Rosanne Lester

Well before decoding that title, I should probably write a bit of background for you…

For my summer job, I’ve been working on a project with the Lande Canadiana Collection for the McGill libraries. A year or so ago, McGill sent photocopies of the Lande Bibliography to OCLC so they could create bibliographic records for what we have in the collection. When they sent what they had done back to us, we only got about half of the 4000 or so records entered into the catalogue. Anything that McGill already had a copy of in another collection was not entered, nor was anything that OCLC could not find records for in their system (in other words, unique works). So my job has been to do all of the duplicate copies and to identify which works need completely new records. After three weeks of working solely on the computer, I finally got to go to the Rare Books Division, and look at actual books (what a concept!). What I’m doing is comparing the physical holdings to the catalogue records, because in some cases the records have mistakes on them, or are in fact for different works, but are so similar to what is in the Lande Bibliography that you can’t tell without actually looking at the book.

Anyways, to explain this post’s title… Today I was looking at a souvenir that the city of Edmonton published from when Alberta joined Confederation in 1905. The interesting part? All of the pictures of Edmonton from 100 years ago! Pictures of fabulous neo-classical architecture. The depressing part? Aside from a few notable buildings (like the Legislature and the Law Courts), I didn’t recognise any of them. So either in the 24 and a half years that I lived in Edmonton I simply missed seeing a bunch of amazing buildings… or they’ve all been knocked down. ERG! That really annoys me. These buildings were GORGEOUS. And its especially frustrating now that I’ve been living in Montreal (and visiting places like Ottawa and Quebec City). Cities that actually care about what the place looks like. Do people in the west just not care about history? Or architecture? Or aesthetics? Or maybe they just like knocking down buildings.

Oh, I also was looking through a later ’souvenier’ publication, and saw a picture of the Old Arts building on the University of Alberta campus. I barely recognised it! Guess that is what happens when the picture shows it in the middle of a field, with NO other buildings around, and minus the 90 or so years worth of trees growing in front of it!

Otherwise, I’m finding I quite like working with rare books. Definitely an area I’d consider trying to work in after my MLIS, but realistically, rare books jobs need more foreign language reading skills then I’ve got (which would be virtually none). Some of these books are pretty neat though. Today I was looking at one that had the title page and table of contents bound in between pages 10 and 11 for some reason. And it was the only copy at McGill that is like that! Lots of the books also have signatures and dedications in them. Its interesting to get to see a part of the book’s history (though deciphering some of that handwriting is hard!)

Well the re-design is going fairly well. I should (in theory) actually be able to post something up here soon that is more library-ish. I’m not too thrilled with the colours (they are really dark on some screens), so don’t be surprised if you come look at my site and its looking a bit odd while I mess around. I’m also having a few issues sorting out the photo viewer on my photography page. There are some pre-made flash viewers that you can find online, but unfortunately you can’t edit the pre-made ones to do exactly what you want. Anyone have Adobe flash editor? I don’t exactly have the $700 that the program costs just lying around. At some point I may have to stagger up the hill to the Education building and check out that fancy Mac lab they’ve got there. Maybe they have Adobe.  (For the record, SO GLAD the LIS department isn’t moving up the hill until after I graduate).  hmm.. although come to think of it, the LIS computer lab might have something I could use. Except I think its going to be closed for the rest of summer. Oh well, everything will get sorted out eventually.

Anyways, I think I’m taking the rest of the evening off. My eyes are killing me, because for the last few days I’ve been staring at a computer screen all day at work, and then coming home and staring at a computer screen here.

Well, I’m officially starting work on the re-design of my website. I decided the old one looked a little too 2003. It used frames… ack!  So time to make some changes. I also figure I’ll finally start a library blog, since I hear employers look at that sort of thing when it comes time for the job hunt. I’ve been keeping a livejournal for a few years now, but that is mostly personal stuff, like what I did over the weekend and such. So this blog will be mainly for library related topics, although I suspect I might stray into some museum/art history/anthropology posts. Librarianship is good and all, but its hard to completely switch gears out of one’s undergrad. Especially if you loved your undergrad classes as much as I did!

At this point, most of the website is still either down, or is linking to the old pages. I’m hoping I can finish changing over the page formats by the end of the week. I may end up fiddling with the colours and images yet though. We’ll see.