Special Hell

If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater. — Shepherd Book (from the Firefly Episode OUR MRS. REYNOLDS)

...or people who steal shiny new books from Libraries.

We recently goofed and slotted for "Main Reference" a new (2008) GRE Prep book that actually needed to be sent to our Main Reserves, where we can control the use more tightly. These are evidently high demand items, and all the previous GRE Prep stuff is in Main Reserves. But, it came from acquisitions flagged as "Main Reference", so I (copy-)cataloged it, my student assistant did the end processing, and off it went to Circ, from thence to Main Reference, where it "sprouted legs" and walked out the door never to be seen again. Painful lesson learned, and that some people are just ruthless sh*ts. Yes, you to belong in that "Special Hell", if it existed, my dear Library thief.

We would've lost more of them if not for the fact that the copy records in OCLC are lacking 050 fields and my ClassWeb access is STILL down (2 weeks now) and I was too lazy to go poking around on LC and elsewhere for older editions from whence to crib a suitable call number.

I'm also taking my time cataloging a 2 volume set of American Women writers. I'm doing an original record that piggy-backs on an existing record for Vol.1 which has an extensive 505 field contents note. I feel obligated to supply an equally exhaustive 505 for Vol.2, but it's taking a goodly bit of time to transcribe page after page from the TOC in Vol. 2. I may also be fudging the rules a little bit in the 245 field, since thought the set has 1 main editor, the secondary editors differ from vol.1 & 2; I combine the statements of responsibility into one with an [and] between the incongruous names. The 505 transcription is even more tedious work than my ongoing NAF project, or at least it feels that way. I'm also progressing my way slowly through an online course designed to teach me how to catalog Integrating Resources (and how they specifically differ from serials). This past Friday I spent all day with an AMIGOS trainer learning the basics of ContentDM. It was okay, and good to play around with training software where I couldn't do any real lasting damage while I learned to set up a hypothetical digital image collection, etc. Much of the controlled vocabulary for images comes from LC-TGM (Thesaurus for Graphic Materials), since the "subject cataloging" for images tends more to be an extension of descriptive cataloging. More "what is" than "what it's about", per se.

It was a good way to spend Friday as our ILS was totally down (even on the user side) because they're upgrading to a new server. The ILS will probably remain down through a goodly part of Monday, which means I can't make any progress on the NAF project, so I'll resume the 505 transcription and re-save the bib workform in the save file. I'm over halfway done, but it's just such a tedious slog, can't be done in one sitting. I'll also log in to the online course and get caught up on the next module, etc.