"And then we came to the end" ~ Last 3 carts of Reference Discards

Today is a monumental Monday! I brought the last 3 carts of Reference titles for discard back to Tech Services today. Undoubtedly I will come across some stragglers as we begin the next phase of the project, the phase where we move all the green-flagged titles to the Stacks, but for now, this is it!

Of note, these carts included Humanities Index, Book Review Index (1965-2008), Book Review Digest (1980-2009), Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature (1890-1982), Collier's Encyclopedia, Academic American Encyclopedia, and Encyclopedia Americana. The old faithful Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature is now covered online in Readers' Guide Retrospective 1890-1982. Volume 17 of Book Reviews Index has a cute spine label:

Peeps gotta get a kick out of the Dialog throwback!

Otherwise to note, one mutilated volume of Encyclopedia Americana is lacking  a couple sections, which is something countless menders have had to address by tipping in ILL photocopies of the missing pages. At least you don't have to worry about that with online encyclopedias!

Strip of paper's edge where a section on China has been cut out of the encyclopedia

This is my last blog post for Reference Discards. Throughout this process of blogging each cart, I have come to a high level of acceptance about the project: these titles are better to be discarded and to be replaced with online versions when available. I shed few tears, except for those ageless ones that witnessed beautiful literary criticism sets go straight in the dumpster. Food for the worms!

The next phase of the project, moving tens of thousands of titles from Reference to the Stacks, is too large in scale to blog each cart. (I could try, but it would be pictures only -- maybe a project for Instagram?) Now that we are upon the planning portion of this next phase, I'm really going into a cold sweat: soon the Reference Room will be empty. Soon instead of the charge of stacks maintenance for reference, I will be overburdened with managing 50 or 100 more computers... :'(

Reference Discards: New York Times Index

I started the week off energetically by collecting all 121 volumes of the New York Times Index for discard. I think after this we've got 1 or 2 more carts of discards...

Large empty spot in Ref stacks where the NYT Index used to be... 

Reference Discards in the As

The return of the traditional printed Reference work!

- Did you know that in 1989, Belgium used 361,014 terajoules of natural gas?
- Did you know that 25 x 25 is 625?
- Did you know that Nicholas Cage's birth name is Nicholas Coppola and he was born in Long Beach, CA?
- Did you know that the 1983 winner of the Greyhound Derby was a dog called I'm Slippy?
- Did you know that on 17 Dec 1989, Brazil elected its first president in nearly 30 years, Fernando Collor de Mello?

All these random facts are brought to you by the 1997 edition of The Cambridge Factfinder, a perfect example of a previously extremely useful printed Reference work. We have the internet now, so these are falling out of use. And this particular one is on the Reference Discard Cart -- which is probably the second or third to last cart until the project is done (I discovered today there are many volumes of the NYT index we have to get rid of... this week I tackled the 22 volumes of the NYT personal name index).

We got rid of printed museum directories and subscribed to The Official Museum Directory online (I hope people find it to use it... some of this stuff kept under lock and key languishes since a Google search is easier (but not as comprehensive)).  

Also on this cart are two Book of Lists, which I remember fooling around with back when I did the evaluation and mending project on the Reference collection. A nice fat encyclopedia, and every school child's quintessential  World Book encyclopedia, those familiar blue covers and orange stripes. I know you have a story of discovering something in one of these when you were a kid... share it!

Lastly... I am totally biased when I say these 31 volumes of An Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities should have gone years ago... book reviews... printed indices of book reviews... so 20th century.

I wish to pause now and offer two sides of reflection that keeping this blog has allowed me. One, that we have done a good weeding that may have helped keep our united Reference collection relevant, and it is too bad that the weeding was only prompted by the directive to empty the room--I feel regret over this although it is totally out of my control. Two, I feel much less sad than I anticipated. By keeping this blog, I have worked out my regret, and I offer each entry as a memorial tribute to Reference as a discipline within library science, as well as a memorial tribute to each printed Reference work that has put itself in our service for so many years.

