Month: September 2018

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A “How-to” primer for biomass resource development / prepared by Electric Power Research Institute. (OCLC #29743402)

Sorting a list of titles without specified non-filing characters (or other sortkey) is so annoying; everything starting with articles get grouped together, and everything starting with punctuation floats to the top!

We avoid this behavior in our catalogs by encoding titles with non-filing characters; that is, the number of characters to skip before determining where to place the title in sorted order.

The title of this work starts with an article (“A”), a space, and then a double quotation mark. As we want to file this book with all of the other titles starting with How-To, we want to skip all three of these characters. This is encoded with a ‘3’ in the second indicator of the 245:

   245 03 $a A "How-to" Primer for...

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The 20-MW TVA atmospheric fluidized-bed boiler / prepared by Tennessee Valley Authority ; principal investigators, A. Manaker, J. Bass. (OCLC #22758855)

The Library of Congress Classification and Shelflisting Manual Part G 63 describes the process of assigning Cutter numbers in an LC call number.

This work has title as its main entry, so will be cuttered based on the title; since the title starts with the article ‘The’, we’ll base the cutter off of the next word, ’20-MW’, which starts with a numeral.

The manual’s section on Cuttering for numerals says “When Cuttering for Roman or Arabic numerals, use the Cutters .A12 – .A19.” Since this title starts with the numeral ‘2’, I was considering .A12, but the next instruction says:

Because of the infinite range of numbers, choose a Cutter
toward the center of the available span when Cuttering for the first numeral in a class. This will allow room for both smaller and larger numbers. Follow this practice even with relatively low numbers since decimal fractions are filed in numeric order before the number 1.

There were no other titles (or authors) starting with numerals in this part of our shelflist, so I followed the advice and cuttered with .A15: 

   TH7140 .A15 1989
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Encyclopedia of materials : science and technology / editors in chief, by K.H. Jurgen Buschow [and others]. (OCLC #47238922)

The OCLC record for this encyclopedia suggests that the accompanying CD-ROM includes the encyclopedia content, but I was suspicious of the “web access disc” wording and access code – it seemed more likely that the disc included links to an online resource version of the encyclopedia that would accept the access code.

If that’s the case, can we really circulate the disc? Are we allowed to just share our access code (and online access) outside of the library?

I checked the contents of the disc, and they are are as minimal as I expected – a single PDF (advertisement), plus some HTML pages with supporting images, and a “Register for web access” that points to a page on the publisher’s web site… a page which is long dead, since the disc is from 2001.

I’ll confirm with the selector for this branch, but assume we won’t be keeping the disc for our collection.