Monday, August 13, 2012

So Perhaps I Should Not Have Chuckled

Top of the evening all...

Several years back, I stifled what would have been an inappropriate chuckle.  It seems that one of my bosses had majored in library science during his university years.  It hardly seemed like a hard subject.  I was wrong.

Fast forward to this summer...

Jennifer and I are up at Camp Ramah.  Normally we come up to teach.  They asked us to do something different this summer.  No one has organized the library in a couple of years.

I am no longer chuckling.

We have put in two days of work.  We still have at least one more to go.  It is a great deal of lifting.  the summer has been dry.  There is thus a layer of dust on all of the books and on all of the shelves.  We have been wiping everything down and re-shelving books.

There are challenges.  We found a book about Golda Meir.  Should that go under biographies, under a section on famous Jewish women, or under Israel?  That type of question has come up more than once. We have been getting help from a camper.  He has his own ideas as to how things should be organized.  His ideas are good, but we can only have one method going at a time.  He has somewhat accepted that we are in charge.

It is interesting bringing two sets of rabbinical eyes to this endeavour.  We are able to make distinctions between a regular siddur and the siddur of Sa'adya Gaon.  The regular siddur goes with all of the other siddurim.  The siddur of Sa'adya goes with the history section, as his was the first one out there.  We can also look at the writings of Nachmanides and figure out what goes in the rabbinics section and what goes with philosophy.  The last person who organized the library really did not make such distinctions.

We will likely be asked to do this again at the end of next summer.

Have a good night everyone.

R/SCG

P.S. For the non-Hebrew speakers out there, 'siddur' is 'prayerbook.'

P.P.S.  Camp is, as always, lovely.  I do not know why we send kids.  We should send kids to grandparents, and then go to camp on our own.


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