Vulgar corruption? Let me guess, you’re an 80 year old, ex-English teacher ain’t 'ya?
As a librarian, I can point you to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of resources that analyze the English language as a living and adaptable form of communication that has changed in many ways over the last 120 years (which is how long alright has been in common usage).
I’ve never heard of Islam is of the Devil, but it’s very possible that someone will lose it, but not because they’re offended by it. They’ll lose it because they want to own it. The reason that few libraries own a copy of Mein Kampf isn’t because of censorship issues, it’s because it’s wasted money because some moody teenager will steal it within a few weeks. The same can be said for books on Wiccan spiritualism. The people that steal aren’t conservative Christians (as I first assumed), it’s bored teenage girls who decide to take up Wicca but don’t have any money.
Justin, just wanted to tell you that you’re alright by me; I’ve enjoyed this thread but haven’t asked any questions 'cause I spend a lot of time at my local library and already have a source for most answers.
Yours is the only “Ask the . . .” thread I’ve ever read past the first couple of posts.
I’m enjoying answering them actually.
Typically, no. Our policies state that library staff are not empowered to act “in loco parentis” (“in the place of a parent”). If a minor child has their own library card, an adult guardian is expected to monitor the materials they borrow.
I’ve never seen a parent come running back in with “How dare you let my child borrow this filth!” but I know it happens.
It’s gotta be some really wild combination of things for me to notice or the patron has to have a particular trademark. For example, the Mormon missionaries who borrowed the complete oevure of Quentin Tarantino and a stack of X-Men comics or the nun who loves murder mysteries (the bloodier, the better).
I have waived fines in that exact situation dozens of times. The amounts are typically small (almost always under $5), and as you said, its just not worth the hassle. Especially because the woman behind them will have $30 in fines and pay it with a smile (“Do you know how much all of the books I read would cost to buy? This is a bargain!”). I have better things to do than fight with trashy people or aging yuppies over a few dollars.
Thanks, I really appreciate that.
[QUOTE=MTCicero]
No. I just have a problem with you referring to someone as uninformed when you choose to use the vulgar corruption of “all right”.
[/QUOTE]
Do you also have a problem with people not knowing the difference between two completely different words?
I should be so fortunate.
However, I suppose if it’s all right for the Who to use it, then it’s [del]all right[/del] alright with me.
Really? You don’t think that maybe it was a typo?
By the way, that’s short for typographical error - since we’re being grammar Nazis here. Oops, maybe I should say semantics Nazis if I want to be more accurate.
And just in case anyone who is interested in jumping all over my shit has been too lazy to look at who has been posting what, please take a moment to see when my previous post was and please note that it had NOTHING to do with the current discussion.
However I would like to add an observation. While I generally agree that English is a living language and therefore should reflect common usage, I would also point out that often common usage is based on ignorance. In those cases I think we should accept it only reluctantly. For example, it was recently pointed out to me that the words atheist and agnostic are often used interchangeably. This is only reflected in some sources and the less reliable ones at that, but even so, it is an example that is repeated far too often in my opinion.
shrug I don’t know. I don’t know you. What I do know are these two things:
and
Go back and read what I wrote - something no one seems willing to do. I responded to what I saw as an insulting comment. While I am usually willing to admit that my perceptions are not always accurate, I believe in this case they were. Ergo, I did not start anything. In fact, I made a couple of conciliatory comments in an attempt to dial things back a notch. Obviously those attempts did not succeed. However they should at least serve as evidence that I had no intention of trolling - which I assume is crime of which I am guilty in your mind.
The Danish aphorist Piet Hein has written “Stor er den som ved, men større er den som ved, hvor han skal spørge”. “He who knows is great, but greater is he who knows where to ask”.
And I’d like to add that the reference librarians wouldn’t be able to find the information if there weren’t any cataloguers and classifiers. 
I may pop in occasionally and answer questions as well. Spent close to three years working in a public library (main branch in a mostly rural county with a semi-metropolitan handful of city-towns and a thriving tourist area), and now I’m working as a school media specialist (this is fancy-talk for a school librarian who also does some of the IT administration).
I know it has been mentioned, but if you have extra books laying around and want to give them to a library, will they readily accept them?
I read once that the Library of Congress has a porn collection. Is this true? I have heard that the Library of Congress has a copy of every book with a copyright, at least from the United States. True?
That’s the idea with a national library, to collect everything that’s been published in the country, disregarding the subject, and not only books. Someone has once said about the National library of Sweden that “as we don’t know what might be of interest in 200 years we’d better keep everything”. If a future local historian wants to write a book about his home town he should be able to find what films were shown at the cinema, the price of a beer, which teams the local football team played, what items the grocer had special prices on etc.
ETA When I started working at the National Library I was informed that porn was locked up together with military secrets, car repair manuals, knitting patterns, early Donald Duck magazines and other items that have a habit of acquiring feet.
