1. The editor’s introduction to Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary, by her ex-husband, is famous among bibliophiles: “Working alone and without government support (or even comprehension) she managed to assemble the six thousand weirdest words in the English language. Nobody asked her to do it because nobody thought such a thing was possible. In fact, I asked her not to do it.”
1. “Fewer added entries are required and no more than one or two subject headings need be added to the core record.” (Willy Cromwell, “The Core Record: A New Bibliographic Standard,” Library Resources & Technical Services, 28 [October, 1994], p. 422.)
1. David H. Shayt, quoted in the Washington Post, July 5, 1992, p. C8. A copy of the illustration Shayt found appears with his remarks.
2. Thomas Mann, “The Principle of Least Effort” and “Bibliography,” in Library Research Models (Oxford University Press, 1993). The same book provides numerous other examples of information that can be found only by direct examination of subject-categorized books.
1. At least three such services are currently available: EBSCO Discovery Service, Primo Central, and Summon Article Finder.
2. Descriptions are taken from the EBSCO website at www.ebscohost.com.
3. The database descriptions are largely taken from the ProQuest home page at www.proquest.com.
4. This list is derived from the company’s online brochure at http://support.dialog.com/publications/dbcat/dbcat2010.pdf.
5. Descriptions are taken from the Gale Cengage website at www.gale.cengage.com/catalog/facts.htm.
6. Descriptions are taken from the online information pages available to subscribers of the FirstSearch system.
7. A study by John Martin and Alan Gilchrist, An Evaluation of British Scientific Journals (ASLIB, 1968), once found that in the Science Citation Index, citing authors abbreviated Proceedings of the Institute for Electrical Engineers 24 different ways.
1. This points up another persistent problem with copy cataloging available in the OCLC system: catalogers at smaller libraries are not in a position to see the range of new books being published in any given subject area, and so may tend to assign broad subject headings to books because their own collections are not large enough to require finer distinctions. The broad headings they use then get picked up without review by larger libraries, which should be making finer “specific entry” distinctions.
2. See http://about.jstor.org/service/early-journal-content.
3. I am most grateful to Alistair Morrison, Director of Product Planning at LexisNexis Academic Library Solutions, for his help in sorting out a very complicated can of worms here, and for permission to take descriptive information from company sources, among them: The continued existence of these specific URLs is in doubt, however, since much of LexisNexis has recently been acquired by ProQuest; but ProQuest.com should remedy the situation.
4. Descriptions in the section are derived from the company’s website, www.heinonline.org/.
1. Descriptions of the Web of Science products are derived from their printed sets and from their home page at http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/multidisciplinary/webofscience/.
1. Beall, J., et al. “The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Titles Represented in OCLC WorldCat.” College & Research Libraries, 66, 5 (September, 2005), 431–435; and DeZelar-Tiedman, C. “The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Titles Represented in the RLIN and OCLC Databases Compared: A Follow-Up Study to the Beall/Kafadar Study.” College and Research Libraries, 69, 5 (September, 2008), 401–406.
2. I cannot resist referring researchers to the reference to a disgruntled note, famous among reference librarians, recorded in the Pre-’56 NUC in the entry for James Wolveridge’s Speculum Matricis (vol. 671), and the bibliographic ghost recorded in entry NP0576549 (vol. 471), which is not owned by the University of Oregon. Similar peculiarities add dashes of color to otherwise stodgy reference works in other areas. The way to tell if your library has the first (1980) printing of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is via the presence of a decidedly unconventional spelling of the word “fugue” in vol. 7, p. 782, column 1, line 2. The obscenity is corrected in subsequent printings. Also in the 1980 New Grove set, two hoax entries slipped past the editors, for the fictitious composers Guglielmo Baldini and Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup; in later printings these spaces are filled by illustrations. A hoax entry also appears in the 1971 edition of Music since 1900, entered under 27 April 1905; subsequent printings reproduce the entry with an explanatory disclaimer note. In the Congressional Record of September 27, 1986, p. S14050, col. 1, a memorandum in support of a bill to outlaw indecent communications by means of telephone includes a full-paragraph transcription of a dial-a-porn message, thereby making the Record itself a printed means of indecent communication. Chapter 42 of Niels Horrebow’s Natural History of Iceland (London: A. Linde, 1758), entitled “Concerning Owls,” reads “There are no owls of any kind in the whole island.” The “rights” statement of Hillel Schwartz’s The Culture of the Copy (Zone Books, 1996) vents explicitly the secret wishes of many authors; it reads:
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, replicated, reiterated, duplicated, conduplicated, retyped, transcribed by hand (manuscript or cursive), read aloud and recorded on audio tape, platter, or disk, lipsynched, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including genetic, chemical, mechanical, optical, xerographic, holographic, electronic, stereophonic, ceramic, acrylic, or telepathic (except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 or U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press who promise to read the book painstakingly and all the way through before writing their reviews) without prior written permission from the Publisher.
