Early Summer Report

I’ve had a few people ask me recently “What is your internship like? How’s the new job? Do the cats still love you?”

Well, first off, my internship hasn’t started, but that will change on Wednesday of this week. Stay tuned for juicy details about sewing labels to dresses.

I have, however, been at my new job for just over a month. Since I had been working in the department already as a work-study student, there wasn’t an immediate shift in my duties. My two coworkers seemed to expect that I already knew what I was doing, which meant that I spent quite bit of time sitting around nervously and trying to look busy. It didn’t help that other library employees would come by to congratulate me on getting the job and ask if I knew that 97 people had applied. Yeah. Thanks. No pressure. But I’ve been getting more assignments and projects and now feel like I have a list of things to do when I come in to work. Some recent highlights:

• When my boss was sick I was asked to go to an important meeting in her place. I met with archivists from the New York Public Library and Parson’s to discuss collaborating on a grant project.
• A woman introduced as “the most important designer in China” came by to get a tour of our collection and donate some gorgeous books. I had the honor of standing by and smiling like an idiot.
• I made time for a last-minute researcher who was doing work for a film. She spent about 2 hours hurriedly looking through some 1870s periodicals and then rushed out to meet with her assistant. Fifteen minutes later (after I had re-shelved all the material) she came back in and announced she had just gotten a call saying they had changed the time period for the film. She said she wanted to die and wondered if there was any chance that I could pull another set of things. I was scheduled to be off work soon, so I said no.
• My boss and I took a trip to a rare book dealer to spend some of our acquisition budget. We fell in love with a hilarious a cartoon book by Yves Saint Laurent about a little girl named Lulu who runs around Paris being terrible to people.
• One of my projects is to improve the department’s online presence. If you have facebook you can check out our page here, and you can also see images from the collection on flickr. For better or worse, twitter might be next.

Now for a cat update. I wasn’t able to convince Coco sleep on my bed for long. She forgave my roommate for being out of town and moved back in with him. But now he is out of town again—this time for 10 days—so I’m working on my evil plan to steal the cats’ affections. The only problem is that the summer heat has arrived and both are shunning anything that retains heat and spend all day splayed out on the floor looking dead.*

*They aren’t dead. I poke them occasionally to check. They don't really appreciate it.