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Venice lessons : industrial nostalgia : teaching and research in architecture / [editors, Harry Gugger [and five others]]. (OCLC #967143333)

This nice book showed up as a problem this morning. It seemed fine at first glance: a nice title page and verso matching the information on the cover, including title, author and publisher, and an ISBN (on the back cover and front matter), all matching the content in this DLC record.

BUT that record (and similar ones) all described a resource with around 60 pages, where the one in hand had 216 pages. Indeed, only about the first 60 pages appear to be children’s book material; there’s no new title page after that, but the content changes to a more serious work about the historic architecture of Venice; I’d have thought it was a bound-with, given the tape binding, but the pagination is continuous.

We found a record that matched the whole piece in hand, and included as explanation:

500 __ ǂa Contains no title page, title from cover.
500 __ ǂa "This is Venice", by Miroslav Sasek's is reprinted in its entirety and published 2016 as part of the larger work "Venic Lessons".

There was no second title page for the actual title of this book (“Venice lessons : industrial nostalgia : teaching and research in architecture”), only tiny print on the cover that is now mostly obscured by our barcode. Maybe there was a dust jacket that didn’t make it to cataloging? Also, a closer look at the children’s book content reveals added annotations in lighter print throughout.

To aid future catalogers who receive this piece, we’ve added the barcode from the front matter/back cover as an invalid barcode:

020 __ ǂz 9780789312235

and also a cover title:

246 3_ ǂa This is Venice
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Primitive city : urbanism & typology 2013 / by University of Kentucky College of Design: Akari Takebayashi + Team Primitive City. (OCLC #953993155)

I had some trouble with the subject cataloging and classification of this title. Just looking at it, it had chapters about various topics, including the circus, towers, crop farming, and sheep herding. The stated objective and keywords (urbanism, utopia, infinity, etc.) were hard for me to break down and compose into subject headings, so I brought it to our monthly Third Thursday problem session for discussion.

After lengthy discussion, we decided on a general heading which seemed to cover the topic well:

    650 _0 ǂa Architecture ǂx Philosophy.

plus a detailed contents note, and other notes clarifying the context. We classified as Architecture, General special:

    NA2540 .P745 2013
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Aerial photographs of Clay and Owsley counties, Kentucky. (OCLC #921306444)

In our last Third Thursday “bring your cataloging problems” sessions, our map cataloger brought some aerial photographs of “probably somewhere in Eastern Kentucky” taken in the 1970s. They had very little metadata on them to give us clues, so she’d selected two which seemed to have the most identifying features. How were we to find their specific locations? (Or should we just catalog them more generally, with the little information we did know?)

I posted the photos to reddit on the /r/whereisthis subreddit, and within a week I had an answer, complete with a Google Earth link which matched one of my posted photos. Success! We now have a nice full record with specific subject access:

651 _0 ǂa Clay County (Ky.) ǂv Aerial photographs.
651 _0 ǂa Owsley County (Ky.) ǂv Aerial photographs.
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It’s amazing the things you find when people retire and mail you the problem piles that result from cleaning their offices. Why did these things stay in processing limbo instead of moving out into the collection? It’s a mystery, but one that often doesn’t matter – the real question is, where should they go now?

This printout stuck in a nearly-cataloged book is from around 2003, so is probably from OCLC Passport? The call number label is no longer sticky, which is fine, because it is not the one we’d choose for this volume. Maybe that was the problem.

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Today our catalogers gathered to share and discuss our cataloging problems. This time my problems were so large I had to bring them down the elevator on a book truck!