59X

Not long ago one of our reference librarians fielded a request for this item: Memorie dell' Accademia delle scienze di Torino, Turin. Classe di scienze fische, matematiche e naturali. Series 1, 7 (1): 317-386. 1804.

She found what looked like a match in our catalogue, but on closer inspection the volume numbering made no sense and she could not track down the issue given in the citation. Not to be deterred, she referred the problem to our serials cataloguing team. Fang Gao and the bookstacks team's Holly Mansfield vanished into the stacks, and for weeks nothing more was heard of them. But they eventually reemerged, blinking in the sunlight, having found that this set of volumes encompassed not just the one title but nine others as well:

1. Miscellanea philosophico-mathematica Societatis Privatae Taurinensis.
2. Mélanges de philosophie et de mathématique de la Société royale de Turin.
3. Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences (Turin, Italy)
4. Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, littérature et beaux-arts de Turin.
5. Mémoires de l’Académie impériale des sciences, littérature et beaux-arts de Turin.
6. Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences de Turin.
7. Memorie della Reale accademia delle scienze di Torino
8. Memorie della Accademia delle scienze di Torino. 2, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche.
9. Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, littérature et beaux-arts de Turin. Sciences physiques et mathématiques.

It's not glamorous work, but the joint efforts of Bookstacks and Cataloging staff like Fang and Holly and many others, toiling away in the dim and musty reaches of the stacks and our cataloguing backlogs, are revealing a great deal about what makes the UIUC collection noteworthy.

Naun.

As many of you will know, LC has formed a Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control to advise on its long-term direction for cataloguing policy. The Working Group held the first of its three "town hall" meetings earlier this month. Nancy Fallgren's summary has been posted to the LC web site and is well worth reading. Some of the earlier contributions to this debate were rather heavy on management-speak, so it's encouraging to see the Working Group calling upon a wide range of expertise and tackling some substantive issues surrounding bibliographic control in these discussions.

Naun.

For those of you who missed Marti Hearst's talk on faceted search interfaces last week, here's a powerpoint with most of the same content. The first twenty or so slides provide a nice, very approachable primer on faceted searching:

http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/talks/chi_course06_4_23.ppt

There's lots of other good material in this presentation, including tips on designing and evaluating faceted interfaces. Also included are the results of some user testing that Hearst and her colleagues did on a fine arts site, where their faceted interface handily beat a Google style interface.

Naun.

The play mentioned on Autocat has been published:
http://www.livewithculture.ca/content/view/full/11516/

DEFILED or the convenience of a short-haired dog
Presented by: East Side Players

Contemporary Comedy by Lee Kalcheim.
Directed by Harvey Levkoe.

Librarian Harry Mendelson is so obsessed with preserving the catalogue
card files, which generations of librarians have annotated from being
replaced by computer bytes that he threatens to blow up the whole library - unless police negotiator Brian Dickey can talk him down. A relationship begins to form, but can it stop the inevitable? A humorous and thoughtful look at the price of progress.

In Room 220 we have an informal meeting each Monday
morning. We use this time to keep each other up to date with recent
developments and also to discuss our day-to-day cataloging
operations.

The meetings are quite informal and have no predetermined agenda. They
are not intended to supplant the Cataloging Working Group meetings:
if there are any matters that raise policy issues or affect procedures
in other cataloging units, we take them to the larger group.

Please feel welcome to drop in on these meetings if you happen to be
in the area, or if you have particular questions you want to ask or
issues you want to raise. It may be a good idea to let us know you are
coming, particularly if there is something you specifically want to
talk about, but feel free also just to show up. The meetings are held
in Michael Norman's office in Room 220 each Monday from 10:30 till
about noon.

This tool takes you from an Amazon page to the UIUC library catalogue entry for the same book. This is how it works:

In Firefox, open the attached html file, then click and drag the link
it contains to your link toolbar. Find a book in Amazon (like this one: http://tinyurl.com/qevr3), then click on the "UIUC Catalogue Link" icon on your toolbar. A new window will open; toggle to it. (If a new window doesn't open, it means we
don't have the book.)

The OPAC Records Working Group was formed in response
to the recommendations of the Access Strategy Team report and takes
over the roles of the Cataloging Policy Committee and the ISCC
Cataloging Team. The report is available at: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/accessstrategy/accessrept.html

The new OPAC Records Working Group (ORWG) include all UIUC librarians engaged in regular cataloguing work. It will be holding its first meeting
on Wednesday, May 17, at 9:30 a.m. in Grainger Commons.