Week 6 lesson

I know I have been calling them 'week' for the lessons but I should have been calling them lessons... so lesson 6.

This lesson was all about creating a MARC for a book of our choice. However, in order to do this, we had to learn all about MARC. Just when I think I know it all, I am totally surprised and pleasantly surprised. The MARC tab has been on my Follett system all this time and I have never used it. I have seen it a couple times here and there. Saw some of the info on it, but it looked to hard to read, so I would stick with the "title details"section. I am very happy to have learned all about what MARC is. With almost every lesson in the core courses of the UBC library diploma I feel I become a more competent librarian. After creating my own MARC for a Vampire Plagues book (that I plan to read next for my students) I looked ahead to the coming weeks of what is coming up and I did not feel to worried about assignment #2 anymore as this week's lesson has given me the knowledge and skills to make that assignment possible. So often the new TLs (including me) are so worried about only promoting literature and it isn't until you have been teaching for a few years that you learn about all these other important aspects of the job. Last summer in taking Libr 462 we spent a little time on weeding and had to weed some in your library for experience. That is when I realized how poor my non-fiction section really was and this past month I weeded 1500 books from the collection. So I'm looking forward to how knowing more about MARC and other skills I'm learning in this class will help improve my skills as a TL.

The actual creation of the MARC was not a hard one or tedious (even though I got some things wrong - it was a good learning experience) and.... it is probably not my type of work, however I can understand why it is important that we know this and see how it can be used. It is a system that is used all over and it is important to recognize this. It also gave me a much much higher appreation for what the head librarians do for me. I am already so thankful for how much they help me as is, but now I can understand their job so much better.