Day 40: 3 days in, 300 words behind.

Ya, I'm already falling behind in NaNoWriMo. Maybe I can catch up after I've finished all my researching and annotating and presenting. Maybe not. We shall see.

I'm hesitant to use the lesson I had decided upon today, at the risk of speaking too soon. But then again, I said that I liked cataloguing, and that has stayed true enough. Consider this as an extension of that lesson.

Lesson 40: Designating subject headings is not as difficult or daunting as I was afraid it would be.

It feels very logical to me, and it just makes sense. I imagine it will be harder when I'm trying to do it from a hard copy list in the quiz than it is when I'm using the fully searchable LC subject headings catalog, but I rather like it.

It's like compromising a need to complete a search. It's something my brain does automatically. I look at a title, I have a question, and I immediately break them down into their component parts. In some ways it just allows me to classify them in my memory and remember them better; "Oh yes, that book! The one about women's psychology and its application to healthcare, it's right over here..." or "I have often wondered that myself! Why just the other day...". But it also allows me to optimize a google search at lightning speed, and apparently, to divine subject headings with relative ease.

Although, why isn't it more helpful with Dialog?

Ugh, Dialog. The love-hate relationship I have with that thing.

There's a lesson for another day. "Be Careful What You Wish For".

Day 18: This book was written from BEYOOOOND THE GRAVE

Cataloguing class, work and the first Quidditch practice I'm actually participating in (I wanna be the Keeper!); it's a long yet awesome day.

Had a particularly interesting lesson in Cataloguing about books written by mediums.
 
Lesson 18: The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) have a rule for cataloguing books that were written by spirits through mediums. So if you're ever looking for a book by author and see a few options, one of which has "(Spirit)" next to it, that particular option will contain all the books written by that person after their death related through a medium.

Some examples from McGill's catalogue include Sister M.G.'s "The purgatory manuscript : the relations of a nun with a soul in purgatory" and Sitting Bull's "message from spirit life" written by (from?) him the year after he died... The spirit of one Robert Hugh Benson seems to have had a particularly active afterlife.

...

The More You Know....

Day 15: Fear is the Mind Killer

Allow me to rephrase that: Sickness is the mind killer.
Despite an awesome weekend of Comic-Con, my Sunday was destroyed by being violently, violently ill, for no discernible reason. I wound up missing all the panels I had wanted to see (no Stan Lee for me :( ), though I did manage to stay at Comic-Con long enough to take some great photos, and get basically the rest of my Christmas shopping done. Regardless, I was feeling human enough to get up for class this morning, I just have yet to test if I can eat again yet.

Today's class was Bibliographic and Factual Sources, and we covered Open Access in our discussion portion, and catalogues in the class.

Lesson 16: I need to learn to love WorldCat.

Perhaps it's been the librarians around me being disdainful towards WorldCat that's made me wary and hesitant of it's usefulness, but from what I heard in class today, it is an incredible resource with a lot of potential. It seems that it just requires some intense GoogleFu. GoogleFu is something I have in abundance.

With over 200 million items, on a variety of topics, from around the world (74,000 institutions in 170 countries), I cannot neglect WorldCat just because I find it has a tendency to be obnoxious, uncooperative and, dependent on my mood, garish.