DAY 19: A Day At The Filipiniana

The end of our internship is almost here. I couldn’t believe that after weeks and weeks of waking up at 5AM and working for at least eight hours, all of those would soon be over. But before I get completely ahead of myself, I need to deal with the remaining three days I still have to commit to. It was a good thing we were at the Filipiniana for our final shift because it didn’t felt as difficult as the previous sections were. I honestly pity my friends who are at the cataloging for their final station. Let’s disregard them for a while as I also have things to deal with.

JULY 12, 2017 – WEDNESDAY

As the days get nearer, I become more and more excited to go to work and finish the remaining hours. Before 8AM, we were already downstairs at the Filipiniana to begin with our shift. For our very first task, we were oriented to their indexing process. It was quite easy: we were supposed to copy the cataloging details of a book and edit it to a specific format followed by adding a title of a story or a poem found inside a book, we were supposed to continue following the format, changing only the title and page numbers until all of the book contents have been indexed

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In order for us to experience all of the tasks, we were given different ones. Tricia was first to index and I resumed the searching I was doing yesterday while Edward was processing books. After the first two hours, I was done with the searching and we decided once again to switch roles. This time, I was indexing a book of poems while Tricia was processing books and Edward was shelving and shelfreading. I remember the book I was indexing, it was a book of poems made by OFWS sharing their thoughts. I became interested to read this at a later time after our shift. We decided to once again, switch roles after lunch time.

We headed back before 1PM and it turns out: I would be doing the same thing I did earlier. I would still be indexing. I was a little worried because we were assigned accession numbers to use and I was nearly exhuming mine. The book of poems takes a bit longer time to index than other works because this has numerous entries of poems. However by 2PM, I was asked to get off the computer because someone would be checking the borrowed books. I simply marked the page I had left off and went to resume my shelfreading from yesterday. This is what I had mostly done during the afternoon. It was a simple task but I have to admit, I was getting a little bit sick of it.

Hello Shelves, My Old Friend

It wasn’t what I was solely doing though. While I was shelfreading, I was also taking orders and returning books to the shelves. This went on for the rest of the day. I even remember going to the farthest end of the shelf to return a book even when it was almost 5PM and the lights at that part were already turned off. Just another fun experience to add on the journal!

That concludes our day at the Filipiniana! This means we only have one full day left at this section and a half-day shift before we complete our requirement to the Filipiniana and ultimately, the internship.

Let’s just say I can’t wait any longer!

- Sam, That New Librarian