My real entry for today is here.I'm having such an interesting time with librarything. The widget that links to it is a scroll down, if anyone cares.
For one, I did pay for an upgraded membership. $25, I figured, is about the cost of one hardcover book, and if this is amusing me as a hobby or pastime or whatever, it seemed reasonable.
For another, I'm continuously finding differences between not just what I'm doing and what I do at work, but between what I have here and what I have at work. Such as:
In the library, everything is, of course, in one place. Okay, it's in one big place, but there are just lots of tall stacks and the books start at 000 and work their way around the room up to 999. Just right there in front of you. But here, I started with the books on my shelf of favorites, right near my desk, all artistically arranged by whatever category was in my head when I put them there. Then I went into the bedroom, looked on the tiny book shelf, and got those. Then the ones on the other side of the room. Next, the living room. They're all over the place.
Here at home, my books are dusty. I pick them up, I blow the dust off the tops, I'm covered with dust. My hands feel dusty. But when I handle books in quantity at the library, my hands feel dirty. I am washing them all the time, or more recently, using anti-bacterial gel constantly. It must be the 60 years or so of accumulated dust that constitutes a whole different level of grime.
Which is interesting because even though there are indeed books accumulated since the library opened in 1943, in general, we try to keep the library's collection up-to-date. There are no old science books, for example, nor should there be. Even the classic fiction gets updated, because the books wear out, or are so unappealing looking to kids that we just need newer ones. But at home, I save books forever; I intentionally buy books that are old. I don't have an especially large collection, but I started buying antique books when I was about nine years old. And I still have those. And I'm not even going to list the Hubs' antique law books in my librarything.
Speaking of which, it rarely ever happens anymore in the library that I need to catalog a book that is so old that it doesn't have an ISBN number. We dealt with all of those 15 years ago when we first converted to an electronic catalog -- is it that long? -- and although one or two a year still pop up, it's not enough even to stick in my mind. At home, though ... oh boy. So many of my books are from the sixties or seventies, before ISBNs became standard, or even earlier. I started buying and collecting children's books when I was in high school, so that's the late sixties. My books from that time include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Phantom Tollbooth, Le Petit Prince, In the Night Kitchen ... they not only don't have ISBNs in them, their editions are so old that they don't turn up in an Amazon search. I think I've also mentioned before that I have a little hardcover edition of Little Black Sambo, that politically incorrect nightmare, which has been out of print for years and years, but which I think is now available again. An interesting book. One of K's professors mentioned it once in class, and said that of course, none of the students had probably ever seen it because it's been so out of fashion and unavailable. And K said, Oh, my mom has a copy. I think the guy was impressed, and certainly surprised.
I'm done entering for tonight, but my next target will be the children's biographies I loved as a kid and that I got on eBay a few years ago. I have about twenty of them, and I know for a fact none of these editions have ISBNs or will show up in a search. Manual entry, then. I can do that.
