I always feel disoriented when I travel home from college or back again, because it's like traversing two lives in the same day. But this time it feels much worse and much more hopelessly off-balance, because now I have left every last person behind and there is no return trip to New York looming in the near or distant future. Within the span of one day, all of the basic things about my day-to-day life changed: my residence, my job, my dating status, even the weather. (The weather has been too symbolic for its own good: in the last few weeks at Colgate, the weather was unbearably hot and unusually sunny, right up until my last day there -- but then the dark clouds returned, and while the weather was warm when we departed, it became eerily chilly just as we crossed the Massachusetts border.) When I got home and emptied my pockets, all the spare change and receipts that I had picked up during the day took on different meanings. It is as though they were clearly labelled "before" and everything around me had a sign on it that said "after."

Yesterday just seems far too recent to seem so far away.

So yes -- the library project.

I have been working at the library helping to move all the books out before the massive renovation begins on June 15th. During the last school year they installed this massive robot called the LASR (library automated storage and retrieval, pronounced laser) in the back of the library, and during the renovation most of the library's books will live in it. It is essentially two three-story-high aisles of metal bins, with a crane-like machine in each aisle to retrieve the bins. So each day, we scan thousands of books into the bins so the computer knows where they are, and the cranes take them away and bring back new ones, endlessly. The day shift arrives at 8 in the morning and the night shift (mine) closes up at midnight each day, and during all the time in between the LASR goes back and forth and back and forth with its bins. I try to remember that when the machine starts behaving irrationally and throwing little robot fits. I only work for eight hours a day, and usually don't load the LASR for more than four at a stretch. Even machines like a break sometimes.

The books are stored standing up in the bins, and there are all kinds of other jobs to do to prepare them for this. There is duplicate barcoding, where we stick a new barcode on the top of the front cover of the book to make it easier for people shuffling through bins to find the book they are looking for. We have fascinating little machines that will scan the original barcode of the book and then spit out a sticker of the same barcode, except when they're feeling dyslexic and mess it up. Barcoding can be mind-numbing or interesting depending on what section of books you are working on. The great irony of working in a shut-down library for the summer is that so many books pass through your hands each day, but you're not allowed to check out any of them. (The librarians have informed me that this is the great irony of working in libraries in general -- you will never have time to read all the interesting books that cross your path.) Barcoding also makes you incredibly aware of the quirks of book titling in certain subjects. For instance, now that I have barcoded every book in the criminal justice section, I really wish I could send a memo to everyone with inclinations to publish in this subject area to inform them that it is no longer clever (and probably never was) to call your book Crime and Punishment. Likewise, for people publishing law-related books, it is no longer acceptable to use the title "______ on Trial." Too many things are on trial -- homosexuality, colonialism, your mother, you name it. The lack of creativity is astonishing.

Since the LASR bins come in different heights, the books also have to be sorted by height. For this reason I've developed the incredibly useless skill of being able to distinguish a 10" book from a 12" book from a 14" book at a glance. (It is even more useless because the books we classify as tens fall in the range of 7 3/4" to 9 3/4" high -- those that are too big to fit in an 8" bin and just small enough to fit in a 10" bin. So even if I were to attempt someday to impress someone with my knowledge of book size, the numbers I use wouldn't correspond to an actual ruler.) In some ways this height organization is confusing and scary, because all of a sudden order no longer matters. Our precious library of congress system by which we've always filed books can be tossed to the winds. The whole concept of a shelf no longer applies. This took some getting used to. Also, I feel bad for the people next summer whose project will be to get all the books out of the LASR and put them in order again. I can't even imagine how painful that will be.

Of course, the most fun job (albeit sometimes the most frustrating) is loading the LASR itself. In reality it's a fairly tedious process, like all the others. Scan book, place in bin, scan book, place in bin. But the ridiculous shortcomings of the software and mysterious and inexplicable errors make the whole thing an adventure. The machine itself is often cranky and unpredictable. Sometimes scanning a book will produce an error on the first try but scans fine the second time. Sometimes the cranes carrying the bins will jolt tempramentally into the workstations while other times it will ease in calmly. When we have been at it too long, we end up talking to it like a fussy child. I think that all the movies about machines taking over the world and making slaves of humans have it all wrong. This is truly servitude to machines -- babying them, coaxing them, your life revolving around getting them to work properly, while they infuriatingly refuse to make any sense. When one of my co-workers expressed exasperation that the LASR wouldn't scan books properly on the first try, another said to him "It just wants to make sure you know that it's in control." It is.

The most exciting errors are when you find a book that is listed as "On Search". Probably because it was misfiled on the shelves, no one has been able to find it, sometimes for decades! It is hard not to have a feeling of satisfaction at these accidental discoveries, even though it's entirely possible that as many books will be mysteriously lost in the LASR as well. The best part of this job is, once a bin is full, getting to watch the LASR take it away and bring back a new one. No matter how many times I do it, I never get tired of watching it.

But the movement of books around the library is only half of the project. Right behind us, as we clear books out of different sections, the movers come in and disassemble shelves, move boxes of books, and clear out furniture. Every day I come in and re-explore parts of the library that we had finished getting books from, and I discover a strange new Case Library, empty, and yet immense in the absence of books and shelves. Suddenly the strange arrangements of carpet and tiling are noticeable, the rooms seem larger, brighter. We keep talking about what sort of party we should throw in these new-found empty spaces.

Incidentally, next year, while the building is being renovated, the library is being relocated to two different places -- Donovan's Pub and the old ATO house. It seems that we are fusing Colgate's "work hard, play hard" culture in ways never before anticipated...

Since I will never be able to describe it properly, and since pictures are more fun anyway, I have pictures of the library project for you!

earlier -- later