"What's working at the American Library like?" you way ask. Well, I'm here to tell you, as I sit here waiting for the lunch hour to roll around and giving myself a break from the database searching that makes up 95% of my day.
Ooops. I guess I spilled the beans. Yes, 95% of the work I do here at the American Library is of questionable legality. Essentially I am the conduit they use to assess scholarly articles through the many services Princeton subscribes to, which I can access through a proxy server. Now, I like searching JSTOR, ProjectMuse, ProQuest, and Wilson OmniFile as much as the next English nerd, but eight hours of it is a lot. Thus: this break I'm giving myself now.
When not ripping the University off, I make bibliographies of the books the Library has collected for the exam. Ah, the exam. I haven't explained about the exam.
The exam is the CAPES (which stands for Certificat d'Aptitude au Professorat de l'Enseignement du Second Degré), which all French people who want to be English teachers for middle school or above must take. My job is to get together study materials for three of the six new subjects on the test (of the twelve subjects, six are reused from the previous year and six are brand new). My subjects are: 1) Lolita: the Nabokov novel and the Kubrick film, 2) Endgame by Samuel Beckett, 3) The South after the Civil War from Reconstruction to re-segregation (1865-1896). Princetern F, my colleague, is in charge of Emily Dickinson, The Federalist Papers, and Roderick Ransom by Tobias Smollett.
I got to pick my topics first because I arrived a week before she did. I hope she never finds out. ;)
Apparently people studying for this exam come from all over France to see what we put together for them in the library, so it's a really interesting and important job; it's just too bad it can be so mind-numbingly dull.
My boss, the reference librarian, is really nice, and about a foot shorter than me. This was the case with BossLady last summer, too. It's really difficult when your boss is that much shorter than you, since whenever you walk up to them with a question it's as if you're imposing on them. Which is not the case at all.
Of the other people who work in the library (minus Princetern F who arrived yesterday and of whom I have yet to form an opinion), the other reference librarian scares me, even though I suspect he is a really nice old French man, and the circulation desk woman is awesome. She thought I was a librarian from the states on my first day, and I felt sad when I had to correct her and say, no, I'm just a rising Junior(!). We have a nice, smiling "Good morning!" and "See you tomorrow!" relationship.
As the summer progresses, I'll have more insight into whether I prefer this kind of work (not that hard, slow paced, straightforward, a little boring) to the work I did last summer (lots of little tasks which were fairly easy but had the potential to be confusing, sharp learning curve on the way things were run, overworked and underpaid, great experiences) or not.
For now let me just say: I'm never working somewhere this beautiful again. It is ridiculously depressing to sit inside for eight hours a day when I could be wandering around Paris.