The Holidays and Donors

I have been currently been working on my digitization project for a class I am taking. I also have to start getting ready for tax season receipts.

We usually send out bibliographic receipts to material's donors whenever we get the materials and catalog them, usually within the space of a few weeks for most donations. However, there are circumstances, like the number of books donated, that prohibit us from following our normal work flow procedures. We then must do a receipt more in line with traditional donation receipts, listing the total number of books received broken down by type (hard cover, softcover, etc.) and then just a count.

This year, we should have no problems completing our donations receipts.

One thing that is beneficial for the libraries: If you wanted to donate a little something, but didn't want to give just a few dollars, we encourage you to consider giving a subscription of a periodical to the libraries as a possible donation. Talk to us about what magazines / journals / periodicals would be beneficial to our libraries. We can tell you what we already receive, or whether a subscription of something we already get is coming due soon, or even if there is something we should be getting and do not do so. All is definitely appreciated.

Bad Librarianship

I was thinking this past weekend what a disservice we do to everyone when we miscatalog something based upon our own personal perspective. I mean, one of my pet peeves is that many of the items cataloged about humanism, free thought and the other similar topics are most often cataloged by a person who catalogs Religion.

Why is this bad you might ask? Well they might touch on a few aspects of what these subjects are, but more often than not, you see that they get lumped into the classification of Humanism, not secular humanism, or those specific areas, just humanism. Or even worse, they get cataloged under the dreaded "Religion -- Controversial Literature" or "Jesus Christ -- Controversial Literature."

Problem is, that is not specifically what the book is about. In the case of Jesus, many items should go to "Jesus Christ -- Histrocity" if it is dealing with the question of whether Jesus existed, not "Controversial Literature."

Humanism itself fits under several categories. The philosophical aspects go under (philosophical aspects of)Humanism (B 821), and (other aspects of) humanism go under BL 2747.6 (Rationalism as a special theory under religion). There is a difference.

Additionally, just because a work is critical of religion, does not make it secular or controversial of religion.

With the above reasoning, I also should not catalog anything regarding agriculture (with the possible exception of crop circles) as I have no experience in dealing with it as a subject.

More fun research

One of the fun research projects I get to do around here is hunt down images for use in videos and identify photographs. I will be looking for a specific photo that was used in our earlier fund drive videos that we cannot find its source. I also have been compiling a collection of various free thought related speakers photographs from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

I hope to place these images with identifying information so that we will be able to identify these free thought personages quickly. I also may be the holder of all the digital images we use in the company. Right now, everyone maintains their own...