I was Anti-Rickrolled by a catalogue card today! In case you don’t know, Rickrolling was a trend few years ago, where a person’s expectations of seeing a funny, cute, interesting, exciting, etc. video were subverted by the video instead turning out to be a clip of Rick Astley singing the song Never Gonna Give You Up. The internet is weird.
So, anyway, in my job as Junior Editor on the National Library of Scotland’s Music Retroconversion Project, I review hundreds of music records each day, against scanned images of the original catalogue cards, to check they are correct to go into the online catalogue.
The batch I am working on right now initially shows the front of the card with the title, performer and shelfmark of the music record, then you click to see the back of the card, which displays a list of song titles.
Imagine my excitement when one of the cards I was reviewing was a Rick Astley album! I even said out loud to no-one, “Oh my gosh, am I actually going to get Rickrolled by a catalogue card?!”
My somewhat-unjustified elation was cut short when I clicked to see the back of the card – and the song wasn’t there. There was a whole bunch of different Rick Astley songs that I’d never heard of, but not the famous one! Not the one that was used to subvert, annoy and prank expectations. And thus, by not having the song on the record as I’d been anticipating, I was if anything MORE Rickrolled that I’d have been otherwise.
Well played, catalogue card … Well played.
Kirsty's Keyboard 