Finally, male readers will wince, and some feminists cheer, at the singular particulars of the death of the son and heir of Sir John Hussey Delaval, later created Baron Delaval, as succinctly recorded in G. E. Cokayne’s Complete Peerage, vol. 4, p. 139, note (b).
1. Following the Equator, vol. 1 (vol. 5 of The Writings of Mark Twain), epigraph to chapter 11, p. 125 (1897; reprinted 1968).
2. Here as elsewhere in this chapter I am passing along some of the savvy of Washington Post reporter Joel Achenbach.
3. See “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference” at www.guild2910.org/Pelopponesian%20War%20June%2013%202007.pdf. It is a copyright-free paper, so simply googling its title (in quotation marks) will also bring it up.
1. Other techniques such as original observation and analysis, controlled experimentation, site examinations, and statistical surveying or sampling are beyond the scope of this book.
2. An August 22, 2011, paper on Inside Higher Ed, “What Students Don’t Know,” effectively explodes the myth of the “digital native.” The open-source article appears quickly in Google if a search is done on its exact title, in quotation marks.
3. For a much more extensive, and technical discussion of reference sources see my article on “Reference and Informational Genres” in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd edition (CRC Press, 2010), vol. 6, pp. 4470–4480.
4. A librarian colleague once e-mailed me to ask for a copy of a previous edition of this book; she said some of the academics in her school were teaching this, and she wanted to hit them over the head with my book. I sent her a hardcover copy.
1. The point here is similar to that recognized by the drafters of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As Jacques Maritain, one of the drafters, wrote, “It is related that at one of the meetings of a UNESCO National Commission where human rights were being discussed, someone expressed astonishment that certain champions of violently opposed ideologies had agreed on a list of those rights. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘we agree about the rights but on condition that no one asks us why.’”—Jacques Maritain, “Introduction,” p. 9, in Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations: A Symposium edited by UNESCO (London and New York: Allan Wingate, [1949]; reprinted, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, [1973]).
2. “For example, complex numbers were invented and the theory of them deeply investigated by the early nineteenth century, a mathematical development that seemed to have no relevance to physical reality. Only in the 1920s was it discovered that complex numbers were needed to write the equations of quantum mechanics. Or, in another instance, when the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton invented quaternions in the mid-nineteenth century, they were regarded as an ingenious but totally useless construct. Hamilton himself held this view. When asked by an aristocratic lady whether quaternions were useful for anything, Hamilton joked, ‘Aye, madam, quaternions are very useful—for solving problems involving quaternions.’ And yet, many decades later, quaternions were put to use to describe properties of subatomic particles such as the spin of electrons as well as the relation between neutrons and protons. Or again, Riemannian geometry was developed long before it was found to be needed for Einstein’s theory of gravity. And a branch of mathematics called the theory of Lie groups was developed before it was found to describe the gauge symmetries of the fundamental forces.”—Stephen Barr, “Fearful Symmetries,” First Things, 206 (October, 2010), 35.
3. Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is an interesting example of an observer’s status, in light of its famous concluding paragraph:
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning containing matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
According to these criteria Hume’s Enquiry itself would have to be committed to the flames: it is not a book of abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number, nor one of scientific measurement or experiment. The unarticulated assumption of the author is that his own observer status enables him to present truths about the “closed” materialistic world-system he sees that cannot themselves be measured or quantified within it. If this is the case, however, then there is a tacit recognition that another kind of knowledge, the philosophical, can produce truths not provable by mathematical analysis or experimental scientific methods.
1. This list is largely derived from the more extensive discussion of these issues in my open-source paper “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries” at www.guild2910.org/future.htm.