Friday, January 14, 2011

I have a new job!

Today I started my new job at the University of Florida's Auxiliary Library Facility.  I have my own desk!  So exciting!  So at my new job, I will be helping with the de-duplication project in preparation for the building of a high-density facility addition to the current Auxiliary Library Facility.  All of the eleven of the state universities of Florida will contribute books to the new facility and in order to make the most of the space, it is ideal to only have one copy of each title in the facility.  Thus, my coworker and I were hired to to pull multiple copies of a single title, determine the copyright status and condition of the item, choose which copy to keep, and make the corresponding changes to the catalog (ALEPH).  If an item is out of copyright, we also check to see if it has already been digitized by either Internet Archive or Hathi Trust.  If it has not been digitized by either, we also choose a copy to be scanned (assuming there are at least two copies: one to keep and one to scan).  The majority of the items in the Auxiliary Library Facility are Dewey Decimal Classification and my boss started me off in the 300s.  I just missed the 200s (religion)!  Probably for the best.  I am looking forward to the marriage and sexuality sections of the 300s and the fairy tales in the 390s.