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- From: HBLADM81%UCONNVM@PSUVM.PSU.EDU (peter allison)
- Newsgroups: bit.listserv.govdoc-l
- Subject: how others see us
- Message-ID: <GOVDOC-L%92091512155629@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
- Date: 15 Sep 92 16:14:57 GMT
- Sender: Discussion of Government Document Issues <GOVDOC-L@PSUVM.BITNET>
- Lines: 20
- Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
- Approved-By: RAED@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU
-
- ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
- In an introduction to Frances McCue's The Stenographer's Breakfast (Beacon
- 1992), fellow poet Colleen J. McElroy writes somewhat unenthusiastically
- about her "early graduate student years...as an assistant to the Government
- Documents Librarian." "The Documents room was a small space clotted ceiling
- to floor with pale brown stacks of cardboard boxes, ragged piles of pamphlets,
- reports, and booklets, hundreds of boxes of file cards, and bins of letter
- shelves--all of it coated with an almost imperceptible layer of dust.... My
- job was to file the mess before it all turned to mulch.... Each day, I coded
- parcels...under an alphabetic cross-hatch of decimals, dashes, and numbers that
- forced me to think in a language that was completely nonfunctional outside of
- the confines of the Documents room. And all of this while regular library
- traffic swirled past the door and onto brighter subjects in the seemingly
- legible languages of law, literature, biology, and social subjects.
- If I complained, the Documents librarian would say, "Don't worry.
- They have to come this way soon. We hold the key to all in this room.""
-
- Can anyone name that librarian?
- Peter Allison
- UConn, Storrs
-