Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism

Unlike 20th Century Literary Criticism, which thought it was gonna slip by unnoticed (it didn't originally have a pink tag and didn't make it on our review list), this one has been slated for discard since the beginning. (All these Gale literary criticism sets have the same drab brown cover and same font/embossment... easy to see them all blend together on the shelf.)

I was going to say it's no biggie, just another predictable link in this chain... but then I thought of the PN aisle in the Ref Stacks that is almost empty now, and I got a little nostalgic for, like, 2003 - 2005 when I was in college...

Anyway, this one had to sit out behind the Reference Desk for a couple weeks while they finished construction on the new office cubes in Tech Services, and then for us staffers to finish our move-in and settle down. It finally got pulled back to the Cataloging Dept this afternoon (and gave me a reminder that I need to teach the students how to build better carts... loose arrangements means capsizing going around the corner of the art gallery! Thank god the GTU taught me to make them snug on each shelf).

Incidentally I met with the Cataloging staff today to discuss a disk project they're working on -- reuniting CD-ROMS with their books in the stacks (previously the CDs were kept in a case behind the Circ desk). We discussed how to proceed with the CDs tied to Ref items marked for discard and to keep... they are graciously waiting until we're finished with the discard project.

Which I ran some numbers for, and I'm at least 45% through -- almost half! Maybe we'll finish by the end of summer. If I count the Ref Annex, I'm more like 70-80% finished, but I didn't calculate those numbers.

Well I hope all 270 volumes of this one goes to a good home... and not the dumpster.

More literary criticism

Goodbye Contemporary Authors and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism...

Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series

Today in the life of a traditional library worker, I continued my work discarding all 149 volumes of Contemporary Authors (New Revision Series), call number PN 771 .C5833. (Manhandling books and pushing around carts seems so traditional, like I am living out the stereotype of librarians the world over; if only the traditionalist knew what we're really doing with these carts of books...)

As a last hurrah, and ahead of discarding the original Contemporary Authors series next week, I utilized the trusty print index volume and looked up Joyce Carol Oates (for Randy) and Norman Rush (for me). They were in volumes 129 and 130, respectively. A little sentimentality tugged at my heart, as we as a "developed society" draw nearer to the abolition of print indices.

At this point, absence is more startling than action: the dusty, empty black shelves are growing disturbingly sparse in the PN section...

I must also wring my hands this week about what's becoming of these series in the name of practicality. It takes space to store books while we wait for folks to claim them; it takes time to wait for folks to claim them; it takes money to ship these heavy tomes across the country. Apparently my library has little of all these things. Once Better World Books passes, they go straight in the recycling dumpster. One librarian opined: Craigslist? Would it be better to put the books on the curb with an anonymous "free" posting on Craigslist? Do I dare step into the political vortex that is summoned once one brings up such matters?

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.

Next on the Chopping Block: Poetry Criticism

One hundred and five beautiful lilac volumes of Poetry Criticism. I hope these end up in a good home and not in the dumpster like all those red Short Story Criticism volumes did back in November.

It's online, which is probably best for the types of entries found in this series. Nonetheless... so beautiful (anything with the word poetry in the title...)... so beautiful (anything with the color purple on its cover...)

Goodbye Poetry Criticism...

Moving through the Ps

Today I began the discards on PN 1998.2 R34 1992 vol. 1-2 and ended at PE 1689 I3 1983 vol. 1-3.

I had to skip over many of our multivolume literary criticism sets in order to make a cart of singles... the next few weeks will just be truck loads of volumes from these series... A truck load of Poetry Criticism, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Contemporary Authors, Nineteenth Century literature Criticism, Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800...

I didn't feel as nostalgic and emotional today as I have in past weeks, although these huge sets mentioned above, often in their brown covers, are such a staple title in what I conceive of this Reference Collection... those rows of ranges totally blocked full with these sets... the new crisp ones that would come every so often... compared to the first few volumes in the series, which have loose binding and fraying corners.

This week we're getting rid of a dictionary and other literature reference works, nothing too sharp to jab, and some film and performing arts directories and lists, all of which has probably been superseded and we're keeping seminal works in the topic, with updates.

Two weeks ago, starting on the Ps (literature) was very emotional for me.

