The 999 is the Cutter number. 
Yay, Cutter humor!
My pet peeve is that they never seem to get around to installing that periscope I keep asking for that’ll let us basement-dwelling catalogers know what the weather’s like. I mean, there could be tornados up there!
…But nah, being a cataloger at a university is actually pretty cool. I come to work in jeans and a Zelda t-shirt and spend the day messing with cookbooks from the 1920s or exhibition catalogs of crazy new Spanish art. Even doing authority control can be fun (in a geeky, oooh-look-at-my-shiny-clean-catalog kind of way). 'Sall good.
(Ok ok, I hate it when publishers leave out minor details like, say, the publication date, or play weird typographic games or otherwise make what should be a straightforward job into CSI-Bibliographic Edition, but hey. Just keeping us on our toes I guess!)
Hah, do you ever do serials? Because there is nobody more stupid, lame brained, and in love with title changes than a serials publisher. We spend ages passing issues around playing “find the volume number”.
I used to work at an art museum doing a lot of exhibition catalog cataloging - that was pretty miserable, too, especially since I then had to take my work to a computer that had the floppy in it and print out a crapton of catalog cards and file them. No, this wasn’t forty years ago, it was 2004.
Librarian geek moment, but… I’m irked that Newsweek has dropped volume/issue numbers altogether from their masthead. I log in the new periodicals here and there’s nothing to check against anymore. (Business Week and others don’t list these either but at least they’re consistent- they never have in the years I’ve been working with them- but Newsweek used to display them as prominently as Time.)
Actually, nothing gives me greater joy than seeing a serial on the backlog shelf…and giving it to the serials cataloger. I don’ know nuthin’ ‘bout catalogin’ no serials!
…Wait, you had to print out card catalogs in 2004? I know progress in library-land can be glacial, but dang! I’m actually kinda impressed.
(And here I thought the recent ALA preconference where the presenter tried to explain relational database structure…like it was this new, crazy thing…by simulating it in paper form (no computers here!) took the cake…!)
Small special libraries can be very backwards. I mean, they didn’t even pay me full time and the first week I worked there they took my computer away because “Special Events brings in money and you don’t.” So I never got e-mail after that. I just had the computer with the floppy drive that printed the catalog cards. A friend at a big academic library gave me their old LC books when they got the updates.
Yeah, I feel ya. Sometimes I forget how lucky I am, working at a large, academic library. (Though we’re still no strangers to the whole “so what are you contributing to our bottom line again, exactly?” brush-off.)
I also help grade assignments for a cataloging course as a side thing, and one of the students was really blowing my mind - “wow, where I catalog we’ve never heard of AACR2! Even the head of Tech Services! And what’s this MARC thing?” And I’m like, how the heck do you catalog?! It’s amazing how much libraries’ situations can differ.
It’s one reason I guess why trying to do anything in library-land is like herding the proverbial…
Yes. Harvard Business Review also makes it diffciult.
Oh, lawsy lawsy lawsy. I had an assignment in the last year of my grad.dip. in translation in which the professor categorically insisted on the PRINT edition of some article. Notwithstanding that 1) no library in the city actually has that in print; 2) the now-standard way to access that journal is online; 3) they will not do an interlibrary request for an article that is accessible online, just because some professor has a stick up his ass, which quite frankly is a policy I understand.
In the end the librarian actually had to write me a note to the effect of “this is a real academic article, not just some website.” Fortunately the professor accepted it in the end, after some drama. Jeez.
:: breaks into sweat ::
Don’t get too excited - then she talks your ear off about the patron who peed in the water fountain and those assholes with the free range kids and how the administration is fucking her blog and where are the volume numbers on Newsweek?
Ah – the joys of being a serials librarian! (Not that I ever had much to do with them – serials, I mean, not the librarians. I was mostly a monograph cataloguer.)
Speaking of format changes, what is it with those editors who don’t just get an impulse to change the design of their journal (which might be overdue anyway) but who either change the way quotations and references must be or accept different formats?
The last time I had to deal with academic journals it was in Chemistry, and each journal had guidelines on how to do those things. The guidelines might be “see guidelines for (one of the field’s leading journals),” but hey, if you picked a JACS from 1949 the formats for references would be the same as for a 1994 JACS.
This time around it’s journals on Linguistics and Translation. Apparently not only are they more obsessed with the use of impersonal forms (leading to [del]crap[/del] things like articles with a single author using the “impersonal plural” all over the place… next time capitalize the “we,” at least it will be more decorative :p) than the Chemistry folks, they are freeform when it comes to referencing so long as you use “a leading format.”
I don’t mind when students or not-particularly-educated patrons get confused by decimals, or even when faculty members get confused by them, but I’ve had a couple of professors over the years who’ve actually argued with me or the library about how decimals work. They’d tried to find books on the shelves, reported the books missing, a librarian or staff member walks straight to them and- not obnoxiously but very politely- says “this is a decimal, so .145 comes before .15” and gets a response of “that is not how they’re supposed to be read” and “I have a Ph.D.”. Of course the fact that said Ph.D. may be in Edwardian Drama is beside the point- it extends to classification. (I hate the “a Ph.D. in anything makes me an expert on everything” attitude some- certainly not all- professors seem to have.)
Of course what really throws them for a loop is when they go into Government Documents without asking for help. SuDocs is it’s own creature and responds to nothing, and I had to explain to one irate professor that “No, here the . is a period and the numbers after it aresequential- .15 is going to come before .145”. Now I truly am not the type of person who makes them feel stupid when explaining things- I go out of my way not to, and there really isn’t any such thing as a stupid question where cataloging is concerned- but I get irked at the lectures on “that’s just a stupid system! How’s anybody supposed to find anything!” lectures. (Go to D.C. and take it up with the Government Printer and I’ll gladly do what he says, til then JUST ASK FOR FREAKING HELP [and do it politely]!)
