The Abztract Dancers Chronicles

journey to the west (my 1.25 journal regarding my LIS 181 this summer)

My duties at Data Gateway Philippines Corp. (DGP) started on April 23, 2007. I didn’t actually expect to get a slot there for my field assignment but I hoped for the best. I’m with there with a fellow student, Lester Belen, and together with other new trainees, we were trained for a project called Gale Indexing. Initial week was introductions and training. There I learned and relearned some things about indexing. I was so glad I could apply some of the skills and concepts I’ve learned from my LIS 64 under professor Faderon. We were thought how the get the main point of the article at hand no matter how long it is. Aside from that, we were told to expect that we will be handling several and varied materials – magazines, newspapers, scholarly papers, and reviews. During the training I’ve also learned how to communicate with people better. It was stressed to us that everyone in the group could benefit if all of us would pitch in something for the project, especially if it is of great help. Actually, our group is the second batch to tackle Gale Indexing. We are supposed to be ten in the team but one bailed out before the training was even halfway through. Aside from me and Lester, there are fellow library science friends as well, Angelie and Criselle; jokesters Marcus, Alan, and Eric; and two guys named Rey. Apparently, our varied background regarding information work was not a problem at all. Though sometimes there are long and awry discussions, we often benefit from what one was saying. I learned that some of my thoughts, even though how silly they are, can help others in grasping the main point of the article and articulating it to standard terms.

The way we index a material is pretty much the same way that I’ve encountered under ma’am Fadz. We browse through the material, check for bibliographic information, find the main point of the article, and check our term against a standard list of terms. A main difference is that, we have to find a second term to further refine our first term’s focus regarding the article. Just like in LIS 62 where we had to find a subheading for our subject headings. And as new trainees, we were introduced to the initial batch of Gale Indexing and to the management. The people there were friendly and were fairly easy to get along with. Like us, the first batch (there were five of them) came from different fields but had settled for information work. During the training, we’ve handled book reviews (for an easy start). We handled magazines and newspapers throughout the whole second week. I’ve learned tons of stuff, especially general information. I’ve encountered straightforward news clips, business reports, and feature and sports articles. Our standard list of terms provided me another perspective of how US government works. Bulk of my magazine work load was Cosmopolitan USA, so maybe I got a few naughty things as well. Our workload gradually increased from five to 35 articles per day. During the later part of the week, we were introduced to scholarly articles. These papers included several subject fields including: specialized branches of medicine like forensic nursing and plastic surgery; business topics like industrial reports, financial strategies, and business jargon; social sciences such as psychology, philosophy, and domestic relations. It was intimidating at first, but we gradually found a way to work around the boring tone and the overwhelming length of the research material that we were indexing.

In the middle of the third week, Lester, Anj, and I were chosen to be included in a special subgroup of the team. The client requested DGP to include abstracting in addition to the indexing processes of the Gale Project. We had contact with the client, via teleconference, for some project talk and some training regarding abstracting. As newbies to the project, we introduced ourselves. Good thing I’ve learned some few pointers back from LIS 71 on how to talk to library users, well in this case, a client, regarding information service. After a few minutes of talk, we were introduced to the abstracting part of the Gale Project. Again, LIS 64 was of great help, since I dealt with “making long stories short” back then. Aside from what we index via the computer, our additional duties included abstracting journals of different fields and indexing them afterwards. It was tiring, and almost everyday we’re bombarded with information overload but it was worth it, since we are learning something new everyday at work. The fourth week was tedious. Sequential days of abstracting and indexing varying materials were mentally draining. But as work was escalating, so was fun. I’m glad I’ve had this experience. It gave me something to look forward to after graduating in Library and Information Science.

**puro bola lang no? haha...