Phew! It finally happened!
A librarian is an honorary post on Goodreads. The status lets you add, remove, delete, or modify books and book-related data from the Goodreads database.
While I understand that this is not something I should be bragging about, I actually had to put in a surprising amount of work to achieve the role. I’m NOT kidding!

But the question should be why did I want the post in the first place. I mean this is clearly a voluntary position and only people with a lot of free time and altruistic hearts will bother to play librarians on a database website—and I don’t have a lot of free time, neither my heart cries for humanity in general. I actually have a very self-serving reason. I want a nice, clean-looking, polished Goodreads profile. And some of the books I’ve been reading are not so well known. A lot of them have no cover photos, no detailed information, and no synopsis either. Some are completely absent. Who cares about those books, right? Thank all the gods there are a few hundred editions of Harry Potter and Game of Thrones in there. Nerdiness saved!

Anywhoo, inhales a long breath, I wanted to add the books to the database first. So when I add them to my shelves, everything will be nice and showy. But the problem is, to a user, the book addition feature is very limited. Also, you cannot edit the info later on. In some cases, the books were already there but with next to no information. This is when I decided that I’ll be a Goodreads librarian.

So I headed over to the quiz section that asks you a set of questions and if you pass, they toss your case to some manual review thingy and grant you the status.
The first time around, I answered the quiz based on “how hard can it be, I love books lol” and failed miserably. They have strict guidelines, you see.

You can take the test every 24 hours. So I took it again the day after. This time, I opened a tab to the guidelines and tried to answer each question by frantically searching it. I failed again. I realized it’s not going to work. So I took the time and read through the rules. The next day I failed, AGAIN! This time I took the failure personally. I couldn’t help it.
You see, they set the question as A, B, C, D, and None of the above. Sometimes there were multiple answers and the right one is the one a little bit MORE appropriate. What to add, what to avoid, how to decide what entries should be merged or not, and some things I’d never even bother to do. But to pass you need to pass a certain threshold. This quiz has been one of the trickiest examinations I had to go through—maybe because I’m not really good with rules.

So, that third day wasn’t the last and neither was the fourth. It took me a whole darn week to get a favorable score. And then the site told me to sit tight while they consider my answers.

Satisfied, I went to sleep. The next day I checked the site. The same message popped up—wait, we’re checking. Checked the day after, still the same. And after a week. A month. Two months. Three... long... months! After that, I stopped checking. I made my peace with it. I’ll read the books but won’t add them to my profile. I don’t care.

But after more than 5 months, a couple of days ago when I was visiting my profile, I looked under my username. There it was! Goodreads Librarian!
Haha! I think perhaps the corona situation got it delayed. This is, after all, a voluntary position.
And the sad thing is, I’ve forgotten most of the rules I had to read. I’ll have to go through the guides again to nudge my brain. But I think I’m happy and satisfied that I’ll be able to do what I really wanted a few months back!

I don’t know if you’ve read this rambling all the way through. If you did, thank you! Really wanted to share it! 😁