowhere.

With this said, I will continue to write the date day month year, which I feel still makes more sense than month day year.

-How does one represent the Howard Dean scream in writing? Is “a;lgha[owighao[wieg[aowiwgn” a good approximation?

The sense of frustration that he must have felt to cause that scream is something that I can understand right now. Tonight, at about 8:00 PM I learned that an assignment that I had believed was due tomorrow afternoon is not actually due until Tuesday at Noon. It seems that most of my class, except my partner and I, knew this as of yesterday. I was working busily away none the wiser.

The good side of this is that we will be able to hand in a better assignment. The downside is that I will have to spend some of my weekend on this assignment when I had hoped to spend most of it on cataloging and reference assignments.

In many ways this change of due dates does not surprise me. Once I became aware that the professor knew that some individuals in the class, including your humble author, had been given incorrect instructions on how the project should be completed it became clear that an extension would be fair, if not likely.