The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

PE 1117

That being the base call number for readers and perhaps spellers, of which the SCSU rare books collection has quite a great many of, and which I spent a great deal of time this past week putting in some semblance of order.

But I get ahead of myself. When last we left off, I was withdrawing various flood damaged books from the system, and stacking them in boxes to be taken away to wherever it is books go when they die. I am thankful to say that that project has finished.

In its place, we started work on dealing with the art gallery books (the ones that were in 7 feet of water, as you may recall). As withdrawing all of these books as I did with the others would be enormously time consuming, it was decided instead that we would mark everything that used to be in the art gallery withdrawn using the mystical power of Mellinium's rapid update feature, and what I would do would be to change everything back to unwithdrawn, change the location to normal stacks, and put a note in that says each book is in the closed stacks. Oh, and by the way, since they all came back at random, please sort them all by call number and reshelve them in order, and move everything that isn't a general collection book somewhere else to deal with later.

The actual changing of records was not particularly hard:

This is a screen in Mellinium of a withdrawn item. Contrast this with

Note the colored squares, where I've gone in and changed things. That part took a couple weeks between two of us, which I accomplished from my secret base filled with high tech equipment:

Or not.

Now, the part where we had to reorder a few thousand books, that part was fun, and the subject of a few shouting ma...strategy sessions between us and the circ people helping us. It turns out that, say, going through the area where the unsorted books are and pulling off, say, a chunk of B through BX call numbers makes you wind up shifting an awful lot of books as you come up with more Bs, BDs, BFs, and the like. This makes rabbits very sad and should not be done. What we ended up doing is going through, weeding all of the books of any given call letter out, sticking them on shelves, and then making up a series of trucks from that, which was a lot more humane.

These are some of the partially sorted shelves. We are up to about H or HA in this shot.

This, which used to be the faculty dining room, is where all the unwithdrawn books eventually got shelved, or at least the ones up until E or F, at which point we ran out of room, and subsequent books got shelved right back where they came from in the kitchen.

All of this having been done, we moved on to a new project, which was to sort out all of the textbook special collection and reshelve it together. Because it turns out that SCSU has an entire collection of early American textbooks, dating from around 1815 to 1950 at the latest, with most of them dating from around 1870.

Now, this wouldn't be so bad, except:

1. Some of these old books are VERY fragile;

2. The textbook collection is mixed in with other special collections, some of which are also quite old;

3. The textbooks all have special acid-free slips with barcode and call number. But many books are missing these, considering that they've gone from shelves to trucks to boxes to trucks to shelves again.

This is compounded by a series of bizzare organizational choices I don't yet understand and so cannot explain. So I'll distract you all with pictures, instead.

These are unsorted shelves, prior to pulling the textbooks off. You can make out a few of them (on the bottom shelf closest to the camera), while most of the rest belong elsewhere.

Ultimately, there were plenty of arbitrary decisions about what was a textbook and what wasn't, and there now exists a stack of shelves full of "I think this is textbook collection but who really knows" books.

I also ended up with a collection of very damaged books, since for whatever reason, many of the covers of these old books had come unattached from the books. Many of them were still next to the book they belonged to, but some were just...there:

These were of course excellent fun to deal with.

Of a more benign entertainment, it's just fun to look in period books to see what's there. Let us examine:

A book entitled "France At War On the Frontier of Civilization" from 1917, with the name of Eugene J. St. Marie, Captain, F(ield) A(rtillery) given as the owner. Remarkably well-preserved for a book that perhaps went through the First World War.

People used to write all sorts of things in their books. This one, dated May 11th, 1815, belonged to William L. Hinsey.

Also plenty of scribbles and drawings. This dictionary from the 1870s had plenty of fairly well-drawn figures, including this one.

And of course there were some great covers. This one is a geography book from 1873. Note the guys in conquistador getup, brandishing a cross and a flag. I also particularly like the random cowering Indian. Let's see you get away with that today.

And of course titles. "The Mathematical Velocipede?" Sounds like a really bad D&D monster.

My knowledge of Tom Swift, Boy Genius, dates from reading Dad's old 1950s copies, wherein Tom cruised the solar system in solar sailers, and drilled into the earth with atom bombs. In 1912, of course, you couldn't have atom bombs, so here he has a camera. As I was not previously aware of pre-1950s Tom Swift books, this was a little bit of a surprise.

If we needed more proof that the 1970s and 80s were a strange time, let us only examine this lamp that was found in a random box...

I also have a fairly entertaining barcode project to tell you all about, but that shall wait for another time.

Posted by Dwip at September 1, 2007 2:30 PM