I came down with an icky cold last week, and I thought it was all better but I started feeling sick again yesterday. Does anyone remember the Anastasia Krupnik book where’s she’s obsessed with the possibility that she’s caught leprosy? She keeps checking out a medical book from the public library that lists all the symptoms and concludes that because her earlobes itch, she’s destined to move to a leper colony. I watched Papillon a few days ago, where Steve McQueen escapes the horrible french penal colony system and winds up on an island set aside for lepers briefly. Even when dealing with lepers, McQueen is the essence of cool.
I don’t have leprosy, but I always tend to assume the worst when I get sick. So since my throat is sore, I’m wondering if I have strep or the black death. Hopefully I won’t infect my sister when she comes for a visit tomorrow
Good and Bad Things at the Reference Desk today:
Bad - People acting miffed I say I won’t watch over their backpacks for them. Seriously, they shouldn’t want to leave their stuff at the reference desk anyway, as I’ve been known to walk around and help people find books in the stacks. I don’t want to be responsible for any random belongings left behind the reference desk. What if all the librarians where I work are secretly kleptomaniacs? Don’t be leaving your backpack with people you don’t know!
Good - I managed to absolutely thrill a student when I showed him the non-English language news sources in Lexis Nexis.
Bad - Obscure ancient science journal abbreviations that don’t appear in my handy reference book of journal abbreviations. What’s with all the journal title abbreviations? Who started this? Was it scientists whose time was too valuable to type out the full name of the journal? And doesn’t is suck when the journal may be in a different language, so ann. may mean annals or annales or annalen? I totally cheat with science reference questions sometimes and e-mail the professor in my family for help, especially when I don’t have any other librarians around to ask.
Bad - Someone looking for a government document who isn’t sure what the format of the document is, but it has something to do with geology somewhere in the New England area.
Good - Some of the students in a class I taught earlier are following up, stopping by the reference desk or e-mailing me for help.
Bad - While I understand why someone want their child to practice the violin, it is rather difficult for me to answer a rather complicated reference question about psychology research while being serenaded loudly with selections from the first Suzuki book. Could people call the library after practice? I find it hard to try to think of possible research strategies when I have to listen to an extremely loud badly out of tune rendition of “The Old Grey Goose is Dead”. Three people are waiting in line for help. At one point, I end up describing the search features of PsycInfo from memory on the phone while silently demonstrating for someone else how to search MLA at the desk.
7:20 am on October 19th, 2005 1
I am not surprized that, with your finely honed Commando Librarian skills, you are able to answer two questions at once, similar to the way the action movies show the hero punching and kicking two different enemies. If you also had a Vitamin C lozenge tucked in your cheek, you’d be fighting the cold too!
7:50 am on October 19th, 2005 2
Next time I’ll try to remember to take cold meds!
10:12 am on October 19th, 2005 3
Yes, I know you’re simply kvetching, mostly tongue in cheekly, and boy howdy do I sympathize, but …
“Was it scientists whose time was too valuable to type out the full name of the journal?”
Ummm … type out? These abbreviations originated when you took your notes LONGHAND. I say hurrah! for abbreviations, especially standardized ones. Although I did cheat while dissertating: I used a little home-printing set for the journal titles I used most, just stamped out ten, twenty index cards at a time, all I then had to do is fill in the page numbers. (It’s not only scientists who use abbreviations!)
And for printed citations, using the abbreviation saves a lot of ink and space, especially when it comes to the standard journals everyone cites over and over.
“And doesn’t is suck when the journal may be in a different language, so ann. may mean annals or annales or annalen?”
No OCLC terminal handy? I just ran a keyword search on the abbreviations of five of the journal titles I’m cataloguing, and they all popped up in very short hit lists. In any case, the abbreviation for the rest of the title should let you know what the language is, so you’d know which one is meant.
Good luck on your cold. Nasty things, colds!
Tanuki
10:14 am on October 19th, 2005 4
P.s. re: cold — Tiger Balm. Rub a little along the sides of your throat and in the hollow, i.e. that v-shape around the Adam’s apple, the moment you feel even vaguely sniffly. Really does help.
11:14 am on October 19th, 2005 5
I’m obviously still loopy from the cold, of course people were writing notes in longhand back then
I did try WorldCat (I don’t have cataloging super-powers), but while I was finding journal titles that were close, I wasn’t finding anything that was matching up for time period of this particular title. I ended up finding a likely candidate though, I think the abbreviation was for a French physics journal.
6:23 pm on October 19th, 2005 6
Urban legend: abbreviations are used in science citations so that the total character count is minimized, thus saving ink, paper, and cost. 19th century journals didn’t start articles on new pages — they crammed ‘em in on the same page where the previous article ended. Sometimes, saving a character meant saving a line, and saving a line meant saving a signature, and that meant one more volume before the price had to be inreased. If only modern publishers were so judicious in minimizing costs.