Life and Light

In my quest for eliminating all duplicate and inadequate records from the MassCat catalog, I am still slogging through the letter L. I just finished viewing possible duplicates of titles beginning with the word Life (and there are a lot of them) and have been working on titles beginning with the word Light (and there are a lot of THEM).

Usually, as I have said before, I do a keyword search on one or two words, sort by title and then begin looking at each record as I scroll down the list, 20 records to a page.

When I was working at the beginning of the list, I found lots of problems: duplicates, misspellings, weird characters that should be accent marks, records too skimpy to identify the specific edition. Now that I'm nearly half way through (L being the 12th letter of 26), most of the pages are error free, though I still find things that have snuck in (or maybe I missed).

And there are records being added constantly to the catalog, sometimes in error (there's already one there) or the record is CIP (Cataloging In Publication) and is missing some details such as page numbers.

As I continue through the alphabetical list of each search, though, the last half of the alphabet is in far worse shape. It's a good reminder how much is still left to do to clean up this catalog.

On a sad note, my youngest sister, Wendy, 55 years old, a life-long smoker and single mother of beautiful 18-year-old twin girls, was diagnosed in November of 2016 with lung cancer. She's been undergoing chemotherapy and radiation and is now in a Hospice facility near her home in New Hampshire. I visited with her on Monday. Two of my other sisters and one brother were there and I got to spend time with them, also.

I barely know Wendy. She was only 3 when I left home to go to college, so we never really lived together. In 1987, she was living in Berkeley, California with her (now) ex-husband. I went to the ALA conference in San Francisco and stayed several extra days so that I could visit with her. It's the only extended time we ever spent together as adults and I very much enjoyed her company.

Life and Light. When Wendy is gone, she will take with her a Life and a Light.