Psych, Soc, Ling & Af Am @ the Library

One of the big projects this year for our library has been to look at our “brittle books” and decide what to do with them. Do we have lots of copies, so we can sell the books that are falling apart? Should we buy new copies? Do hundreds of libraries own the book, so if folks need it, they can borrow it? (Especially if no one has checked the book out in 30 years!) Should we digitize it? Or has someone already digitized it?

Well, yesterday I was looking through the brittle books in my areas. Here was a Working Paper by Peter Ladefoged from 1967 from UCLA. (For those of you who aren’t linguists, Ladefoged is probably the most famous phonetician ever. He wrote the book that most students have used to learn about phonetics for the last 45-50 years. And he’s been tirelessly working to protect and study endangered languages. He just died in 2006.)

Anyway, this was an old paper. Not held by many libraries, but variations on it are held by hundreds. I would have liked to digitize it, but UCLA has a large number of Ladefoged’s works online. (And a wonderful memoriom to him as well.) So I checked UCLA’s site and look what I found: an archive of UCLA’s Papers in Linguistics! Just wonderful.

Not only does it include Working Papers, but also Dissertations and Master’s Theses (Master’s Theses are usually not available through ProQuest Dissertations, by the way).

Of course, the greatest site to list the grey material in linguistics, generally digitized and often free, is

http://www.lingref.com/lwpd/index.html

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In our catalog before, if you only knew the beginning of the title of a book or had a spelling problem, searching for the book might be futile or it appear anywhere on the list. Perhaps even on the second or third page! However, now we allow you to search for a title or author and get what librarians call a “browse” results list.

To use the the browse search, I click on the middle radio button on the library catalog search screen (Search begins with (browse)). I’ll search for a book I’m reading: Wikenomics.

See how cool? Even though I don’t know how to spell, I still find my book! (Actually, depending on the misspelling, this issue is often resolved in the basic search as well. You can get a “Did you mean ‘wikinomics’?” question that will lead you to the correct record.”)

But the browse should help you find books and authors when you know them already! Have a go at it!

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What is that Cryptic Note and Where has the Request Button Gone?

You might have noticed a new note in many of the entries in the library catalog:

LIBRARY WEST — [A-Z Call Numbers in West; Request 0-999 from Storage] — BF76.45 .R53 1997 [Regular Loan]

Many students and faculty members have asked me, rather confused what it means.Luckily, I had already asked someone else, so I could tell them.

Almost all of the books in Library West are catalogued following the Library of Congress Classification system (LC system), what the note refers to as books in the “A-Z Call Numbers.” These books are already in Library West. If they are in Reference, they are on the 3rd Floor. If they are in the circulating collection and can be checked out, they are on the 1st and 2nd Floor. In the library, you can get Floor Plans showing where books are located based on their call numbers.

Some of the books are still catalogued following the Dewey Decimal Classification system (Dewey system), what the note refers to as “0-999.”

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These are still in storage. Some will be reclassified into the LC system and relocated into Library West. Others will be left in storage. Either way, you can request them from storage and they’ll be brought to Library West within 24 hours, just like before.

But, as you can see, the Request link that you’ve gotten used to seeing over the past 2 1/2 years is gone!

Now to request something from storage, you need click on the “Online Requests” link at the top, right-hand corner of the page in the orange bar.

Click on picture to enlarge

When the page opens, choose George A. Smathers Libraries Forms. When that page opens, scroll down to and click on “Library West” or “Storage” Items. On the next page, click on alternative form. This is the actual form you fill out!

Or this is the URL: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/Storage/StorageRequest.asp

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