???

The first book I picked up at work this morning gave me a bit of a shock.



How was I supposed to classify that? Some years ago, I learned the Cyrillic alphabet (a long story), so I tried to sound it out. "Snekmro-phomo-memrucheskee camalog zvezd." No help there.

I tried looking inside.


"Spektro-photo-metreecheskee catalog zvezd." Spectro-photometric Catalogue Something-or-other. OK, so catalogues go under "Table and Data Books" - 522.0212. So far so good. But putting it in the database was going to be slow going. I didn't have a Cyrillic keyboard. All I could think of was to use the word processor to "insert symbol" one letter at a time, and then cut and paste.

And then I tried the next page:

Duh!

I think tomorrow I might have a coffee before I start putting books in the database.

The Temporary Librarian

I'm shattered, even though I've only been at work for three days now. Less than that actually. At midday yesterday my son had to be collected from school with flu, so that was the end of work for Thursday, and I was late in this morning because I had to wait for my friends to arrive to look after the poor kid, so I worked until 7 pm to compensate. So far all I've done is to put the books on the shelves back in order and check about a third of them against the printout from the database. It's frustrating. I keep seeing fascinating books like, "Where are all the aliens?" and "The nerd's revenge," and I don't have time to read any of them.

Once I've finished checking the existing library, I'll be adding the books in this pile, plus the ones behind the camera. I think there's somewhere between 2-3000 of them altogether, which should keep me out of mischief for a bit.