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...

Wikipedia

Many people have a problem with Wikipedia. Because anybody can change what is said there, you have a situation where just about anything can be said about anything...

What is forgotten is that a every one of the people who take the time to write the various Wikipedia articles feel it is important enough to take the time and write something there. Whether it is truthful or not.

However, it should also be remembered that in the long term of this tool, that the truth will eventually come out. If someone sabotages an entry, it is pretty easily repaired.

Librarians don't like Wikipedia because they feel it is not reliable. I don't use Wikipedia as an authoritative source. I use Wikipedia as a starting point to find the authoritative source. Most of the time, it can be used to track down sources relatively easily, as Wikipedia does require sources be listed, or there is a warning tag stating this.

Should librarians dislike Wikipedia? I don't think so, as long as it is able to give a starting point for better research.

Freethought Librarianship

One of the most unique things we have at our CFI Libraries is our various freethought items.

From Wikipedia:

Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that beliefs should be formed on the basis of science and logic and not be compromised by emotion, authority, tradition, or any dogma. The cognitive application of freethought is known as freethinking, and practitioners of freethought are known as freethinkers.

(I shall discuss Wikipedia in a future blog, but suffice it to say that Wikipedia is usually a good starting point)

Anyway, we have a very good collection of these items, including some of the rarest, such as Ingersoll, Cohen, Joseph McCabe, Joseph Lewis, Bradlaugh, etc. A large portion of the rarest items have not yet been cataloged, but I am currently working on them.

There are very few of us out there any longer who maintain freethought collections, but University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has a "Social Protest" Collection, which is included within their scope, the American Atheists have some within their collection, and then we do. There are other places that have freethought as well, but these places have the largest and most well-known collections of these materials.

More Rare Book cataloging

I've been concentrating on finishing the cataloging on all the rare items I still have in my office. I am finding quite a few items we did not know we had. Many of these items are very unique and will require that I do some original cataloging on them.

I also spoke to our architect, and I should have revised plans and bids for our new spaces within a few weeks. Hopefully we can afford to complete this expansion, but I don't really expect it to happen any time soon.

I will be working on a PowerPoint presentation on our libraries to be used at a regional QuestionPoint meeting to advertise the AskUs24/7 Subject specialists (I am the paranormal expert). This may also be used as a webinar, but I will also derive a new presentation for our donors and potential donors as well.

E. Haldeman-Julius books

Within the last several years, we received a donation of almost every Little Blue Book, as well as a large collection of Big Blue Books and other EH-J books. These Little Blue Books numbered up to about 1,915, but there were a few numbers not used, and many with the same number but with different title, or variants of titles. I was told that the collection we just received is only missing about 150 of the titles.

I recently found some more in the rare collection I am going through. We also had a significant number of the LBB before this collection came in, and I have not yet compared the items we already had to the ones received as part of the collection.

I am hoping we will have many of the "missing" items in our existing collection.