Today's been very slow, probably because it's July, and too hot inside given the decrepitude of our A/C. I haven't seen anyone in over 2 hours up here.
I've spent the day doing some ILLs, which allow me to play with my new scanner, and getting up the gumption to do some cataloging.
Cataloging is probably the most universally unliked part of librarianship. I actually think it's fun, but then I've never been normal either. I was one of those who thought the library school fundraiser T-shirt with a "Top-10 reasons to become a librarian" was funny. Especially the "I love to alphabetize" entry.
It's pretty easy most of the time too. Much cataloging has already been done by the Library of Congress or (in my field) the National Library of Medicine, and you can download the stuff straight off the web. But you have to double check all of it, because sometimes what they've done is just .. weird.
One of the current batch of books is on medical statistics. "How to report medical statistics" to be precise. NLM thinks it should go under "History of Medicine", subsection "Medical writing and publishing. Historiography."
?????
I've recataloged it into "Public Health" (not the best place, but closer than history, and the only section with statistics as a subsection), "Statistics and surveys", further breakdown to "Theory or methods of medical statistics". This just seems a more natural place to put a "how-to" book on this subject, not to mention that in my small collection, I want to keep all the stuff on a given subject together. That's how my patrons search for it.
So it's time for my afternoon snack, and to download some more catalog records while checking them for sanity....
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