Hello, my name is Eve Pasternak and I have just joined the staff of Behrman House. My mission: to organize, catalog, and otherwise make findable the thousands of photographs in the archives here. If one of the editors says, "I need a photo to illustrate the concept of bikur holim," I'll be able to come up with several images. More importantly, photographs will be indexed so editors can search the archives on their own. This requires advance planning, or rather advance mind reading to guess what people will want and what words they will use to search for the images they need for their books.
Our database can perform powerful searches but only if the images are catalogued consistently. For example, Hanukkah must always be spelled the same way (not Chanukah or Hannukah!). Each field is defined to contain certain values, so that “Passover” and “seder” need to be listed in the Holiday and Ritual fields respectively, not the other way round or in the same field. Some concepts can be illustrated in a number of ways. For example, learning as a Jewish value could be illustrated by a classroom scene, in a synagogue, on a field trip, or at home by oneself or at a family seder. Giving all those different types of pictures the same index tag (“Learning”) will open up more possibilities to an editor looking to choose images for a new book.
I have worked as a librarian for over 20 years, most recently at the Waldor Memorial Library, the Jewish community library of the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest. I’m used to considering books as completed works and it will be very interesting to me to learn about the full life cycle of a book. I can catalog, shelve, and recommend books to readers, but I have never seen a book grow from initial idea to finished product.
The same attention to detail that I put into cataloguing books for the library goes into every decision made here before publication—from the choice of illustrations and chapter headings to the color of the cover. Each choice affects how the book is used. Librarians are astonished at how many people say, “I was reading a green book last week. Can you find it for me?”
It’s fun being the new kid on this block. Everyone plays nicely together and shares their knowledge freely. I think I’ll like it here.
