Just encountered the subject heading “Hot Spots (Political science),” which, being a fashion and design library and all, we don’t see much of around here.

I asked a co-worker what she thought and she said ”So it’s used for books all about the bars, restaurants, and nightclubs frequented by politicians?”

Sadly, it’s actually “works on areas of civil, military, or political tension that sometimes flare up into major conflicts.” Bummer. I think her definition is way better.

I love the fact that ever since I posted an example from the table of contents from an art book listing painters and specific paintings that I thought people would look for, I’ve been getting hits to my blog from those search terms.

Dear keyword interweb searchers: thank you for helping to prove my point!

Well, it’s been a busy (and therefore blog-post-less month) due to our former head librarian heading off for a new start in a new state. Despite the exciting possibilities of change, I was truly sad to see her leave, so I’ve been a bit lax to post.

But the other day I found not one, but TWO awesome records that totally brightened my day and cheered me right up!

The first was for Discovering the Great Masters: The Art Lover’s Guide to Understanding Symbols in Paintings. Not only is this an amazing book, with quality large-scale reproductions of some of western art’s most famous paintings, check out the table of contents in the bib record:

505

00

$t The last judgement / $r Giotto di Bondone – $t Secrets of the animal world – $t The adoration of the Magi / $r Gentile da Fabriano – $t The Arnolfini portrait / $r Jan van Eyck – $t The Ghent altarpiece / $r Jan van Eyck – $t The Chancellor Rolin Madonna / $r Jan van Eyck – $t The annunciaton / $r Rogier van der Weyden – $t The deposition from the cross / $r Rogier van der Weyden – $t Christ mocked / $r Fran Angelico – $t The triumph of Federico da Montefeltro / $r Piero Della Francesca – $t Portinari altarpiece / $r Hugo van der Goes – $t St. Jerome in his stuidy / $r Domenico Ghirlandaio – $t The adoration of the Magi / $r Leonardo da Vinci – $t La primavera (spring) / $r Sandro Botticelli – $t Marriage of the virgin / $r Pietro Perugino – $t Virgin and child enthroned with Saints / $r Giovanni Bellini – $t The birth of Venus / $r Sandro Botticelli – $t Madonna della Vittoria / $r Andrea Mantegna – $t Pallas Athena expelling the vices / $r Andrea Mantegna – $t The last supper / $r Leonardo da Vinci – $t Mona Lisa / $r Leonardo da Vinci – $t Doni tondo / $r Michelangelo – $t The garden of earthly delights / $r Hieronymus Bosch – $t The Madonna of the meadow / $r Raphael – $t The school of Athens / $r Raphael – $t Mars and Venus / $r Piero di Cosimo – $t The three philosophers / $r Giorgione – $t The adoration of the trinity / $r Albrecht Durer – $t The Isenheim altarpiece / $r Matthias Grünewald – $t A banker and his wife / $r Quinten Metsys – $t Bacchanal of the andrians / $r Titian – $t The last judgment / $r Michelangelo – $t The enigmas of architecture – $t Madonna and child / $r Joos van Cleve – $t The French ambassadors / $r Hans Holbein the younger – $t A Christian Allegory / $r Jan Provost – $t Decoding flowers and fruit – $t Allegory of immortality / $r Giulio Romano – $t St. Luke painting the virgin / $r Maerten van Heemskerck – $t Fight between carnival and lent / $r Pieter Bruegel the elder – $t Allegory of vanity / $r Jan van der Straet (Johannes Stradanus) – $t Burial of the Count of Orgaz / $r El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) – $t Feast in the house of Levi / $r Paolo Caliari called Veronese – $t The calling of St. Matthew / $r Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) – $t Apelles paints campaspe / $r Joos van Winghe – $t Allegory of sight / $r Jan Breughel the elder and Peter Paul Rubens – $t Minerva’s victory over ignorance / $r Bartholomaeus Spranger – $t The education of Marie de’ Medici / $r Peter Paul Rubens – $t The artist’s studio / $r Jan Miense Molenaer – $t Time vanquished by hope and beauty / $r Simon Vouet – $t Fortitude brings peace and plenty / $r Eustache le Suerur – $t The consequences of war / $r Peter Paul Rubens – $t Eucharist in fruit wreath / $r Jan Davidsz. de Heem – $t Vanitas (self portrait) / $r David Bailly – $t The banquet of the bean king / $r Jacob Jordaens – $t The spinners (the fable of Arachne) / $r Diego Velázquez – $t In luxury, look out / $r Jan Steen – $t The gathering of manna / $r Nicolas Poussin – $t In Ictu Oculi (in the twinkling of and eye) / $r Juan de Valdés Leal – $t Las Meninas / $r Diego Velázquez – $t The art of painting / $r Johannes Vermeer – $t The secret language of myth – $t The spell / $r Francisco de Goya – $t Liberty leading the people / $r Eugene Delacroix – $t The apotheosis of Homer / $r Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres – $t Jupiter and Semele / $r Gustave Moreau.

