Rhythmus and blues

This is another boring post about Being a Librarian, so you might just wanna move on to the next blog in your list.

Ok, I specialize in music and my primary secondary language is German. So apart from doing scores, they send me music books in German (and English) to do original cataloging. They say I'll get other stuff later, but for now I should stick with what I know (German (and English)) since I'm a new cataloger. Ok, whatever, thanks for your good faith. Well it turns out they have a point, and the reason I know they have a point is because I've been totally over my head when it comes to original cataloging of books. This is because a) I have not cataloged a book in like a zillion (that's one with a zillion zeros) years, not since my intro to cataloging class in library school, and there I wasn't even doing it alone. Also b) despite what they said, not a single book I have gotten has been in German. Or English.

I'm not sure who's in charge of sorting all this shit out, but somebody needs a crash course in What Is Not German. For starters, here's a handy quick reference guide:

The Following are NOT German:

• Dutch


• Danish


• Finnish


• Czech


• and especially


• Swedish

And yet, I have accumulated 12 books in these languages that are stowed away in a secret place because I don't really fancy going up to my boss and saying "I'm too stupid to do these." I mean, I may be good at music, but that doesn't mean I can tell you what these crazy books are about. One has a violin on the cover. One has the word "Finnish" in real big letters. That is the only word in English, the rest is in (wonders behold!) Finnish.

So today when I received a book in German titled "Rhythmus", I was totally excited to be able to do something right for a change. It's a collection of essays. Ok, great, essays about rhythm, this is easy! So I read the back of the book and discover, much to my dismay, how much different German is from Smart People German (Smartpeopledeutsch). "What are these words???" Every word was hyphenated because it took up more than one line, and none of them were or contained "Musik" or "Komponist" or "Theorie" or anything. I saw "Kunst", which was kinda ok because it means Art.... and something that looked suspiciously like Krebs Cycle, which certainly didn't belong. Certainly, right?

Well, it turns out it was Krebs Cycle. I went back and focused more, and I did better this time. The back of the book translated essentially to: "There's rhythm in everything! So this is a book about everything! Nobody else has cataloged it, so I guess it sucks to be you, ha ha! You should have studied harder in German 203 and not quit like a quitter. Ach!"

So basically, I looked at all the little essays inside. There were some about music, specifically rhythm in music. So I used that as a subject heading. I saw one on Paul Klee, so I found a heading about rhythm in art, which redirected me to Composition (Art). I was like "Great, that makes me look kinda smart. I was afraid all my headings would have 'rhythm' in them and everyone would know that an ignorant loser cataloged this book." Then I saw in the book what looked like "Circadian rhythm" and a couple essays with diagrams of light spectrums, so I decided to go with a general "biological rhythm" type heading. One said "Mesopotamia" in it. I pretended not to see that one. One section of one essay was about day and night, so I decided to round it out with "Cycles", which it seems is a subject heading. And then I threw in "Rhythm" for good measure. It put that one on top.

Then I looked at my record and thought "Hey, this looks super good! I really, nobody's REALLY going to know if I completely screwed this up, I bet librarians bullshit knowledge all the time!" Nevertheless, I opted not to update the record on OCLC (the big ol' database every library ever uses) and just put it into our own. So that's what I did.

All in all, I felt good about how it turned out. I picked up the book and started taking it to where it needs to go to be bound, feeling light and happy with a sense of accomplishment. I felt empowered. Then I dropped the book and accidentally stepped on it and bent the cover and kinda tore the title page and all my good feelings went away, but whatever, nobody will know it was me.