2005-04-20 - 1:27 p.m.

If I say I'm a "library assistant", people don't know what I do (actually, if I say I'm a "librarian", most people don't know what I do). Therefore, I've decided to give myself new job titles based on who my mail is addressed to. So far, I'm the Head of the Serials Department (we don't have one of those, and I'm the only one who works with serials, so it's fairly valid), the Librarian (ook)and the "VP/Dir. Multicultural Marketing".

One of the things I do is order and recieve new books and provide preliminary cataloging. Yesterday, I checked in Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars, which, of course, made me panic. BECAUSE I DON'T REMEMBER THE MEMORY WARS AND THAT MEANS THEY WOOOOOONNNNNNNN.

This was an easy book to catalog because it was already in the system and all I had to do was add a holdings record for our library (I don't do classification yet, as we've got too many books coming in at this time and receiving and paying for them is top priority). A more difficult book was Südtiroler leibgerichte , because I don't even speak German, and it's difficult to catalog a book if you can't read the publication information (which is important for some reason). This also made me panic, because babelfish says that "Südtiroler leibgerichte" translates to "Suedtiroler of body courts". And this is a recipe book. WHAT IS GOING ON HERE????

More on recipe books: From Kitchen Creations, a few kids' recipes, which have a certain Zen Koan flavor to them:

“Broccoli: You take some broccoli, cook it in a pan and eat it tomorrow.”

“Hot dogs: You need: orange stuff, it has a top; salty water; soup, you have to mix it up; gray stuff; pancakes, you have to bake them, crunch them; dry, dry bread, break it to crumbs. Then you mix it up and that makes hot dogs.”

“Bananas: 1 banana, then 2, 3, 4. Cut with a knife and hammer, then walk to the park and eat the banana.”