Arnie Sheinfeld

I've been at the MIT Libraries and in Serials Cataloging (Sercat) since I was a young lad! I had just turned 24, and was two years out of college (UMASS/Boston, 1975, BA in English). While in college, I worked part-time during the school year and full-time during the summer at a bank doing data entry and assorted behind the scenes banking activities. This experience "propelled" me into a full-time job with the bank which lasted for two years. In October of 1976, I was working on Halloween day when the branch bank was robbed! This episode in and of itself could take up a few paragraphs! Upon leaving the bank in the summer of 1977, I worked for a temp agency in Boston, and one of those temp jobs landed me at MIT, doing some research and data entry on fluidized bed combustion for two grad students in the 1977 version of the Energy Lab.

One day I picked up an issue of TechTalk, and started to peruse the job ads. I was geared towards any editorial, writing or non-scientific jobs that would go along with my interests, and I got a few interviews with the Libraries, ultimately being hired as the "S & J Editor", which stood for Serials & Journals in the MIT Libaries. This publication was Sercat's union list (a list of all serials and journals held at the MIT Libraries, basically containing the title, call number(s), location(s), and holdings for the entry. This union list ran concurrently with the Boston Library Consortium's (BLC) Union List, and MIT's data was included in the BLC Union List, as well as in the aforementioned in-house publication. Back in 1977, there were no computers as we know them today, and my data entry occurred on a Multics machine, where the phone headset was inserted into the phone "receptacle", and once the dial-up connection was made, I took the 3x5 catalog cards and retyped the necessary information into the machine. I remember that we had reams of thermal paper that were used for this machine, and I think I spent more time unraveling these rolls than I did on inputting the data! For a time in the early '80's, I was farmed out to the BLC office at the Boston Public Library (BPL) where I used their phone line and hookups, as the phone company could not hard wire 14E for the connection that was needed to connect to a new vendor. Looking back, I think that traveling from MIT to the BPL got me prepared 25 years later to travel from 14E to the Library Storage Annex (LSA)!

So, how did I become a serials cataloger you may ask? Well, quite by accident actually! Inputting all the data from the catalog cards familiarized me with basic serials' concepts, e.g. corporate bodies, title main entry, title changes, holdings, call numbers, etc., and when the wind was blowing for the demise of the Union List (due to budget constraints, and new technologies), a very savvy supervisor told me that I should get trained to catalog serials, if for nothing else job security! So, through a bit of osmosis, and excellent training, I became a serials copy cataloger, and I've been cataloging serials into my 31st year here at MIT!

What's changed in the cataloging processes in 30+ years? That will be my next wiki addition.