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.