Kennedy and Khrushchev

Since I'm now working on the letter "K" in my alphabetical list of duplicates, a couple of weeks ago I arrived at Kennedy.

A search on the single keyword "Kennedy" brought up over 2,000 hits. It likely would have been more, but some of the problems were resolved in the "John" search.

Besides Jack, Bobby and Ted, there are lots of other people whose names include Kennedy, like William Kennedy who wrote lots of books found in library collections and therefore increased the number of hits.

Shortly after Kennedy, came Khrushchev. There weren't nearly as many hits, but there were several hundred - again, many having already been merged because they were found in the Kennedy (or John) search. My teen years occurred during the 60s, and I was acutely aware of the Cold War. I even learned how to spell Khrushchev (perhaps it was a school assignment). I found one bib record with his name misspelled, probably because the record had been hand keyed into the library's former catalog.

Since most of the MassCat members are school libraries, I have concluded there are lots of materials (mostly books) covering the 1960s. I have since learned that there was lots of money for public schools in those years and library collection were well developed. Unfortunately, that's not still the case. School libraries are chronically underfunded and since librarians want their libraries to look as if they have resources, there's not much weeding going on. I'd really like to see a chart or graph of the publication dates of school library collections. I can just about guarantee it would skew heavily to the latter half of the twentieth century.

I can attest those were interesting times that today's students should know about, but how often are most of these books read?