Sep 06
14
Got organization?
One of my (many) great coworkers in the library technology department this afternoon made a hilarious comment that got me thinking. He said that as a student who worked for our department many years ago he never ceased to be amazed by how messy librarians can be. One of the jobs of the student workers, a class of employee I also participated in, is to troubleshoot staff computers in-person. It actually can be a rather intimate experience since you need to go into a person’s office and quite literally “get all up in their junk.”
For a profession based in large part on its ability to organize information many of us would not pass an elementary cataloging class if our MARC records looked like our desks. Is the ability to organize millions of bibliographic records and coordinate all sorts of different electronic resources and reference services based in an organizational mind? I am not so sure that a passion for the information profession necessarily equates to an organizational discipline that it would seem to imply.
What do you other circulators think? How much organization exists in your personal sphere and how does it relate to what you do? I, for one, go through an ebb and flow (accumulate and purge?) based on the gravitation pull of the moon on sticky notes and random meeting notes I rarely look at again.