Librarian DiAnna Diaz

February 10, 2012 11:31 AM
Generally her duties as a librarian were fairly regular. Admittedly, this did have the potential from time to time to become repetetive and mundane, but every time DiAnna found herself settling too far into a routine, something would come along and shake her out of it - like she would be needed to cover teaching Divinations classes again for a short while - so the young librarian had never found this to be a problem. Today she had a new task to begin, but with the need to do a little lesson planning for the older years, she decided to call on her monitors and assistants to aide her in this particular effort. Many hands made light work, or so her step-mom liked to say.

"Hey everyone, thanks for coming," DiAnna greeted those who had responded to her request for their help. Quite a few of her assistants and all the monitors seemed to be around the library a lot to help out, anyway, but it was still nice when they came at her invitation. She tucked a thick strand of dark hair back behind her ear as she explained the situation to them. "While we have a lot of books here, there has been some concern among the Board of Governors - A.K.A the people you never meet who decide what happens to your education as such like - that plenty of our reference books are out of date, and so providing incorrect information." She tried to keep her tone neutral so that the students didn't pick up on the fact that she thought this exercise was a waste of time. Admittedly, up to date information was important, but when you came from a Muggle background and the internet was a familiar concept, old school books seemed to be such a small concern in comparison.

"Our task is to locate all the books that were published more than a hundred years ago, and decide whether or not they are still relevant." Considering the thousands of books in Sonora's stacks, this really was no mean feat. "So, ignore the history books and assume they're safe. Restricted books are monitored regularly, so they'll all be fine, too. Fiction books can likewise be left well alone. However, the rest of the library is fair game. Find any book that was published more than a hundred years ago, and bring it to this table here," she gestured to the large, empty surface to her right. "Once we've pulled out all the potentials for replacement we can then look objectively at whether or not they are still useful." Which wasn't really a task she would be entrusting to the assistants, but there was no need to mention that at this early stage in the search and destroy mission.

"As usual, any questions, come and see me. If you don't like the look of a book, don't open it. Thanks for your help, I appreciate it."
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Alicia Bauer

March 03, 2012 11:13 PM
Joining the team of students working in the library had been mainly an act of strategy, a look toward the bigger picture, a step on her own version of the road to being first a prefect and then the Head Girl that her mother had once completed and her eldest sister was nearing the end of, but it hadn’t taken Alicia very long to notice other perks. Some of the tasks were dull, that was true, but it was also true that she couldn’t help but feel a little thrill whenever she was called by the librarian, whenever anything, really, happened with the job to make her feel important. Being a first year was in most ways the antithesis of being important, of feeling respected and worthwhile, so it was a pleasant change from the norm.

Today, called, then, she arrived at the gathering of the assistants and monitors feeling genuinely cheerful, smiling at even the monitors who outranked her, even at her sister. Being a library helper was, it seemed, something of a family occupation here at Sonora; not only was Rachel in it, but she had confirmed, after first deciding he would do for one if inquiries led to that conclusion and then a long and very interesting conversation which had actually at two points spilled out of the library, that Russell Layne was indeed a distant relative. One of her favorite friends was here, too, so she wasn’t even the lowest-standing of the junior members of the group. It was one of a very few cases where being part of something felt kind of like a good thing on its own account, and she didn’t object to that.

The assignment they were given didn’t sound like the greatest thing in the world, but she didn’t object too much to it, either. Having spent much of her conscious life learning Latin did give her a certain squeamishness about dismissing the value of old stuff, but only having any money because she’d grown up in a blended family and didn’t mind that her stepfather’s money was as recent as it got, almost, had given her a good appreciation for the modern and new, too. There were a lot of distasteful things about the modern and the new, but in what other environment could a girl whose Squib aunt had given birth to her first bastard child at age fifteen, whose own parents had both dropped out of school halfway through their seventh year and lived out thoroughly horrific lives before her mother wised up and had an incredible, providential moment of luck, hope to make something of herself? And knowledge was power, and recent knowledge was usually easier to apply to recent situations. Plus, it was the assignment, and Alicia seldom really questioned the morality of things. Nothing she had ever seen or been told by people she didn’t consider stupid made her think it was the least bit practical.

She thought of grabbing Thaddeus as a companion into the stacks, but he seemed content to go off on his own for now, so she did, too. It was more important to network, but it was nice, sometimes, to just be alone and have some quiet for ten seconds, and working in the stacks could let her do that for a while. Picking a section that wasn’t in one of the excluded categories at random, she began looking over books, judging age by eye and then pulling them down to check to see if her instincts were correct.

At length, she came to one she had actually read and paused for a moment, her hand on the spine. She was a little sentimental about books she’d actually read, and so a little reluctant to take it from its place. The shelves were very big, after all; it would be easy for anyone to think her eyes had just slipped over one, especially since she was not tall even for a first year. The shelves looked absolutely overwhelming, really, from her height, and never mind that she had spent a respectable portion of a year in them.

Slowly, she lowered her hand. No one would ever notice; inside an hour, she was sure that the librarian would forget which subjects Alicia brought to the table, anyway, if she even bothered to notice in the first place. Most people really were hugely unobservant, in her experience; she guessed she would have been, too, if Jeremy and Gramma Alma hadn’t gotten hold of her at an impressionable age. Balancing the load of books she already had on the edge of a shelf, she took out her wand and levitated them and then started back on the way to the table, thinking this looked like enough of a load for a first year to be able to float along.

Halfway back, she saw someone else coming out with their own books and stopped to make way. “Go ahead,” she said, with a bright smile. She could keep hers up, and being courteous won friends even when it made her want to tear her hair out.
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