Week 3 & 4 in the Library

I had a crisis of confidence… sniff…

I sometimes feel like I can’t catalogue. Every time I assign a number and then see that some other librarian has already assigned a number, and I just didn’t see it, and it’s different to mine, I feel like my cataloguing is bad and wrong. I plodded along today, writing little sticky call number labels, and sticking them on to book after book and I thought oh no… this is awful… what am I doing here? How long will this take me???

And then, everything changed.

A shy little Year 9 came along, and began to stare. So I started a monologue like a cooking program: “Right, so now I take the book from this pile, and I open it to the first page, where I’ve already written the call number, see? And then, here, I copy it onto one of these sticky labels, and I stick it on the book. Watch closely, as I take the next book and repeat the process…” Well, if the little kid wasn’t enthralled! And he got his shy little friend to come and watch too. And eventually the whole class came over.

“So… you guys want to try?”

They sure did. They started a little assembly line until all the books I’d already assigned numbers to had a little sticky label stuck on, written in cute little Year 9 handwriting.

“Finished! No more books, Miss.”

Hmm, I thought. Should I let them assign the numbers, then? I mean it’s not like they have to know how to build a Dewey number really, because we’re using Paula Jones’ Dewey Guide. They just have to decide what the book is about, and learn how to use the thesaurus, which they’ll need to know anyway in order to find the books. They would learn all this in the library classes I’ll start teaching in a few weeks, of course, but library classes generally require a LIBRARY first.

So it began. The kids talked about the books. They tried to figure out what kind of a book they had in their hands, and what it might be about. I gave them a few pointers, and a few clues when they didn’t know the words (words like “verse” and “prose” instead of poetry – English is their third language, or fourth if their parents speak French). I told them little stories about all the books that seemed interesting to me (and probably bored them to death: “Oooh, this one is about Kay Cottee! Have you heard of her? Oh, she’s amazing, she sailed around the world by herself…” “Oh, you’ll like this one – ALIVE! – It’s these soccer players who had to eat each other to survive in the Andes!”).

They raced each other to find the last name of the author to complete the call number (and hit each other over the head when I told them they’d accidentally chosen the name of the illustrator instead). We continued all day until 4:30, when I called a halt to the proceedings. But the kids wanted me to stay and “storian” (story on).

So I stayed. Then I got different kinds of reference questions:

What’s your boyfriend’s name? (Well, he’s not my boyfriend so much as, err…)
Who is Cameron Diaz dating now? (I think it might be John Meyer. It’s not Justin Timberlake, is it? Umm…)
Do you like Halle Berry? (Sure, Catwoman was cool. She ate a lot of tuna, hey?)
Which famous Australia soccer players do you know? (I can’t think of any, but I remember liking Ronaldo in Brazil, is he still around?)
You know Nicole Kidman, right? Are you related to her? (Yeah, she’s famous, but we’re not related. Australia’s kind of big, y’know…)

Finally, they wrote a list of things they would really like in their library. I didn’t help them with it, I merely said, “Yeah, that’s cool. Keep going!”

I will copy it out below, exactly as it appears (but with a few translations in brackets):

Books that we would like to pay [buy]
1. Bob Marly
2. Drugs
3. AIDS
4. Pollution
5. Dating
6. Music
7. Sports – Soccer
8. Soccer stars: Beckham, Ronaldo, Zidane, Christianto Ronaldo, Raul, Bartes
9. Karate
10. Climate change
11. Customs storys of Vanuatu
12. Forest
13. Customs and culture of Vanuatu
14. Harry Potter
15. Vampire
16. Macgasines [magazines]
17. Maleria
18. Smoking
19. Cartoons – Superman, Spidermans, Tom, Jerry [Comics]
20. Basketball stars
21. Rugby stars
22. The lords of ring
23. Rustling [Wrestling]
24. Charly and the chocolate factory
25. World map poster
26. Chiris Brown [Chris Brown]
27. Inspector Rex
28. Harry Potter
29. Rihana the singer from USA
30. High School Musical
31. European union
32. Rohald Dall
33. Stewart Little
34. The lion king
35. Fairy tales
36. The Twiches [I believe she meant The Twits, but I could be wrong]
37. Sweet Valley High
38. Goose Bums

(The last one is my favourite!!!)

Notice that Harry Potter got on there twice? These kids must be the only ones in the world who haven’t read that junk. Surely someone has a spare copy to send over? OR to save on postage, start collecting books now and I’ll grab them from you when I come home for a visit on May 30th for a week.

Book of the week:
One Muff Too Tough
(The history of an important Meat Workers’ Union strike in New Zealand!)