Пермяки : антология пермской фельетонисты конца XIX – начала XX вв. (OCLC #36784009)
If the cover of this book of humorous Russian poetry were a Dixit card, what sentence would you use to describe it? The back cover features a small dog peeing on a lamppost, if that helps.
This one showed up on the problem shelf because of series problems: it is volume 1 of a set (which may never have had other volumes) and that set is volume 2 of a series.
Gert Boon / Hans Ibelings. (OCLC #861955106)
This book about “one of the Netherlands’ ‘least known’ famous architects” had only a brief CIP record in OCLC, and even that had the distributor listed as the publisher. An over-narrow search could have missed that one! Now it’s upgraded to a full RDA record.
Another tricky bit on these architecture books is remembering to use the appropriate artist table (e.g. N6) when assigning an LC call number to reproductions/collections of an architect’s work.
“Весь Херсон” в шаржах : Крученых и Тарабановского / Сергей Сухопаров. (OCLC #752741916)
Despite being a bit rare (copy 210 of 250), this book already had pretty good copy in OCLC, so I only needed to assign an LC call number. I probably could have gone a couple of ways with this.
Fully half of the book contains one-page descriptions of people in/from Kherson (Ukraine), with accompanying comics by Tarabanovskiĭ, the artist on the right. However, the largest single section of the book is about the author on the left, Kruchenykh, by whom my library already has a number of works. I classed the book with a Z cutter under Kruchenykh’s class number, where I think it will best serve my library’s patrons. The city and comic artist are accessible by subject headings.
Some churches / Tasha Cotter. (OCLC #868901194)
I anticipated getting to use a 3,2,2,1 or 4,4 search to narrow this one down, because of its short title made of common words, but the phrase “some churches” turned out to not be all that common in the title index (only about 100 records in OCLC, easily scrolled through).
I do expect that one day Tasha Cotter will have the O vs. 0 shelving problem though.
Sborník k šedesátým narozeninám Prof. PhDr. Ludvíka Svobody Dr. Sc. / uspořádal J. Engst. (OCLC #18785334, and others)
Serial? Series? Analyzed?
This single volume was left on its own serial record. We have a series authority record for that title saying that we analyze the series, so I had to go find copy for each logical volume, and bind their records together too. (woohoo! boundwith!)
Now I just have to deal with the volume we found on the shelf nearby that has the same call number, is not in our catalog, but does not have its own unique title.
ארצינו : ספר מקרא על פי הנושא המרכזי לשנת הלמוד השניה או השלישית / מאת צבי שפרשטיין :ציר בידי אשר פורסט (OCLC #649829978)
When reaching the last mile of a big messy project, I recommend addressing any problem titles while the material is still fresh in your head, rather than letting them cook on the shelf for a while. In the meantime, you might forget not only how to type in that alphabet, but even how to copy and paste it.
A showcase of the Italian research in magmatic, metamorphic and applied petrology / under the patronage of the Gruppo Nazionale di Petrografia (GNP) and with the support of the 32nd International Geological Congress organizing committee. (OCLC #868312242)
It’s a book with a CD-ROM in the back. Wait no; it’s a CD-ROM with an accompanying booklet! Also, a special issue of a journal. Actually, three special issues bound (burned) into a mega-special-issue! The 33Xs and 740s are many.
The common place book of William Turner, M.D. : an exiled reformer under K. Henry VIII, and Dean of Wells in the reign of K. Edward VI, the father of natural history in England … (OCLC #52094229)
Ooh, a commonplace book, just like the Baudelaires kept! What exciting things lurk in here? I’m not exactly sure… The handwriting is crowded, and much of it is in Latin and Greek.
Having just given a talk this morning about searching for copy in OCLC, I feel a bit silly for finding the record sooner: I had only searched for “commonplace”, not “common place”. 246 now added.
Analysis of traffic growth rates / by Monica L. Barrett, R. Clark Graves, David L. Allen, Jerry G. Pigman, Ghassan Abu-Lebdeh, Lisa Aultman-Hall, Sarah T. Bowling. (OCLC #868084240)
We are cataloging this series of digitized documents in our institutional repository UKnowledge. Fortunately, most titles have print copy in OCLC with good subject cataloging and even some URLs for other electronic copies identified, so that helps us to derive our original records.
One difficulty is that there can be up to three different title-page-ish pages to choose from: a cover, an actual title page, and a report documentation page with fields organized into boxes. Not all of these may be present in a given report, but sometimes when they are, they contain slightly different information.
AccessMedicine / from McGraw-Hill Medical. (various records)
Platform change! Fortunately the old URLs redirect properly (hooray!) but surely the content is slightly different. The title-list format is definitely different.
To avoid re-cataloging the whole platform, and to help reliably spot the differences, I re-formatted the old title/edition list (using vim) to match the new format, and compared the two side-by-side (with vimdiff, shown).
Blue on the right means a new title has been added; blue on the left means a title has disappeared. Pink just means a difference, sometimes a new edition to be cataloged, but sometimes just a variant in punctuation, spelling or title choice.
The title list documents were pretty different, but it looks like relatively little new cataloging is needed! Next month will be simpler: I’ll download the current title list again, and compare with what I have now.