Day 1 on Work Placement

SO, today I drove all the way over to Bundoora for work placement, to CAVAL, which is on the ground of Latrobe University. I was pretty lucky, the traffic wasn't too bad. It took me just under an hour - although if I'd gone the way google maps told me to go it would have taken at least another 15 minutes. Charles showed me a better way, which I'm half familiar with, so kudos to him.

It has to be one of the most interesting places I've ever visited, I'm going to try to write a little bit each day about placement, as Cathie wrote up a timetable for me, for today through to Thursday, which is really helpful. Cathie is in charge of the digitising section, she was very welcoming and helpful, and gave me the background information for the business - she's also the one who's organising for me to get together with the relevant people to show me around and give me a taste of what they do.

One of the things they do is use this amazing machine to scan books, which has adjustable clamps and a cradle (so the books don't have to be flattened - imagine if you had to flatten a really old book!) to hold them in the correct position. It has a page turner too, which can be slightly unpredictable depending on the book. Oh and the software involved - I was lucky enough to meet Emily, who is the person in charge of the machine - and she got me to QC one of the documents which had been scanned recently. Document? Well, it was nearly 200 pages, so yeah....I got to crop images, remove clamp marks, delete duplicated pages, etc.

I also got to speak with Lamis, a lovely lady in charge of the cataloguing section who is particularly involved with the LOTE section. She showed me the books with the rules in it which have to be applied in order to meet the criteria set by LOC. LOC really does rule the world! She is also in charge of the end-processing side of things, preparing books to be shelf-ready for various customers. I did this last year at protect-a-book, so at least I knew what she was talking about. I'll be spending at least a couple of days in that section, because they always can use an extra pair of hands.

Tomorrow I get to see the CARM section, where all the archives are kept. Cool!

I'm really tired, it's been a helluva long day for this old chook,

Till next time.........