Is that not the coolest thing you’ve ever seen? (Well, if you’re a cataloging librarian at an art school where students are looking for particular works, like, say, the Mona Lisa, rather than having to flip through multitudes of art books about Leonardo da Vinci to see if they might include an image?) Now granted, this wasn’t benevolent on the part of the British Library or a helpful arts library cataloger adding this in–this is a direct transcription from the table of contents, as the 505 should be. But still! It’s amazingly helpful in our library environment, and I would love to see this sort of enhancement done for more art books, regardless of whether it’s a direct TOC transcription or not.

And if I wasn’t swoony enough over discovering that record, a few books down the pile later I encountered Ad Boy: Vintage Advertising With Character, which had the following 505:

505

0_

Ad boys — Ad girls — Ad kids — Alphabet — Anthropomorphism — Bees — Birds — Bugs — Burgers — Candy — Casinos — Cats & dogs — Cereal — Cleansers — Coffee shops — Cookies county fairs — Cowboys — Cows — Crate labels — Dairy — Desserts — Devils — Donuts — Elephants — Energy — Farm — Flower power — Frosty treats — Happy hour — Holidays — Home — Hot dogs — Indian maidens — Mechanical men — Monsters — Misters – Motoring — Muscle cars — Nasties — Nemesis — Not-so-super heroes — Orange drinks — Pigs & pork — Pop corn — Potatoes — Potato chips — Power — Public service — Puppets — Restaurants — Royalty — Scottish plaid — Sea creatures — Slogans — Snacks — Snowmen — Soft drinks — Space adventure — Supermarket savings stamps — Toys — Travel — Travel (across the U.S.A.) — Vote.

Again, transcribed directly from the book’s table of contents by LC, but so helpful for our students, who are more inclined to search for items by these sorts of concepts and keywords. Props to the book’s editors for organizing, arranging and describing the book in such a fashion–it seems to me like they truly know their audience and readers.

I would love to see more enhancements like this in records for arts libraries. I can see where non-arts libraries might not want such keyword clutter in their records, as it might provide false or incorrect retrieval leads for their patrons. But the enhanced data could easily be included in a field that needn’t be displayed or indexed by other libraries, but could still be shared with any library that wanted to utilize it.

Just when I was getting down about something, here came these great records that cheered me up and made me smile. A big thanks to the diligent and kind souls out there at the British Library and the Library of Congress who created them, even if they were just following proscribed standards. You guys made my day, whoever you are.

 

 

Lots of crazy stuff going on in cataloging this week, from the Library of Congress finally coming to the table regarding the subject heading “Cookery” [pdf] to a new bibliographic utility in the market to compete with OCLC. Plus I’ve been finishing up a 4-part series of blog posts in response to reader commentary talking about how I started cataloging and directions from there.

But all of those things pale compared to the official announcement today that our Head Librarian is resigning. She’s moving on to new & better things, but I confess I’m anxious about what will happen now–especially since the library director already has some “ideas.” That’s probably the part that scares me the most.

Library Journal posted a great article the other day profiling libraries migrating away from DDC to alternative classification systems. I found it pretty fair and balanced and definitely worth the read. Check it out if you have a minute.

Today I received the following email from the Long Beach Public Library. It’s a “pre-overdue notice,” which is apparently supposed to remind me that my materials are due soon.

For the love of Pete, can anyone tell me when my book is due, or are you really going to make me dig out my library card and log into my online account to look up the due date myself? I can’t even think of a remotely good reason not to include the actual due date in an automated “pre-overdue notice” reminder. I don’t know whether LBPL or Innovative are the ones to blame in this case, but it’s a serious FAIL.

 

I have no doubt that OCLC provides many ways to stay current in this fast-paced world of cataloging. Many OCLC ways.

As for me, I’d rather get my information from a variety of sources, preferably ones not put out by the cataloging monopoly. It’s part of this little thing we like to call “information literacy.”

I’m not saying, I’m just saying…

So it’s quarter break here in our library. We usually have 2-3 weeks between each quarter when the library is closed to patrons, but we still come in to work. We’re actually pretty lucky in this regard, as we get a lot of tasks done that we couldn’t ordinarily accomplish with the library full of students. I’m grateful for this opportunity; I know most other libraries don’t have a time like this.

One of the many things we do over quarter break is to change out all the library displays. I’m not involved much with this process, being on the tech services side of things, but a while back when asked for ideas, I suggested using one of the displays to highlight “how to” aspects of the library: how to find a book, how to search the catalog, etc. I’m pleased to say that the idea was well-recieved and one of our bulletin boards is now dedicated to that topic.

