#mainlib

To those people I didn’t mention, thank you. You guys are the best! Even in a short span of time, we get to know each other, we get to know each other’s frustrations and passions about the profession. This is not-your-ordinary training indeed. This is beyond LIS 181, this is a life lesson that I will forever treasure. Again, Thank you, Main Library.

Welp, I thought that this day was supposed to be the best, turns out it’s not. It’s actually the worst day (as of writing) that I’ve ever encountered. It was such a disaster that I actually would want to delete this day as part of my life, with Duterte’s inauguration and whatnot, I couldn’t help but be frustrated with the events this day, particularly the part when I was at the bindery. It was a complete disaster. Never did I encounter an old man that was so rude, as in rude. He called me stupid, just because my paper has been cut in the wrong manner. I’ve endured seeing his gloomy and quite devilish eyes as I made my way throughout the 20 steps of Binding a damn book. For the record, why do I have to do this? I am not supposed to this, nor did I ever imagine myself doing this. Why on earth are we doing this kind of thing? Aren’t we supposed to be more focus on stuff that would really matter in archives (ehem, Digitization) rather than preserving so many books (upon reading some of them, they were really trashy as hell, as if they weren’t appraised by someone or were appraised but didn’t know what appraisal is) that are going to occupy the near-full University Archives. I understand it’s because they want us to teach the conventional way but come on. let’s face the fact that digital world is upon us and usage of physical materials (such as books) are on it’s way down. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just really frustrated with that old guy in the bindery that’s why I am uttering these words. Nevertheless, I forgave him already and at the back of my head, I just want the bindery part of my OJT to be finished as soon as possible. See you journal!

Hey there journal! Things have gotten a little harder this time. Our section head, Ma’am Judith wants us to finish the entire shelving of the materials tomorrow, until noon. Wow ma’am, what do you think are we? Robots? We can’t process the entire shelving and inventory with a very limited timeframe, in addition, I am the one leading in terms of the material being put in the inventory, Sam and Tricia are lagging behind me. I told them to move quickly as possible but they were really keen on understanding every bit of information in the material, savoring whatever articles they might find amusing. I can’t help but think that in these times, us, prospective information professionals, are being challenged with very strict time frames. As such, we are encouraged to make the most of our time properly and to appropriate tasks accordingly in the quickest but the most effective way possible else we’re going to suffer consequences. I hardly think that they’re going to teach us that easily considering the amount of workload that they’re doing. I just hope that my classmates are going to learn that as well. Well, that’s it for today journal! See you tomorrow!

Yikes! After spending 30 hours inside the hell named Cataloging, We’ve finally started our next station, the Indexing and Serials Section. I can’t help but smile as I write this down because the people there are much kinder and more accomodating compared to those from the cataloging section. They didn’t let me down unlike those from the which-must-not-be-named section. Ma’am Judith explained to us that Serials section was a merge or a convergence of three former sections of the  Main Library namely the Foreign Serials Section, the Filipiniana Serials Section and the Indexing and Abstracting Section. She also told us that in this section we aren’t supposed to index all 25 hours, instead, we will be taking up shelving, inventory, analysis and so much more. She told us that it would be quite boring if we’re going to be subjected in that method alone, therefore she wanted us to explore other stuff that we can do inside the Serials Section. Oh, by the way, as we bid our goodbyes with the Cataloging Section, they gave us 14 thesis titles and asked us to check if there were any existing records in iLib, out of those 14 we got 12 with existing records, 1 with an outdated record and 1 with no records at all. We’re faced with MARC21 but it was quite easy if you get the hang of it. Hopefully, we’re both correct with what we did earlier. I guess that’s it for this day journal, see you again tomorrow!

Ayoko na pows.

Hi there journal! Well, we still haven’t finished the filing yet. What should we expect? There’s just too many of them and we lost a member in our group (Tricia is currently assisting in KOHACON along with some SLIS people) today. Well to be honest, we could have done it today or at least finished it but sadly we couldn’t. Apart from that, catalogers in the Cataloging section seems to be missing in action for me. They weren’t there when I was supposed to ask on our next task. I also saw one of them calling a friend and speaking so loud that we could actually hear that they were fighting. None of them actually cared or actually noticed us except for a woman who asked us about our work. Again, what should we expect? Ma'am Annie’s our supervisor and she’s away. No one seems to bother themselves with us while we were exhausting ourselves with the tons of catalog cards needed to be shelflisted as soon as possible and there’s no sign of them giving us the real deal of cataloging...very disappointing. I was expecting that it’ll be today but, well, who knows.I don’t want to get my hopes high again for this section, it’ll just continue to disappoint me I just hope that everything will be different for this section tomorrow though, for a change. I don’t want this scenario to happen again, especially to the next batch of interns in that section. I guess that’s it for today, Journal, see you again tomorrow!

Suko na kami, bes.