Library and literary miscellany from your pals at Library Journal.
(Maintained by Molly McArdle, Assistant Editor, LJ Reviews)
Just as military contractors, air traffic controllers and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works — whether famous novels or poems scribbled on napkins — to the collection, preservation and digitalization of millions of books, photographs, maps and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission.
In a 1988 review of DeLillo’s Kennedy assassination novel, Libra, which appeared in the New York Review of Books, Robert Towers called DeLillo “chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction,” and the term has stuck. DeLillo said in his 1993 interview with the Paris Review, “I’m not particularly paranoid myself. I’ve drawn this element out of the air around me, and it was a stronger force in the sixties and seventies than it is now. The important thing about the paranoia in my characters is that it operates as a form of religious awe. It’s something old, a leftover from some forgotten part of the soul.”
Don DeLillo Wins First Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction | Library Journal
ok - last Ruscha post. March 1964 issue of Artforum with a great ad for Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Ruscha’s book was rejected and returned to him after he submitted it to the Library of Congress. - ds
P for me!
I’m on the Z Team.
PRs 4eva
I don’t understand this but I admire it.
Why, Library of Congress, why would you have me shelve these two books so far away from each other?
PZ7 is supposed to be an obsolete classification for children’s literature. Obviously the person who did the LCN for Catching Fire was working under the old system. We use PZ7, though, at HNU. Give me Mocking Jay and Hunger Games (if it also needs fixing) and I’ll put them all together. We can discuss which option is best for the books: PS or PZ.
It’s helpful being followed by your cataloger.
<3
For the record: 1. This is not the first appearance of Nation LCSH. 2. For those non-catalogers: “corporation” in cat-speak means “group” or “organization” (as used in MARC field 110), not “company.”
I mean, it’s still racism because despite having Nation LCSH, it was refusing to acknowledge Nations as their own Governments, which they are.
More discussion on the recent LoC catalog changes for Native tribes.
Doesn’t help the image of a library as a 21st-century tool, when we’re catching up on sociological trends from the 20th or 19th century.
— Crossett Library on the new Headings for Native tribes. (via morerobots)
The Policy and Standards Division has determined that names of Indian tribes recognized by the U.S. government as legal entities will henceforth be tagged 151 (Geographic name) in name authority records rather than 110 (Corporate name), as they were previously tagged. This change in status of headings for tribal entities to 151 (Geographic name) will enable these headings to be used as jurisdictions when needed in cataloging. When a heading of this type is used to represent a government (110) the MARC 21 indicator will be set to “1” to reflect that this entity is acting as the name of a jurisdiction. These headings may also be used as geographic subdivisions, subdivided directly. This is in keeping with the guidance provided in rule 21.35 of theAnglo-American Cataloguing Rules2nd edition (AACR2) in regard to treating tribal entities as national governments.
By authority of the U.S. government, a growing number of tribal entities have been formally recognized and are federally acknowledged to have immunities and privileges by virtue of their government-to-government relationship with the United States as well as powers, limitations, responsibilities, and obligations attributed to such tribes. This means that tribes recognized by the U.S. government are independent, autonomous political entities with inherent powers of self- government; they possess sovereignty and are equivalent to national governments. To date, there are over 500 recognized tribes within the continental United States alone. Virtually all federally recognized tribes have jurisdiction over some delimited area of land, a geographic place, although land and area vary with each tribe.
Library racism.
I think moving American Indian tribes under geographic headings makes a lot more sense than keeping them under “corporate entities,” considering that they don’t function at all like corporations. They govern themselves apart from whatever local government is nearby, acting more like individual countries. I don’t really see how the LC’s move is racist.
Nah! What I meant was that it has taken the LoC this long to officially recognize the sovereignty of native tribes speaks to centuries of institutionalized racism. So in sum, the move is a good one, but overdue and reflective of some of the LoC’s longstanding problems.
The Library of Congress has begun publishing the Library of Congress Magazine, a bimonthly journal to showcase items from the Library’s collections. You can download the first issue here.
The snacks at the Library of Congress shop, proving no librarian anywhere can resist a pun.
From the Washington Post, Library of Congress obtains astronomer Carl Sagan’s personal papers:
The life of Carl Sagan now fills the tabletops of two vast rooms in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. The life arrived in recent weeks at the building’s loading dock on 41 pallets containing 798 boxes.
Sagan famously talked about billions of stars and billions of galaxies, and it appears that he saved roughly that many pieces of paper.
Here are five things to discuss on the beach.
Books have worked the same way, more or less, for centuries. They are a remarkably intuitive technology. Open, read, close. “Or if you have a photo album, you know exactly what that is,” says Bill LeFurgy, who works for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the library. “It’s self-evident. It’s self-describing.” Now consider the disc, compact or floppy. The disc is not intuitive. The disc may contain photographs, but the disc will not show them to you unless you know how to open it — which, as everyone relocates to the Cloud, will become an increasingly antique skill. In 75 years, the disc will be modern civilization’s hieroglyph; the Rosetta Stone will be the yellowed user manual of an Apple IIe. While books have endured unchanged, other forms of technology have bred with the speed of invertebrate insects, multiple generations each decade: 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, flash drives, Google docs, Pinterest boards — old things abandoned for new things in increasingly short life cycles. “I worry about this,” LeFurgy says.
— Library of Congress’s collection preserves history of American culture (via thelifeguardlibrarian)
Until now, I didn’t have an appropriately frightening subject, but now I do. No, it’s not the school librarian who allegedly took shushing to a whole new level by choking a student. That’s right, an elementary school library is getting rid of its Dewey Classification system. Instead of replacing it with the LC system to prepare the little kiddies for college, they’ve replaced it with a bookstore organization model, to prepare the little kiddies to shop in bookstores that probably won’t exist anymore by the time they’re grown up. It’s one thing when public libraries replace a precise classification scheme for a bookstore model, because public libraries are there to provide infotainment, not precise research collections. Besides, public libraries have long organized fiction and biographies into separate sections having nothing to do with Dewey. Public libraries are designed for the casual browser. But school libraries? Aren’t these the libraries that are supposed to be preparing our children to do library research in high school and college? Information literacy and all that?
— LJ’s Annoyed Librarian shares a ghastly story for Halloween.
