One more painstaking burrower joining the ranks

To start out, I will confess that I have been a blogger-wannabe since I started library school one semester ago. I have been shamelessly soaking up the insights of countless librarian and library-loving bloggers and contributing nary so much as a comment in return.

Lucky for me the library blogging community seems to be a welcoming and optimistic one, so that even a second semester MLIS student such as myself might find a small corner to share.

My other grand confession is that the main thing holding me back has been the lack of what I considered a worthy title. Having tossed out suggestions from co-sub-sub’s such as “Shelf Reading ‘Till My Eyes Bleed” and “The Gnomes Stole My Truck,” I turned to Melville, who supplied us with one of the humblest specimens of a librarian ever to roam the stacks: the Sub-Sub-Librarian who:

appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane (Moby Dick, “Extracts,” p. 2)

Yes, that’s what I hope to be–an apprentice to the timeless art of digging and collecting and hoping that I am helpful to someone somewhere in time. Without the Sub-Sub, there would be no “Extracts” and “Cetology” might have been a whole lot harder too. All these invisible hours of work add up, right? Of course, Melville goes on to make it clear that he feels the Sub-Sub has a pretty sad lot in life:

Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless!

Yeah, some days that sounds about right too. From the little I already know about librarianship, it seems like most days it’s tough to draw the lines between passion, professionalism, and manual labor.

So as I learn, I accept my role as Sub-Sub-Librarian and embrace the work at hand. This blog will be my digging into the life I hope to enter.

Cheers!