Reference Print Collection: I am the most sentimental of all

We had a heated Reference Department meeting a couple weeks ago about how to utilize the holistic way in which of the Reference print collection was developed over the past 60 years. This heated discussion came about in the wake of the Dean's directive to downsize the collection to one range of shelving at the most. (Previously we had been told we would have more space to keep printed works in Reference, although the librarians had flagged the majority of items to be moved to the stacks anyway.)

Some at the department meeting insisted there was no use for the print collection and to get it all out of there (the more junior librarians were the most brutal). Others recognized varying degrees of usefulness and sentimentality attached to it. I felt deeply emotional, and consequently, completely stupid over the prospect.

In a delayed manner germane to self-deprecators, I realized that I, the lowly library assistant to the MLIS-holding professionals of the department, had had the most hands-on interaction with the print reference collection out of everyone working for the library.

From 2001-2005 as a student assistant I shelf read the collection, moved sections of books back and forth, configured and reconfigured the roving Reference Annex, filed the loose leafs, replaced updated volumes of yearlies, tallied the growth of the collection, and helped students find books in the Reference stacks. I have a particularly fun memory of showing some of my English Major cohorts how to use the index to Twentieth Century Literary Criticism to find sources for our upcoming papers back in undergrad.

In 2006, once I had become a full time permanent library assistant, I did part of a preservation assessment inspecting and rating each item for its repair status; I mended 80% of the most damaged books in Reference in the following couple years: lots of hinge gluing, spine repair, and text block reattachments. It was one of my most prized library skills, learning to mend books.

A few years later I supervised an inventory project of the print Reference Collection. I consulted with the Systems Librarian to make a list of everything in Reference. I organized the work so that the student workers and I compared the shelf list to what was on the shelf. We searched for the missing books over ten times over the course of a couple months. We had Cataloging make records for books that were on the shelf but not in the catalog.

Over the past 12 years I have fiddled with the black book ends that nicely hook onto the edge of the shelf and have gone searching for the large ones that are free standing, for the bottom shelves since they don't have edges on which to latch. I have found letters, notes, missing keys, missing books, and other goodies (and garbage) hidden between the books. I have managed shifts. I have re-designed all the call number range signs at the end of the shelving. Hundreds of times I have experienced the unique pleasure of rubbing an orange Chicopee Stretch'nDust cloth over the glossy, black shelves, picking up thick trails of grey dust. And I know the shelves by the computers grow dustier the quickest.

The books are like family, or friends, or in the very least, I've come to somewhat regard the collection as mine. (I guess that's pretty common for librarians.) You can ask me for a Spanish dictionary and I will take you right there. You can ask me for a bible and I can take you right there. You can ask me for the Dictionary of Literary Biography and I can take you right there. Oh, looking for nursing drug handbooks? Let me show you this shelf, two over from the end and near the windows, facing West.

I guess the best part is that this collection was as instrumental in educating me as any other part of college. That's the beauty of a Reference Collection: in a pretty manageable space--not too big and not too small--you can physically run the gamut of human knowledge, easily retrieving overviews and introductions to all topics known to man. Often taking care of the collection physically meant I lost 20 or 30 minutes to the content--the San Francisco books in the F section were fun to read and remembering reading them gives me a specific flavor of my first era in San Francisco as an adult. The style and world view of some of the older psychiatry encyclopedias are captivating without even delving into the denotation of their entries. Thumbing through a world atlas in the Reference Folio would unleash emotional wanderlust. The most rewarding and startling discoveries are the ones you wouldn't have found the words to describe if you searched for them in the catalog: books of quotes by women; statistics on injuries; Irish surname meanings.

This is how they used to make reference librarians, you might be thinking. In that case, I may be of the very last generation of reference librarians made by books and online databases.

So anyway, I went away on a one year educational leave and I came back and the books had been flagged in the weeding process. Yellow, green, pink, and blue slips of paper stick out of the books, making the stacks look vaguely celebratory. The UV light of the fluorescents are fading the colored strips already, so sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between green and blue.

Now I've been back for nearly a year and a half and as I trudge through the library with a heavy cart of books for discard, I often think that I came back to dispose of the thing I love. That may be the only reason I came back, to lovingly dismantle one of my best friends.

The empty spot in the Reference stacks from whence Short Story Criticism was discarded

Likewise, the empty spot left by the discarded series Shakespearean Criticism