ideath ([info]ideath) wrote,
@ 2009-05-08 12:07:00
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question for library people
I know multiple people who know about how libraries are run! (Being a librarian was a dream when i was a tot. I had romantic fantasies about a life of solitude, dedicated to dusty stacks of wisdom-filled books. Ah, romance! But i never followed up on that, somehow, and now i am without a clue as to my vocation.)

CC by-nc-sa by Obie FernandezIt strikes me that said people, who followed up on their calling to librarianship. might be able to help me with a puzzle i'm presented with at Free Geek. We have a small library of cast-off computer books. We are cataloging them with OpenBiblio and shelving them according to their Library of Congress numbers. But we haven't figured out what to do with books that have no such number.

There's also the problem, or semi-problem, that our books are all computer-related, so the LoC numbers (largely limited to QA* and TK*) don't really create particularly useful or obvious "sections" in our library. Love to hear any suggestions about that, too, since the volunteers who work in the library do not in general have the knowledge necessary to create or shelve according to more thematic categories.



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[info]pmb
2009-05-08 07:32 pm UTC (link)
Alphabetic by title. Computer books have boring names, and they almost always start with the name of the technology first. Or perhaps an adjective or verb. But either way, "Learning X" will all be together "Java Y" will all be together, "Advanced Z" will all be together, etc. It's easy, and still encourages happy accidents of finding adjacent books.

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[info]ailie
2009-05-09 12:44 am UTC (link)
I would be inclined to agree with Peter, since you say it's a small library. However, you could also look up the ones you haven't found on OpenBiblio on worldcat.org, then look for holdings information from academic libraries, then click through to their catalog to see what call number they've applied.

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[info]ailie
2009-05-09 12:48 am UTC (link)
Also, most academic library OPACs will have a MARC view which you could export and then import into OpenBiblio.

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[info]boojum
2009-05-10 04:03 pm UTC (link)
I like Peter's idea of shelving. I think it'd be productive to combine that with some equivalent of staff picks or "so you want to be a sysadmin" lists. That way, someone who wants to learn Java from a standing start doesn't have to navigate "Learning Java 1.2", "Learning Java 2" (damn you Sun, for your peculiar approach to numbering systems!), "Learning Java in Fourteen Days", and so on without help.

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