New library job: The flavors of the different sections.

So, I got a part-time job at the university library pulling books from a gigantic list necessary for some  big digitization project.

It's interesting to see the flavors of the different sections.

Usually, you get a pretty good sense pretty soon of if a section is going to be difficult to work in or not.

In one section where most everything was out of order or missing, I couldn't find a title, and then it turned out to be this very very small one-by-two-inch book that was wedged up underneath some other book when I pulled it out to check its call number.

Another time in that same section, I couldn't find a book, and then when I was scanning 2 rows down for another, that book I was looking for was missing, but the other book that I had just been looking for before was right there in its place, oddly enough.

Perhaps my most memorable day was when I was double-checking the books via bar code.

When you go to a section, the call numbers look alike, so if you start checking the last three digits of the bar code numbers on the back of the books, that method tends to be faster, since the bar code numbers are all over the place and can't be confused as easily.

But, within three books of each other, I found bar codes with the same last three digits.

How often does that happen?

Given a big library, every great once in a while, I'd say.

It almost felt like Borges's "The Library of Babel".

(I know that's pretentious, but that's actually what I thought at the time.)

Also, my most moving experience was in the musical score section the other week, when I began thinking of all the music locked away and all the time that the composers had spent on it, aisle after aisle after aisle.