Another peeve is people who get bent out of shape when the copy of Don’t Hassel the Hoff and Aunt Bea’s Mayberry Cookbook they donated aren’t cataloged and put on the shelf pronto. Worst experience was with a PoliSci professor who wanted to donate the majority of his library in exchange for it’s own room with a big plaque marked DR. HYPOTHALAMUS QUACKENBUSH COLLECTION and a substantial IRS deduction.
Some of the books were good- worthy assets to the library. The other 90% were crap- actualy examples include dogeared damaged paperback copies of The Book of Lists and People’s Almanac (interesting bathroom reads but not scholarly and often flat out unreliable) or a twenty year old Rand McNally Road Atlas or a tour book to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum in Gatlinburg (these are all actual examples). He pitched such a fit though that he got what he asked for, though I’d love to know what he appraised the collection at (one of his fits was when we would not figure the appraisal for him).
When I was in grad school my friend worked in Gov Docs and I worked in the business library and got out earlier, so I’d go hang with her for an hour. Gov Docs was in a glassed in room, and people would approach it… and look at the door… and think about it… and probably need to come in, but they’d leave instead. I can’t really blame them - that place was crazy intimidating, even if you’d never gone in the stacks. The stacks were just plain-ass scary. I’m sure I’ve forgotten almost every single detail I learned in that class - what I really learned is that if you want to be a documents librarian the only way is to just go be one for twenty years and then maybe you’ll have learned enough to answer some of the questions you get asked.
I had a similar thing when I worked overnight in a Red Roof Inn. After dark we’d close the lobby and they’d have to check in through the night window. But people would still come to the lobby door and pull on it. Even when there was a big sign that said, “Lobby Closed, Please Use Side Door.”
Then I realized if I put the sign right above the handle people actuall READ IT. 'Cause as they reached for the handle they saw the sign. But if the sign was up too high they missed it, till after they yanked on the door.
I don’t currently work evenings, but at my old job I was 1-9 pm two nights a week. Sometimes students would come in at about 8:30 asking for help finding resources for their paper on the treatment of polycystic ovary syndrome in Japan or some similarly obscure and very specific subject. This was a small college with a correspondingly small library, so after doing a few searches and establishing that we didn’t have anything on site I’d explain about ILL. Then we’d take a look at WorldCat, find a likely-sounding title or two, and I’d begin showing the student how to place an ILL request.
At this point, the student would say “Well, how long is this going to take to get here?”
I’d say “It varies, because the other library has to get the book and mail it to us. Sometimes they get here within just a few days, but it could take as long as a week or two.”
“Oh,” the student would say. “My paper’s due at 9 am tomorrow.”
:smack:
I once had a girl start crying at this point.
I felt bad for these students, I did, but really, what the hell are they thinking? Beginning work on a research paper 12 hours before it’s due is bad enough if you already have the materials you need. It’s incredibly stupid if you need highly specific material on an obscure topic.
What gets me is that these students wouldn’t ask the “How long will it take?” question when I first told them we could order books from other libraries, they’d wait until I was actually ready to place the ILL request. I can kind of understand assuming that the campus library would have books about anything and everything. But once you know that a book will have to be ordered from some other college, shouldn’t it be obvious that an item requested well after the end of the business day is not going to arrive before 9 am the next morning? Maybe these students were holding out hope that my magical librarian powers could cause a book to materialize before them in the blink of an eye. Sorry, but no.
After this happened a few times I started including a bit in my instruction sessions about how if they want to write their papers at the last minute that’s their business, but it’s a very bad idea to leave your RESEARCH until the last minute. I can get them a copy of pretty much any publication they’d ever need, but I can’t guarantee instant access.
This used to drive me so crazy- it’s so frequent- that when I’m doing B.I. classes now (and I say with some pride I am called “The Elvis of Bibliographic Instruction”) one of the things I actually make the class say in unison is “DO YOUR RESEARCH AS SOON AS POSSIBLE”. I make them say this at least twice, sometimes three times depending on how enthusiastic they sounded the first- may seem like a joke (and it’s definitely tongue in cheek) but it does stress the importance. It comes after the lecture on "even if you’re a procrastinator who can’t write your paper until the night before it’s due, have your research done… you might be able to pull off an all-nighter if you have your materials, but if you don’t you’re probably just s.o.l.’ and citing the “my paper’s due tomorrow” people as the actual examples. (Always amazing to me- especially at big universities with thousands of students- how many don’t figure out that “If I’m writing about this particular Langston Hughes play that’s on the list of approved topics then maybe somebody else among the hundreds of other English students at this school with this list is writing on this Hughes play as well and maybe the library doesn’t have an infinite number of sources on it and maybe somebody else knows about the library and has checked the books on it and the Langston Hughes bios out already” and thus come at 9 pm expecting you to have 20 relevant books all on the shelf and waiting to go.)
Right, this reminds me…as the resident lovely and wonderful reference intern (medium sized city’s main public library) I had (I’ve since moved branches) the job of processing and preparing donated books for cataloging (actual cataloging is done at a different branch :smack:). We only added recent edition books to the collection that we didn’t already have. To avoid Dr. Hypothalamus coming in and venting that his book was absent, I had to put together a document for each person, stating each book that was rejected and why.
I felt very silly and somewhat uppity for having to write things such as “Book is 25 years old and in norwegian” or “Book has coffee stains and is a duplicate”.
I seem to recall a poster here once mentioning someone putting roadkill in the book return slot.