Cartier…tiaras and brooches…

Chronicle books is one of my favorite publishers. Of the top of my head I can’t remember why, but that’s what the Internet is for…Well, they have a GREAT blog, will add that to the roll…

And this book, Ticket Stub Diary, which would justify me keeping ticket stubs from 1997 (which I’ve been throwing away in my recent purge.)

So when I picked up (from the bottom of my pile, I can’t face a book about China that has 7 digits past the decimal in the DDC) the grey coffee table book, with the one word title, Cartier, I just sank in.

(Now, I realize I just wrote a post on one word titles, but if you’re Cartier, you’re exempt.)

The book has pictures of queens wearing tiaras, crowns, Elizabeth Taylor wearing necklaces…if I didn’t have a ton of children’s audio waiting for me to check and/or bring into the catalog, I’d spend the rest of the day just poring over the pictures…

drooling over a catalog…am I a librarian or what?

So I’m finally returning The OCLC’s report on Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World. This post was going to be about cool things in the book, like the comparative timeline in the back, but somehow I got sidelined…on the small paragraph that described the AADL as a library catalog that social networks.  I clicked over, and well, this is the post that ensued. So this post is all about the Ann Arbor District Library catalog…drool…

The Ann Arbor library lets patrons tag items in their catalog! Plus other cool stuff, like…

Example: Book on manners: Rules of the Wild. You can click on a link in their catalog and get a “card catalog image,” to which you can add notes.

Example: Sound recording: The Muppet show [sound recording] : the 25th anniversary collection. This item is tagged: cd, muppets, tv theme songs, muppet show. I found it because the tag “muppet show” was one of the 10 most recent tags. At the bottom of the record, “Amazon style,” there’s a list of “Users who checked out this item also checked out these library items.” Wow. I want this catalog. I am green with catalog envy.

They have an audio blog, where they talk about music and audio books and Ooooh, they have music from the Chenille Sisters…whom I dearly love but recordings are very hard to find (well, in PIttsburgh–they are from Michigan).

They have a new CD page, which includes the date added to the collection. I found it by going from the blog to their CD browsing page, which has CDs arranged by genre.

A books blog, a video blog…and their site can be translated into Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Russian. Wow

Somehow I’m not surprised they have no current openings…for librarians. Maybe for a patron? That lives in Pittsburgh? No? Well, I’ll drool a little and maybe add their blogs to my reading list.  

If I had a million dollars…I would buy you this book

(Barenaked Ladies song “If I had a million dollars.”)

In my stack of numbers to check right now, two catch my eye, one for my dad, who reads periodicals, not books, about hammocks, appropriately named The Hammock. The DDC for it is 684.18, Outdoor Furniture. I think we each own our own hammock in my family. When we lived in tropical Honduras, they hung outside on porches or on trees one weekend we “rented” a tiny island. One of my favorite baby pictures of my brother is one of the two of us asleep in a hammock. $17.95

For my brother, who is going to be a park ranger this summer and will probably have a lot of time to read: 1047 pages. Environmental writing since Thoreau. ( I still haven’t read my copy of Walden, but he has. This has passages from fiction (Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath), poetry (Mary Oliver) and a foreword by that erstwhile environmentalist Veep, Al Gore.) It is a book larger than a brick, good to throw at someone if you wanted to possibly injure them (not that I recommend throwing books or injuring others.) The pages are not as thin as Bible pages, but the next level up. Many of my college anthologies of poetry and fiction/drama/essays were made with paper of this thickness. Oh, sad, I wonder if this book would become a college text…well, I suppose I wouldn’t mind taking that class.  My mother would jump at a chance, and so would my brother, tree huggers that they are. (And I mean that in the best sense of the phrase.) $40.00, but cheaper if you get it from Amazon.

A book my friend B might go for, she has a sense of the macabre: The Executioner’s Bible: the story of every British hangman of the 20th century. The cover is made to look like it’s torn brown paper and spattered with fresh blood on the back. $17.99.

I suppose I’d only need a fresh Benjamin Franklin to gift these, but since my purse is tight, I think I’ll send emails and save the 42 cents on a stamp. Thank God for the public library.

Ah well, back to work.

Eating yogurt with a fork…

So yo, yesterday I was cataloging. I think I wrote something about it.

And this morning, I was out of spoons, and I was too hungry to clean one, so I tried a fork. Hey, it worked. And so this is my post on unique titles.

Okay, aspiring authors, perk up your ears here. This is a librarian speaking. You will get a lot of readers of your book if a librarian can remember your title. And find it on the first try. So don’t name your book The Story. You may think you are being creative, but no. You have just created a jam in the catalog. First off, the librarian will get a list of all the books that have THAT SAME TITLE from all the other authors that thought they were being creative. Plus all the items that have an item called “The story” in their contents, like a song, or a chapter title. Then, if the patron can’t remember who wrote it, or when, the librarian will have to sort through all 22 records. Is it by Ali Real? No, okay, did it come out in 1989?

So I’m starting a movement. It’s the “create unique titles movement.” All that stuff about “don’t judge a book by its cover” is bunk. People judge a book by its title all-the-time. I blush when I tell some of the older women at the library that Good in Bed is a great book. * (Which it is, and Jen, I totally forgive you.) But what if the book had been called The Bed? Ohmigosh.

