I recently noticed in our Reference collection one of the quirks of the Dewey Decimal System that people often refer to as “serendipitous” - but look at the picture below to see if you also see a problem:
The books that caught my eye are these (biggify the photo to see the Dewey numbers):
809 - History, description, critical appraisal of more than two literatures 809.91-.92 - Literature displaying specific qualities and elements 809.933 - Literature dealing with specific themes and subjects
And so, I get that these books are each about specific kinds of literature. But come on - a book about the Holocaust shelved between two books about imaginary things? It really is like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other fool Holocaust deniers got into OCLC and caused this to happen - a cataloger sleeper cell.
I’m going to talk with my Head of Technical Services to see how we can fix this.
It looks like Alikewise.com has been around all year, but I only heard about it this weekend - it’s a dating website that matches people based on the books they like.
This is a great idea for a dating website - it seems a much better way to get at someone’s true nature than filling out a profile by guessing what will make you attractive. I checked around the site a bit (without creating a profile), and wonder if there’s a way to tie-in with sites like LibraryThing and Good Reads to capitalize on peoples’ full libraries. LibraryThing sort of already does this, with their You and None Other meme.
But here’s something funny: at my first library, we toyed with the idea of a “singles night” book group. We thought it’d be a perfect program for Friday nights, after work, to come and meet other single people interested in books. It never happened, but I always liked the idea. Maybe that’ll eventually manifest in Alikewise meetups.
And wouldn’t this be a heck of a social networking widget to add to a library catalog? “Like this book? Click here to meet other patrons that do, too.”
But this does puzzle me: if the point is to look fashionable, wouldn’t it make more sense to make a clutch that looks like an iPad or Kindle? Or maybe retrointellectuaistas just have far better fashion taste than I. Well, yes, of course they do. It is creative and well-done, but I still need to cue Flight of the Conchords:
I might sound critical, but you know if they designed a man-purse based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I would want it.
We just subscribed to the Safari computer ebooks database, so I started weeding our print computer book collection. It’s a heavily-used collection, but I found a few books that made me laugh.
The book itself was obviously useful in its time, and now is an interesting look back at the past. Among other information, it contains b&w screenshots of each of the search engines’ homepages, reminding us what the web looked like 10 years ago - directory browsing is certainly less popular these days:
And this was on the shelf in a library that weeds regularly - who knows what gems are waiting in larger libraries that have the space to keep lots of things.
On another note, my parents will be visiting for the Fourth of July, so I won’t be posting again until later next week. I hope you have a good holiday (non-Americans, I hope your regular days are good, too).
My library’s ever-shrinking book budget has made me be more discerning when it comes to selection. However, one area that is always difficult for me is biographies.
It seems like every troubled athlete, aging celebrity, recovering musician, reality television personality, unfaithful politician (and their wives), have all signed book deals. I don’t pay much attention to pop culture personalities, so it’s hard for me to tell if the person is someone significant.
So I was joking with a coworker about a new selection criteria for all of these celebrity memoirs. Since the importance of many of these people is based on social zeitgeist, I thought I could use Google to help me decide. I figure that if a person is important, a Google search for that person’s name should return at least one million webpages. If they’re above that (arbitrary) threshold, I’ll buy their biography - if not, then I’ll check again when the paperback comes out.
Granted, not all my ideas are practical, but here’s how some current biographies fare with this “hive mind” selection criteria:
Obviously, not flawless, but this Google criteria might help tell me who I should pay attention to. And in addition to traditional reviews and ratings, another one of my tactics is to wait until requests for a book reach a certain number before ordering it, but that method only addresses demand after the fact, and leaves out the patrons who didn’t think to request it.
Selection is a fine art, but when it comes to biographies, most my crayons are dull.