I am, however, slightly less than pleased with the actual manifestation of the concept. I know that I can’t have my finger in everything, and goodness knows I don’t want to be saddled with yat another task each quarter on top of all the work I already do. But it was my idea and I do have graphic design and retail merchandising experience. I confess I’ve been counting the hours waiting for this display to come down:

 

 What’s so bad about it, you ask? Well, I’ll skip the diatribe about the design and get straight to my point. Pretend you’re an 18-yearold design student in your first quarter of college with little-to-no library experience. You see this display entitled “how to find a library book” and step one is some fingers pointing at a computer that says “opac.” What does that mean? What do I do? What the heck is opac? It sounds like some sort of air-conditioning duct system, or a rodent-type animal from Peru.

I hate the term “OPAC.” Hate it hate it hate it. It’s probably one of my biggest pet peeves and it pushes all my buttons. No one but librarians knows what an OPAC is or what it stands for, and at this point an acronym for “Online Public Access Catalog”  is outdated anyway. But most of all, our patrons have no idea what it is, and so the image included in the wall display is prohibitively unhelpful.

I personally make it point to say “OPAC” as rarely as possible, and never around patrons. (It’s even driving me nuts just to keep typing it in this entry.) I know a lot of people equally as appalled as I am about the term “OPAC” who now just say “the catalog.” Which is fine, to a certain extent, and I do it too. But it got me thinking–the word “catalog” (as a noun) implies a list. Traditionally, a library catalog is a list of all the materials a library holds.

• a complete list of things; usually arranged systematically; “it does not pretend to be a catalog of his achievements”
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• A listing of a library’s materials (books, bound volumes of periodicals, multimedia, etc.).
  www.shorter.edu/libraries/glossary.htm
• a list of the materials in the library, usually arranged by author, title, or subject.
  lib.gccaz.edu/lmc/help/library_terminology.html
•  A list. Library catalogs list all the materials that the Library owns. Library catalogs can be found as computer databases, or as card catalogs …
  faculty.ucc.edu/library/glossary.htm

But what we have now is not a list. An OPAC is not even a list. We have long surpassed tallying our holdings as simple lists, and believe me, I’m grateful for that. So if we don’t have a list or a catalog, what do we have? We have a database. We have a collection. Those are the words I choose to use during reference interviews and instruction. I’m not sure they’re the ideal choices, but I think they’re miles better than “OPAC.”

We’re a profession not just steeped in terminology, but based in it. Vocabularies are some of the underlying tools of our trade, especially cataloging. We lobby to change and update vocabulary terms to be more current and patron-accessible, why shouldn’t we do the same for our services? Catalogers complain that “no one understands what we do”–maybe that’s becuase we’re using outdated terms and descriptions that those people don’t understand and can’t relate to. I’m left wondering about the marketability and “rebranding” opportunities that might be possible–might reach more of our patrons–if we stopped using outdated, unfamiliar terminology not only in our job titles and subject headings, but in our services as well.

Today we received 101 Charts About Men, so I was looking up other titles with similar subject headings to see where the topic was classed in our collection. I found quite a few books with the heading

Male consumers   (May Subd Geog)  [R S D]
UF	Men consumers [Former Heading]
BT	Consumers

I thought this was strange, considering LC’s propensity for parallel structure–I distinctly recalled the equivalent heading

Women consumers   (May Subd Geog)  [R S D]
UF	Women as consumers [Former Heading]
BT	Consumers
NT	Lesbian consumers  [R]

If headings are parallel shouldn’t it be “Female consumers”? Or “Men consumers”? There’s not even a UF reference for “Women consumers.”

And then it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite headings:

Child consumers   (May Subd Geog)  [R S D]
UF	Children as consumers [Former Heading]
BT	Consumers

I certainly hope the Library of Congress wasn’t thinking the same thing I was thinking when they came up with that heading…

For those of you out there reading who follow fashion as well as cataloging, you probably know that Thursdays are now Project Runway nights. Dedicated followers of the show also know that unlike the previous seasons, the currently-airing season was filmed in downtown Los Angeles, at the “top fashion design school in the city.” Yes, that’s right, folks: season 6 of Project Runway was indeed filmed at my place of work.

Lots of people ask me if we saw the cast and film crew, did we meet the winners, etc. But they never filmed in the main building as far as I know, and never the library. It’s too bad, because I always thought some sort of “librarian makeover” would be a great challenge!

I did, however, unexpectedly appear on the show, in a roundabout sort of way:

Yep, here’s a photo of me hard at work! This is an exterior establishing shot seen in multiple episodes. The square windows above the school sign are the windows to the library workroom. I generally work the night shift, and after 5 or 6 p.m. I’m usually the only one left working in there, so it’s a pretty reasonable assumption that the light on in that window is me, hard at work cataloging books & possibly writing posts for this very blog. Who knew librarianship could lead to a life of such fashion & fame? All that hard work we put into our careers really pays off sometimes. :)