Day Two of Work Placement

Today seemed much longer than 6 hours - although I enjoyed every minute, it was extremely tiring. The drive home was very difficult, particularly as some nitwits decided to hold up the traffic by stopping to watch the police tell off the drivers of some vehicle pulling a trailer that was literally trailing crap out of it..........thereby holding thousands of cars to ransom. For goodness sake people! I'ts a bloody Freeway, move it! After we (finally) got past it, it flowed freely, very busy, but moving. I'm not used to spending so many hours on the road any more, it's exhausting.
Working at Caval today was fabulous! I got an amazing tour around the archival sections of the facility by Eva. Carm 1 is used by the Universities to store their shared documentation, and there are 15.2 km of books, and believe me, we're talking high density people! I have never ever seen so many books in one space. You know that scene in X-Files where you see the forklift pick up the box and put it on the rack, and it looks like it goes on forever - well, that's what it was like, but choc-a-block full of BOOKS. Whew!
Carm2 is about 1/2 books, and 1/2 other stuff from private companies, some of which was pretty mind-boggling. I could have spent all day in there just looking, but no, work must be done. I learnt heaps about the climate control system, and how important it is to have the correct temperature for the books to be stored, etc. And then I spent some time with Theresa to learn about Inter Library Loans. We didn't have time for much, but I got to watch her scan some articles, helped with weighing and labelling some stuff. I even got to press the button on the scanner....looks like I'll be doing some more of that tomorrow, as well as spending some more time with Emily in the digitising room, so that will be pretty cool. Well, warm, really, it's quite warm in there. I'd love to spend more time in the Carm sections......but Eva and Cathie both said they may have some Excel stuff I can help with at some point.
It was nice to be there, but it was really nice to get home. So tiring!
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