The Library of Congress is NOT a national library. It is the Library of, you know, Congress. So no, it does not have a copy of every book published here. It’s sort of an accidental national library.
Call it a de facto national library then, because it serves as one.
Yes, but they may elect to sell them at a sale rather than house them. If you want them added to the collection you’ll need to specify, and then it will depend on several factors whether they will.
[QUOTE=Captain Midnight]
I read once that the Library of Congress has a porn collection. Is this true? I have heard that the Library of Congress has a copy of every book with a copyright, at least from the United States. True?
[/QUOTE]
That’s an interesting story.
There was a LoC librarian/cataloger named Ralph Whittington who had a HUGE collection of vintage pornography- hundreds of films and many of them one of a kind and including some of the world’s oldest surviving reels of hardcore pornography that he’d picked up at auction or through other methods perhaps best not to guess at. He had “stag films” (I’m not sure how explicit) from the silent era and the “Full Contact Porn” by anybody’s definition from later on through the 1950s-1960s etc., all of which he had cataloged.
For those not familiar with cataloging, a DVD of AVATAR isn’t that big a deal to catalog- takes a few minutes to copy catalog it from OCLC- but when you’re dealing with a one-of-a-kind privately produced film, whether it’s a home movie or a 1930s B movie it can take days or even weeks to get all of the cataloging done, and this guy had taken the time to do independent cataloging for porn reels that didn’t even have titles or known producers/performers- we’re talking a herculean effort, basically the donation of months and months of labor- to catalog it.
He wanted to donate it to the Library of Congress because, to quote Thomas Jefferson, “there is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer” and because it’s the world’s largest library- where better to house his baby? This bequest, which was almost impossible to put a value on (he could easily have sold it for six figures if not more and much of it was irreplaceable if lost) caused a miniature firestorm: on the one hand here’s this undeniably valuable and unique collection plus the massive cataloging effort that’s gone into it and on the other it’s hard core porn, it’s not like Senator Byrd was ever going to walk in and ask “I’m in a nostalgic mood…whatcha got on 8 mm of a woman looks like Myrna Loy banging some sailors circa 1936?” nor is it likely that anybody conducting research onto pornography for Congress will really need to watch a 1970 Ed Wood sex-in-a-coffin flick for their research. Ultimately they turned it down.
The collection did find a home though: the Museum of Sex (that link is to a homepage that should be safe for work) in NYC was absolutely ass-tickled with a feather duster to get it.
Time article that mentions Whittington and the museum.
I think Ralph Whittington’s story (did I mention he lived in his mother’s basement?) would be a great indie movie starring Stephen Root as Ralph (or the character based on him) and perhaps Cloris Leachman as his mother. True, Whittington looks nothing like Root, but I love Stephen Root.
To clarify, under the “mandatory deposit” rule, publishers are generally required to submit to the Library of Congress two copies of each copyrighted book distributed in the U.S. It’s possible to get an exemption from the rule in some cases. The Library is not required to keep them, though. They generally add to their collection only those they deem significant works. See this PDF.
Yes, but it does not operate at all in the same way that a true national library does. The average researcher may never know the difference, of course.
There’s a popular misconception that I’ve heard on documentaries and read in print in some periodical that should have known better (I think USA Today) that the LoC keeps a copy of every book published. It stems of course from the fact that one is made available to them, but obviously if it’s a self-published screed on “Why Garlic Makes Me Sad” or a book of derivative poems by a 13 year old Goth girl or a Harlequin romance novel they’re not actually going to put it in the collection. I’ve also read supposedly reliable sources say that they have more than 150 million books, which is also way off mark- they have more than 150 million items, only a fraction of which (maybe a quarter) are books. The other things range from monographs to photos to recordings to handwritten notes to, perhaps most famously, the contents of Lincoln’s pocketswhen he died and a petrified slice of Tom Thumb’s wedding German chocolate wedding cake (or technically a slice of the cake served at a special reception given for the Thumbs/Strattons at the White House).
The Jefferson Building of the LoC is possibly my favorite public building in the U.S.. I honestly think I could spend weeks there and never get bored and I’m just talking the building- not even the Reading Room. If there really does exist anything like a Da Vinci Code of messages hidden in artwork it’s there- tons of clever in-jokes and esoterica. (I doubt there is such a code, but it would be there.) Of course an irony is that on their walls and on many of their souvenirs is the phrase
partly because it’s a good saying for the world’s largest library and because his “donation” formed the nucleus of the current collection. The irony of course is that obviously he could since he sold the majority of his library to Congress (which, true, did not leave him bookless, but did denude most of the shelves of Monticello). Also he did not donate the books but sold them for almost $25,000 (hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s money) and because he desperately needed the money.