This Thursday, after my first week without the previous music librarian, my boss told me that I was doing great. Which was a bit of a relief, because I failed in finding a piece for the Theatre people (because it doesn't exist) and a piece for a string quartet student (because it isn't published) this week.

Oddities discovered this week include a large selection of subject heading authority files in French in the cataloge, such as Musique de piano, 2me siecle, which we also have in English ; the fact that I am starting to punctuate my sentences with MARC punctuation ; and that hotdogs roasting over a fire outside smell really, really bad.

I went to look at a place that my building manager told me about today, a bedroom, living room, and bathroom in the basement of a family home, and it was nice but it would add another 10 minutes onto my half-hour hike to work and I would really prefer to move just once and to some place where I am either sharing a kitchen with a roommate or have my own kitchen, because this whole moving into other people's spaces thing sucks. (I am currently sharing a room, and it sucks for a number of reasons, but it is very difficult to find non-staff accomodation housing out here in the summer so I am trying to not complain.) The local papers come out on Tuesday and Thursday, so I'm just going to try to be more on top of picking up those and calling the listings.

This week I decided to make use of my $12 gym membership, so I went to a yoga class that was supposed to be the easy one, according to the archivist, who does a lot of yoga classes. However, the regular instructor is on vacation and the substitute ones made it a difficult class, which meant that I couldn't raise my arms above my head for two days. I am thinking of perhaps taking up swimming instead, since I have no idea how to use any gym equipment except the treadmill and there are plenty of nice outdoor places to run here, and all the other classes take place while I am working.

One of the churches in town was having a yard sale this weekend, so I went by on Friday and picked up a bunch of cutlery, a nice chopping knife, a plate, a set of interlocking cookie cutters like my Mom has, and an old mixer. It is not big or pretty like those Kitchenaid ones that come in awesome colours, but it works and only cost $10, so I am excited. I will be making cookies later tonight, mostly just to use it.

I have been making frequent use of the public library here, going two or three times a week, just browsing and picking up anything, really. I read A Complicated Kindness last week, which was weirder than I was expecting ; I have been working my way through The Rest is Noise for three weeks now, and it's fantastic, well-written, and it makes me want to listen to everything he's writing about, which slows down the reading process ; I read Where Is Here?, which is all about how Canada was shaped by maps ; I am currently in the middle of Dead Souls, which is weird but not as weird as other Russian novels, and David Sedaris' latest, which I bought, as the library's copy had an extensive hold wait list. It's well worth the purchase, though, especially the section about Japan. The public library has a good display of new and recommended books, so I've mostly been going for those. Last summer I read all of Anthony Trollope's Palliser series, so I feel like I should find something equally substantial (in terms of volume) to work through, but I refuse to delve into the mysteries section of the library and most other non-YA books are not written in series, so perhaps I'll just pick up War and Peace.

I've been here for a week and am only now uploading my pictures from Scotland from mid-May, along with the pictures I've taken since (not much, primarily very non-dangerous wildlife). All of those can be seen on Flickr - Scotland and Banff.

The whole idea behind this blog thing is to tell all my friends and classmates how awesome having a real library job is. And it really is awesome. I have learned a lot in the past almost two weeks of work, stuff that we didn't really learn in library school as well as that which we did but I have forgotten. For example, what all those MARC tags are for. Fortunately the ILS we use (Horizon) tells you basically what the field means when you click on it, but it took me until about Wednesday to get all the 700's right- 700, 701, and 702 are all different kinds of personal names here - because all Horizon says is "Personal name."

Of interest to only the library school nerds, whoever first started the catalogue here made very peculiar decisions regarding uniform titles (which are used for how many things?). Anyway, this guy decided to put the uniform title (Quartets, strings, in E minor, for example) as the 505 and the actual title taken from the item as a 740. This is not a problem for the end user, as both fields get searched under a title search, but it makes the records look a little sloppy.

The authority files are also a bit of a mess. Of the personal name files, some have dates in the d subfield, some have dates in the a subfield, some have periods at the end, some have misspellings, and some are fine. But the subject heading authority files are even worse. Most only have one item attached to them. In some places this is correct, as the library tries to have a very diverse and unusual collection because people come to the Centre to find something new and exciting so unique items are good, but for many other items it is simply unneccessary - do we really need Piano music, Piano music (solo) and Music for piano? Part of my job, probably in the fall and winter when stuff slows down here, will be to go through and clean all that up.

On the non-library side, the town is really nice. Or rather, the area around the town is amazing. The town itself is small and consists primarily of souvenir stores, all of which sell the same things; sports stores, all of which sell the same things; overpriced restaurants; and lots of hotels and tourists. The mountains, however, are impressive and there's trees all over and a river that runs through the middle of town. I have to cross the bridge over the river to get to work, then go up around the graveyard and along a trail where I have seen deer, ground squirrels and a coyote, to get to work.

Last week I went for a walk out to Bow Falls, which turned out to be more like rapids than an actual water fall. Apparently several movies have used that particular rapids, including (I think) Lassie. I haven't seen a whole lot of nature adventure/disaster movies but the informative plaque explaining about all this was clearly meant to impress people.

This afternoon I went up to the Banff Hot Springs, expecting them to be, say, natural pools of warm water. It was a nice trail up, but it turned out that the natural part of the springs was mostly just a few pools between little falls down the mountain, while the Hot Springs that people can visit and go in is actually a very modern swimming pool into which they presumably pipe the water. You can't even tell that it is naturally warm water, as they filter it so it gets that nice clean swimming pool look. According to the signs that I passed around that area there is another set of springs called the Middle Springs, but they were another 3k away and I was hungry so I will go check those out some other time.