There's No Such Thing As Wasted Experience

I know that this title is a potentially dangerous thing to say. This is not a justification for doing stupid things. It's a rationale for gaining a wide variety of experience. This week, my supervisor is busy with the tenure and promotion committee (she has my deepest sympathies), so I have been handed off to Craig, who works in processing. This may not seem like valuable experience for someone who wants to go into reference, but I believe it is (as does Craig, for that matter). How can you effectively find or help people find information or items if you are not familiar with how that information is organized? What's the rationale? Why is there more description for this document and less for this? Even if I never do reference in a rare books library and I get to point patrons toward more...straightforward sources, I will not regret getting to do this. And you will get to hear more about the process of processing when the week is over.

But the real reason I decided that there's not such thing as wasted experience is because of what I'm processing. Back in the '80s, there was a trial about the patents behind the Rubik's Cube. Jerry Slocum, the man with whose collection I am working, was called as an expert witness in the trial. Well, his papers contain a variety of documents from the trial, including copies of patents and patent applications. Back in the day (aka a few years ago), I spent a summer as a clerk in an intellectual property law firm where my mom works. Mostly, I scanned old case files and stored the documents in a digital database so the physical documents could be destroyed. During that summer I became quite familiar with patents and their structure, and I have also gotten to listen to my mom talk about patent litigation and everything that goes into it. I can't say that knowing all of this is necessarily going to make my processing of this collection more effective (though it might), but it is certainly making my job more fun, because I can understand the documents I'm looking at. I recognize the different parts of the puzzle patents, and I know what the correspondence is talking about when the participants are discussing one puzzle infringing on certain claims from an earlier patent. Heck, I even know what it means that Slocum was an expert witness. Like I said, it may not make any actual difference to the job, but it makes a difference to me and my enjoyment of what I'm doing.

And if none of that is reason enough for you to agree that no experience is wasted, look at it this way: the more experience you gain, the more things you know. The more things you know, the better you get at Trivial Pursuit. Think about it.