It’s not just ‘dumbing down’ or lack of knowledge which
\nsometimes causes books to be misfiled within our libraries.<\/p>\n
I recently came upon a cd album of the pop band Japan,
\n‘The Best of Japan’, which was shelved under World music.<\/p>\n
These of us who work in the library world know about many
\nnovels which have the name of a character as the title work,
\nand that have been found on the shelves under the surname of
\nthe title, rather than under that of the author.<\/p>\n
I have even a book filed under the publisher name:
\nthe publishes name was on the book spine in a much larger type
\nface than that of the author.<\/p>\n
These things can and do just happen from time to time.<\/p>\n
What concerns me more is the way in which library books now
\ncome from the suppliers already catalogued,
\nand with the class number already placed upon the spine.<\/p>\n
It may save a lot of the costs involved in book processing for
\nthe various library authorities,
\nbut just as with pre-publication cataloguing by the publishers,
\nit does mean that we have to put a lot of faith in them getting it
\nall right.<\/p>\n
One of the reasons why this worries me,
\nis that there is now a lot less emphasise upon cataloguing
\nwithin library schools,
\nwhich in turn means that a lot of library workers are
\nlearning much less about just how to read any spine number,
\nsuch as those used in the Dewey classification system.<\/p>\n
Given the various costs involved in running libraries,
\nand the pressure to cut these costs during this recession,
\nwell I just don’t expect that there will be much more money to
\nspend on library staff training within the next few year.<\/p>\n
This makes me think that we might need to start rethinking just
\nhow future library workers are trained.<\/p>\n
This is also tied up with just how we teach people to use
\nlibraries, and just how students might learn that they can not
\nfind all the information that they might need upon the net.<\/p>\n
In the library world it’s known as borrower education,
\nbut what we really need is a higher quality of library staff
\neduction.<\/p>\n
This is in order to be able to provide the help that most library
\nusers really do need.<\/p>\n
It all makes for some long term issues which need to be
\nresolved within the library world.<\/p>\n
Now there really is an example of catch 22 at play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s not just ‘dumbing down’ or lack of knowledge which sometimes causes books to be misfiled within our libraries. I recently came upon a cd album of the pop band Japan, ‘The Best of Japan’, which was shelved under World music. These of us who work in the library world know about many novels which … Continue reading A Title by the Spine.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theproject.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theproject.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theproject.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theproject.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theproject.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.theproject.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theproject.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theproject.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theproject.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}