Here's our week in Reference discards!

Discards BX 905 C425 2001 - AS 2 G36 2001

In all likelihood this is the penultimate cart of Reference Discards so I went to great lengths to find some gems. I must confess I am not in the mood to read reference works for fun this morning (most likely because I have medieval Chinese manuscripts on my mind) yet I persevered for the sake of my dear reader!

When I looked at the Gale Directory of Learning Worldwide, I was like, "Who has use for this boring thing? --certainly not me." Whoa buddy, was I wrong. Turns out a reference work like this would have been helpful when I was crafting my Fulbright application in 2011, and later when I was arranging my educational leave from. For example, can the internet give such a comprehensive list of libraries in the Netherlands as this can? Not from what my Google-Fu can tell...

I like the ditty below because its covers are like red pleather pillow cases. For reals tho, it can be fun to poke around outdated theological encyclopedias... looking to see what they have to say about the Gospel of Judas... just kidding! That bad boy wasn't discovered until well after 1979. 

Was happy (and surprised) to see an entry for Apollinaire in this Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion... are they suggesting surrealism is a religion?... lol

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy delivered with a definition of Schrödinger's cat, etc... if you want to sound smart, just read this and intersperse its terms in daily dialog/FB posts/Twitter rants and you will see your standing rise (or others' regard for your pompousness rise).

Thanks to this little ditty, I have a new Russian author to check out... one that apparently writes on themes of China and San Francisco? This is too random to have been planned. Ivan Alexeievich Bunin (Google is trying to correct me into typing Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin... to which I say, Back off buddy!) FTW (hashtag the gentleman from san francisco) 

Last but not least (well...) I'm bringing it all home with the Dictionary of Behavioral Science... don't read this one to make yourself sound smart, just read it to get bored/fall asleep/contemplate the meaning of the classic printed Reference work. 

Nonetheless... in case you were wondering about the pleasure principle... I regret to inform you it was not first coined by Gary Numan... nor Janet Jackson!

Here's our week in discards! 

Discards CT100 C97 - BF575 G7 N38

The bulk of this week's discards are Current Biography, which we have 3 catalog records for and which were shelved in two different locations. (1940-1950 were in the Reference Annex and marked keep in Ref; 1951 - 2012 were in Reference marked for discard and to find an online version.) I took care of these descrepencies and we are discarding them all, although we have yet to secure access to an online version.

Otherwise there are a handful of theological reference works, including the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, which got cataloged and shelved in BL, but I wonder why not in the Q section? ...Ah the deep mysterious of cataloging ;-)

Discards CT 213 G37 - BX 801 C364 1981-2004

I am so close to finishing the discards I can taste it!

I am working backwards from the Zs to the As and today I made progress through the CTs up to the BXes. Nothing too sentimental or very noteworthy here (or is it that I have my focus on the study zone project and would rather be getting creative with the new signs!). The cool thing I found is some directories of archives and manuscripts repositories, which is important to remember -- they must exist in digital format now, and they will come in handy if I need to do that kind of work in the future. 

This week we discarded more of the Who's Who and biographies, and moved into the Catholic directories. 

Reference Discards DS102.8 E54 v. 1 - 16 through CT120 T893

It must be that time of year or time of day because I am just moving through these as fast as possible, waxing philosophic as less as possible. Maybe there are publications ripe for commentary and reflection on this full cart (Who's Who of American Women; Twentieth Century Culture; An American Biography -- is this the old guard telling us in dry terms who and what is notable, what people "did" in the last century, and if so, why should we trust them?) but my MO is getting them over to cataloging to be done with them.

Discards mostly in the Es and the Ds

This week most of the discards are our outdated ethnic reference books, as well as a few series of the Who's Who variety.

I don't have much to say except I want to chill on the binding of this older volume of Who Was Who, which I think is experiencing some brittle books syndrome. Just turning the pages for these shots caused quite a few rips and tears.