Contemporary Literary Criticism, volumes 1 - 78

The mammoth multivolume set Contemporary Literary Criticism is on the chopping block this week, ushering in the heavy hitters of the massive sets, which have mostly happily nested in the PN section of the print Reference collection. To process all volumes at once, or to do it piecemeal? (There is one bib record for all, and nearly 250 item records for the respective volumes — a cart can only hold about 70 at a time to roll it comfortably; I can't imagine 3 or 4 carts clogging up the Technical Services processing area.) The head of cataloging will update me tomorrow.

The first couple volumes had been mended, a thing I remember doing when I did my mending survey in 2006/2007. I fixed the spine of one, the headband of another, and sent a couple to the bindery. Don't know why the Trappists didn't match the buckram color.

My feelings about this literary criticism set are similar to my feelings about last week's Poetry Criticism — a fondness germane to my courses of study in college and graduate school, but not a heavy weight of sentimentality.

Transferring the volumes from the shelf to the cart, I found a Post-it note lodged in the middle of volume 76.

I wondered who had left this — what busy English student, and what work were they researching? Turns out it was on this page:

I wondered if the 2003 version of myself left this Post-It note for the 2015 version of myself — in 2003, sophomore year of college, my Survey of American Lit professor gave me an extra credit assignment on Maus. (I had been a bad student, and blamed it all on my mother's health problems and our estranged relationship, but too much partying was probably to blame.) I never wrote the extra credit assignment, and I barely made it out of the semester with my humanity intact. I wonder I wonder because I spent a lot of midnight shifts as a student worker at the Reference Desk digging into the research rather than writing the papers.

Interestingly, one of the main reasons we are getting rid of it is because the content is duplicated in the database Literature Resource Center. I poked around in the database and couldn't find this exact article, and worse, I couldn't figure out how to search just Contemporary Literary Criticism in the advanced search page.

Tomorrow I will continue my crusade against electronic resources ;-) when my mind is more fresh and a bus prediction timer isn't looming on my other display.