Anyway, I had a new task when I arrived at Oddball on Wednesday: putting things away. It wasn't a "Clean up your toys when you're done with them!" kinda thing, because I'd been instructed the last couple times to put the film cans in the "Films to be put back on shelves" bin when done with them. And now I was going to be learning another thing.
It took up the better part of the morning, and included wrestling with my nemeses, the hair dryers. But it also meant that I got to discover new parts of the building, such as the video archive.
A room full of videotapes, the likes of which I have not seen since the Video Zone in the late 1980s. The Video Zone was a local chain of video stores in Fresno which most of my immediate family worked for in one capacity or another, and I've always traced my encyclopedic knowledge of movies to doing inventory at the Shaw and Marks location in the early 1990s. Granted, I also went on to read a lot of film history and reference books (and they're still my favorite leisure reading), but it all started by being immersed in video boxes.
Oddball's Video Archive reminds me in particular of the original Video Zone location, back when the tapes were kept in a room behind the counter rather than inside the boxes on the shelves. Here's my brother Barefoot in the back room, in 1986:
If not for Barefoot -- who, in the above picture, is 16 years younger than I am right now, which messes with my head something fierce -- getting that job and becoming the manager in short order, I probably wouldn't be interning at Oddball, and my family would look a lot different right now.
The Video Archive was easy enough to get to, but other parts, not so much. Shelf 21 proved to be especially tricky:
I'm the first to admit that I'm not the best with maps, but the only way I could figure to get to it involved walking through a door with a sign saying "Do Not Disturb," and I sure as hell wasn't going to be the person who ignored signs like that. I did try to open a door nearby that had no sign on it at all, and, to make a long story short, that door shoulda had the sign. My supervisor confirmed that reaching Shelves 20 through 28 did involve going through the forbidden door. Meep! Interning is not for the faint of heart.
I did take some pictures of the mysterious shelves, but since they're not visible to the public, I've figured it for the best not to post them here.
I did come across this in one of the non-forbidden areas:
I watched dozens of movies over the years courtesy of that reel. You are missed, Red Vic.
Anyway, after all the things were put away, I returned to my primary goal of logging films. There's a certain batch of about 80 that I've been assigned to do, but they're spread out amongst different shelves, so I've decided to further streamline the process by doing all the ones on a given, easy-to-reach shelf first. To that end, I collected all the cans from shelf 4P, which didn't require any ladders or moving of big wobbly objects to get to.
I won't get to most of them until next Wednesday, of course, but that's okay, and my supervisor said that he understands I may not be able to get to every video in that batch of ~80, and that it's just the tip of the big ol' iceberg of stuff that needs to be processed. That's part of the reality of the archiving world: too much stuff, too little time, and only a small percentage of it will ever be gotten to.
So, if nothing else, it means there's plenty of work out there, that I'm getting experience and developing skillsets that are applicable to things that need to be done. Whether those institutions and companies have the money to pay me and all the other hungry little MLIS grads out there is another matter entirely, and one that I cannot let myself worry too much about right now.
Also, in 1969, certain countdowns were trying desperately to be hip.
That'll come in handy some day.
