posted by Mike Roy
I’ve posted on the LIS re-structuring blog a post about why we are going through this process right now. To read it, you’ll need to have an account on that blog, which you can get by asking Doreen (dbernier@middlebury.edu .)
Submitted by Elin waagen
Save the date! Announcing an all LIS staff Web2.Opportunity!
• When: October 9th at 12 noon (to accommodate different work schedules and preferences, the session will repeat on 10/23 at 6 pm)
• Where: Lib 105
• What: 1st in a series of 5 fall semester Brown Bag mealtime sessions to discover and share new web tools in a fun environment. For the 1st session – Mike Roy, Mary Backus and Bryan Carson will share some fun web tools they are using. Each presentation will last for about 10 minutes, with plenty of time for others to share during the last 20 – 30 minutes.
• Why: Get together with your coworkers across LIS to share fun web tools!
• How long: 1 hour max; 3 presentations – 10 minutes each; there will be time for sharing and learning after the scheduled topics.
• Bring your own bag meal (sorry – no free lunch!)
• But…there will be a prize drawing at each session! And…everyone who attends any of the 5 sessions will be eligible for the grand prize drawing in December. You could be the winner of a coffee mug/coffee card and maybe even a new fun toy!
• Please come – and join your LIS co-workers for a fun time!
• Interested in presenting for 10 minutes at the next session in November? Please contact Elin Waagen or Bryan Carson.
Submitted by Rachel Manning
In looking for the Cuyahoga Falls Library catalog I came across this link in Celebration of Banned Books Week, September 27 – October 4, 2008.
A neat little video on Censorship.
For those of you who might not be familiar with NITLE’s many mailing lists to foster communication around shared interests within the NITLE network, I thought it might be useful to share a link to a page where they describe the lists and how to join them. That page is at:
http://www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/the_network/peer_networks_and_communities
Of particular interest to some might be the NITLE-IT list, which of late has had some very interesting exchanges.
Submitted by Cynthia Watters
Cynthia Watters returned at the end of August from a summer travelling the western U.S. in a small camper/van. She had a wonderful time and now is readjusting to the normal working environment.
Japanese Collection
A major project for this year is the cataloging and processing of two Japanese gifts, one from the estate of Prof. Hiroshi Miyaji, and together comprising about 1200 volumes. To assist with this project, we have hired a college senior, Pamela Yeo, who studied Japanese at Middlebury. Cynthia Watters and Pamela are working together, calling on Pamela’s knowledge of Japanese and Cynthia’s of cataloging. Together they are making progress.
These materials are headed for the Japanese Collection and will increase it by about 50%. The Japanese Collection is currently classed according to an old system devised by a Harvard librarian in 1943. It is both outdated (try classing something on computers…), complex, indexless, and non-standard, but it’s what the original collection came with when we acquired it from the Japanese summer school.
Now seems the time to bite the bullet and reclass the collection in the LC classification used in the rest of the library. It’s a big project, but the new books can be classed in LC in much less time than in the current system. As Cynthia began the project, she realized that it was an opportunity to add Japanese characters to our older records. New records routinely include Japanese characters, but, until a few years ago, they were not imported into MIDCAT from the OCLC database. Since one way of determining LC call numbers is to search the record on OCLC, we can overlay our record with the OCLC record with Japanese characters.
In this way a project continues to grow in scope, but it should provide a great addition to our Japanese collection and its use.
Theater Orchestra scores
The Music Library completed cataloging and processing a gift of 215 theater orchestra scores acquired in Oct. 2007. A student assistant created the basic brief bib records for these, which were then reviewed by a staff cataloger. You can see the list of records by searching the local call no.: “Theater Orchestra Coll” or see an example at http://biblio.middlebury.edu/record=b2289425
Thanks to Janine Podraza for organizing a beautiful display in the Main Library Atrium for Banned Books Week 9/27 – 10/4.
Answer: (provided by Joseph Watson) We understand and agree that some book jackets are desirable, but to be pragmatic, especially in these times of tight budgets, we do not feel like we can justify the extra time and expense required to retain the jackets permanently. The old fashioned library answer might be “Book jackets are used by the publisher to sell the book in a book store setting and they are not necessary in an academic research setting where most people consult the library catalog to find books rather than browsing the shelves.” and to a great extent this is still true. In fact, we recently enhanced the catalog so it is now possible to view book covers, dust jackets, author biographies, table of contents, and sometimes even reviews for most newly published books. Dust jackets stay with the book until it is removed from the New Books shelf and anyone borrowing the book at that point is welcome to keep the jacket. Discarded jackets are left for reuse on a bulletin board near LIB140… they’re great for making collages or decorating dorm rooms.
