my old jobs

I don't think I have said much about my jobs. Since I'm retired not (one year and one month!), I don't have much to do with them.

I got a master's in library science in 1984 and went to work for the H Public Library main location in the Business, Science & Technology (BST) area. I worked there for a couple of years and then made a brief foray out into the business world as a librarian at Pt Marwk. They then promptly disbanded their library (I hated the job anyway) and went back to HPL as the assistant manager of BST. This created a lot of bad feelings in the department since many much more qualified people applied for the job. There was some objection to all of them tho. One had made no secret of the fact that she was about to retire to NJ, one was a very good librarian but had the reputation of being kind of lazy, one was fairly sick (died a few years later), and one was buddy-buddy with the "witch" of the department. So I muddled thru and finally won the respect of most of the people by being very fair and not encroaching into their particular areas of expertise.

A lot of my time was taken up with scheduling 15+ people everyday for time working at the reference desk. The worst part was scheduling Sundays and no one was ever satisfied.

The part I liked best was collection development. During my 12 years there, I had 2 collection development areas. Both of them were very complicated since they involved both the business and the science departments, so it was like having 2 CD areas instead of one!

The first was Transportation. Oh, and keep in mind that this was pre-internet!! so everything had to be found in books or journal articles!!! Transportation in the science department meant everthing to do with cars, planes, boats, motorcyles, ships, railroads, etc. (except "how to" which was in the Fine Arts dept.) Blue Book values!! Indentification of cars!! Fixing cars (omg, Chiltons)!! Boat motor repair!! Driving test booklets!! In the business dept, it involved, of course, the business and history of transportation and a lot about ocean transportation of goods - shipping.

The second area of CD I had was Energy. Needless to say, for Huston, this was a massive undertaking since we had to have a comprehensive collection. For science, we had everything about geology. Geology is the most highly documented area there is. We had an immense collection with many series that had to be kept up-to-date plus an old donated collection that was falling apart but was not supposed to ever be weeded. My boss and I finally did weed it and I bought achieval-type boxes and paper to neaten it up and keep it as safe as possible. Aother problem with this collection was that it was not in the electronic catalog. It was in the card catalog though (we were in the process at some point of switching from the card catalog to a CD-ROM-type of thing which was horrible - one long tape inside that you had to scroll thru). So we laboriously pulled all the cards and kept them in an alcove as the means to finding things in this collection Unbeknowst to us, however, one of the street people was pulling the cards out and using them as scratch paper!! So much for that!!

In business, the Energy collection included all the directories of oil companies, and the STATISTICS for oil and gas. Let us just say that it was hard work but I loved it for some reason.

Another thing we did a lot of was stock quotes. Before the internet, how would you have found a stock quote for any particular date? hehe, we had a set of books that helped but a lot of WSJ on microfilm was used. Ugh! And oil companies are notorious for merging and changing names. There were books to find out about that also.

A couple of science reference questions that stand out in my mind:

What color is the equator? (came from a grown woman) after much discussion about how the equator is an IMAGINARY LINE, ended up with, "okay, you can think of it as green over the land and blue over the ocean)

What is the "angle of repose" for a pile of crushed cement? hehehehehehe (found it btw)

Besides working in BST, we all had turns working in "Telephone Reference". This was a separate area that up to 7 people could work in at once and had a "ready reference" collection designed to answer all general questions. If questions could not be answered with that collection, the call was transferred to the subject department.

Add to all this, various committees, conferences, and general goofing off (not much really) and you have the picture. I mostly liked being on committees. For one, you were off the reference desk. Second, I quickly found out that I would have a "vision" of how I thought things should be for any given situation and most people would not volunteer their thoughts so the one who did usually had their way!! I do have to say though, that HPL is notorious for forming a committee for something they actually had no intention of doing. So the several committees on "selling the business department's services to the business community" never amounted to anything which was extremely frustrating, especially when there were so many documented accounts of other libraries across the country that were actually implementing this idea. So many conferences attended with this idea in mind, so many reports written up which were ignored - sigh. I don't care any more though so HAHAHAHAHAHA.

In 1998, we moved to Venezuela due to OH's job. When I came back, I worked as a temp for about 2 months for J, an investment bank, putting a ton of documents into an in-house database. The I worked for 6 months at Ricaroni University in a 2 person department that did paid research for businesses - mostly on DIALOG, a collection of fee-based databases. I did not like the commute and so quit, especially as they really wanted someone who knew chemistry and I knew virtually nothing about chemistry and the databases for chemistry are very complicated and specialized.

I then went to work at J for good as their librarian and loved loved loved the job for 5 years, then got tired of it. The last year I was there, OH had retired and was lolling around at home and I was supremely jealous. I have to say that I was very suited for this job since they did almost all energy-or transportation- related deals in Huston. I did have to help out the other offices with other industry deals but a lot of the information was obtained the same way and the actual industry didn't matter.

Factset, SDC, Investext, Factiva, Bloomberg, Disclosure - goodby!!!