Not only do you have trouble with the reference librarian when you give a book a common title (The War? c’mon!) you also face trouble with the cataloger. Whilst bringing in Mafioso (an Italian flick) yesterday, I had to double check that the other copy in the catalog wasn’t a duplicate.

Here’s a little experiment. I just went over to clpgh.org, our county’s catalog, and typed in The War. Let’s say it’s 5 minutes before closing and a little old lady has just gone to the catalog and typed that in, cause she’s looking for Ken Burn’s documentary to watch over Memorial Day weekend. Well, if she clicks on the first link, the first page, with 12 records (of 81!) are of items that have something called the war in their contents! Because catalogs are messed up! (and wonderful.) But c’mon, if you’re looking for Ken Burn’s documentary, you’d be a little sad to see that the first entry is 10 things I hate about you [sound recording] (on which you’ll find a song called War by the Cardigans.)

Clearly, if little old lady came to the desk (which she did) and asked a librarian, said librarian would be able to limit quickly by DVD and video. Well, [pause, while I take a breath before I tell you the bad news] this is what the catalog would spit up:”Limited to: Material Type “VIDEO” or “DVD” and Location “Your Public Library” 116 results found. sorted by date.”

Luckily, the sixth item IS Ken Burn’s The War. But what if he had called his documentary “The war in which we ate yogurt?” I mean, even if all the patron remembered were “war” and “yogurt,” that would be unique enough to pull up only one record.

Let me give it a try. Good news! Right now there are no items with war and yogurt in the title! So you, dear reader, can happily go now and write a book called “The war in which we ate yogurt” and you will make cataloging and reference librarians happy everywhere. Well, at least this one. I’d even buy that book. And you’d get a royalty.

______________________

*mostly it’s when they ask me what I’m reading and I say Certain Girls (great title, btw) which is a sequel to Good in Bed (blush).

a project of Biblical proportions…literally

Phew! just finished bringing in the OCLC record for an audio version of the Bible, Inspired by…The Bible Experience. It has 79 discs and 1 DVD.

While copy cataloging sounds easy (you’re just bringing in records from OCLC, right?) with some complex items (like a 79 disc audio of the Bible) there is a lot of work to make sure the record conforms to your library’s standards. I like working with AV because there is a lot of detective work to find out who did the score, who did the music, is it really an ALL African American cast? Some of that information will be in some records, but sometimes you have to watch the beginning of a DVD to catch some of the more esoteric information.

I had to add some and edit some 500 notes. (In MARC a 500 note can be general information or more specialized. A 546 note lists language(s) (or close captioning for a video); 586 if it won an award–it did–the 2007 Audio Book of the Year; 511 for cast; 508 for production. I couldn’t find anywhere that the Prague Philharmonic performed the music, though I thought I saw it in a blip on the “making of” portion of the DVD. My boss just found the PP listed in notes on Amazon but we both agree the record has enough information. (After we import items that have had a lot of changes, we have a colleague spot check it for errors.)  I changed the wording in the 538 (systems requirements) field. I had to figure out why the 130 (Uniform Title) wouldn’t “control.” Oh. If it’s the New International Version, leave out the word “Version.” That took a lot of trial and error…

Thankfully I had printed the work I did yesterday, because I inadvertently had not saved it!!

And the DDC # is 220, no decimal, because it is just The Bible. (It would be 221-229 if it was NT, OT, or other subdivisions.

Last night I was talking to my pastor and he actually knows a couple people that own this audio and really like it. My boss was just reading to me from the Amazon review: Denzel Washington and his wife collaborated on the Song of Solomon.

So are you just in children’s or a full librarian?

This goes right up there with folks asking Madeleine L’Engle when she was going to stop writing for kids and write “real” books.

Why is it that if you work for children, you are considered not as much of a citizen in the work world or world in general?

My answer? I work half time in Children’s and half time in Cataloging.

GAH!

In other news, I’ve joined Twitter. It’s a fascinating world, this “microblogging.” Andrea Mercado, who writes about all sorts of things, posted a great YouTube on “Social Networking.” It’s hysterical.

Yesterday went to Beginning with Book’s “Ninth Annual Best Books for Babies.” Was very cool to see some of my Mother Goose kids show up with their dads.

if it’s Friday, it’s time for some bizarre “coffee table” books…

Wonders of the World: Natural and Man-Made Majesties: The book is peppered with tidbits about the wonders, for instance, did you know that the Statue of Liberty was modeled after Bartholdi’s mother? If no juicy tidbit is available, cute-ish drawings depict something that might happen at the locale: “A caravan at rest near the Khazneh, on the spice road” (for the Royal Tombs of Petra in Jordan). The front flap encourages the reader to “Get inspired by the wonders of the world!”

American Sports, 1970: or, How we spent the war in Vietnam: a photographs of American sports, taken in 1970. I don’t so get the Vietnam connection, but maybe being born in 1971 has something to do with it.

Here’s one I’ll pass right on: Venomous Animals of the World. Yikes. The dust jacket reads: “The first book of its kind on this fascinating subject, [this book] is illustrated throughtout with stunning color photographs.” Yes, stunning photographs that I never need look at again.