What if I told you that you could make an office job interesting with a mere thought? Well, feast your eyes. This is how turn a job of scanning and metadata into the most exciting thing since winning hide and go seek in kindergarten.

Step 1: Acquire texts

Great donors are great.

No donors? Try a bulk order of things. If your department is anything like this one, some funds exist somewhere. Take them. Use them (grants may or may not be involved).

Step 2: Spruce up loot

You achieved the bounty. Well done, but what now?

Put the winnings where you can find them. In this case, consider sorting by the decade, because with songbooks over a century old, one might as well make them look nice.

Step 3: Assemble lair

Your workspace is your tranquil habitat. It is your place of zen. Make this office not a prison of the bourgeoisie but a palace of your proletariat pride!

Basically, just get comfortable, because the office chair is home for the next 40 hours a week (and the breakroom is the vacation hotspot).

Step 4: Devise mechanism

So you have your texts. You built your kingdom.

Now to actually work (I know right?).

Get the pattern in motion, the buttons, the gizmos, what have you. Begin the cycle of scanning. The more brainless the better!

Step 5: Distract self

The mechanism has begun. The stacks on stacks of classics painlessly sift through scanner to become glorious .tiff files.

The worker works without even realizing it.

Now, one must not go entirely brain dead; just enough to still enjoy the other side of life! Podcasts or great music will make that royal you invincible.

Step 6: Command and conquer

File conversion thinks it can rule the ruler, but the ruler rulers all!

Shamelessly like a lord, this worker commands .tiff images into indestructible .pdfa barracks and bundles these .pdfa songbooks into spreadsheets out of nowhere.

Before your very distracted yet miraculously productive eyes, the flaking, dusty sheet music appears transfigured on the computer screen.

Step 7: So meta

Make the miraculous bounty known to the eyes of mere mortals by binding the batched files in metadata. Infuse in these digital cores the essences of popular search terms, so worthy ones might know the wonders of 1920s show tunes reborn (in the case of library data, Library of Congress is one's most worthy ally).

Profound, yes. Impossible? Verily not.

The ultimate step approaches.

Step 8: Upload the glory

Bask in the radiance of digital greatness as the archives become live.

Fine tune the inner workings of the joyful work, wrought by your hands and marginally-distracted mind. In time, the paycheck shall reward these valiant efforts.

Success!

Follow these simple steps of living like a king, and that work week will vanish!

Now go and be royal.

Follow these simple steps of living like a king, and that work week will vanish!

Now go and be royal.