In my effort to suck up as much information I can about librarianship I picked up This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson.
In the “What’s Worth Saving” chapter the author talks about Toni Morrison’s house fire back in 1993 and the buzz about what would happen to her papers. Papers? Does that entail type written drafts of The Bluest Eye, post-it notes on research she did for A Mercy, and printed emails to Oprah about the movie version of Beloved? I’m curious.
Toni Morrison’s manuscripts must be an archivist’s dream, but it might be just as interesting to archive lesser known writers.
A fun fact from the this chapter was a warning from Sue Hamburger that authors should use a high quality archivist pen, because gel pens deteriorate.
Reading about Hamburger’s story made me think that Toni Morrison’s son should go to library school, so that he can begin the archiving process early. Who has these types of thoughts? I’m so random.
Highly Textured Librarian 
You pose a good question about the issue of “papers.” How do the current technologies influence what papers writers and others (famous or not) leave behind?
Would you recommend this book?
I would recommend it to people who want to get an idea of what librarians do.
I especially liked the part about…um…poop. Also I’d like to read more library-related blogs…so here I am. 🙂
That poop part made me nervous. Does that really happen with regularity?
Not regularly at our small town library. However, unfortunately I have had to clean up poop from a diaper “genie” that wasn’t used properly. The joys of a small town library. 🙂
If your library had been larger would you have not been required to handle the genie?
I never finished this book. My only experience with poop has been the residue left in public restrooms. Ewww!
I can’t believe what a mess some people can make in the restroom, and yeah there have been several “poopy” situations at my branch. We’re a small branch, and maintenance only comes in part-time. Fortunately for me, it’s usually my superiors who handle the big messes. There was once though, there was only two of us working and both restrooms were icky. So I handled the women’s restroom and my male co-worker handled the men’s room (the men’s was worse!).
This falls under that “other duties as assigned” that they don’t tell you about. But it doesn’t happen regularly. 😉