Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Missing in Action

What do Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe and D.H. Lawrence have in common?

People sometimes misspell their names. And when that happens, it's impossible to find them or their books in an online catalog.

I've recently corrected Austin, Allen and Laurence in the MassCat catalog. I've also changed some squiggly symbols so that Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë have the umlaut over the letter e. There are also all of those Japanese manga (is that redundant?) authors. They often have accent marks as part of their names and those accent marks don't always import properly into a new catalog.

As long as I can remember, the copyright symbol was indicated by the lower case c. After all, we used typewriters and didn't have the option of too many symbols. Now with computers, bib records actually contain © and sometimes ℗ if the item is an audiobook. Those symbols sometimes don't import correctly. I spend time every day correcting all of those various and sundry anomalies.

In the meantime, I'm plowing, progressing and puttering through the letter P. I finished reviewing titles beginning with the word Pop. There were a lot of books about Andy Warhol - not one of my favorite artists.

Tomorrow, I'm off to the Clark Art Institute with a friend to see the Renoir exhibit. I have my museum pass from my local public library. I remember the Clark back in the 1970s when it was a small, cute museum - and it was free. Now the admission is $20. I don't go there often enough to make it worth my while to purchase a membership, though I realize a membership is basically a donation and a monetary vote of support as well as the ability to visit for free.

Like most people I know, I have to make decisions on where and how to spend my money. I donate as much as I can to my local public library and they use my donation to help purchase museum passes that anyone can borrow.

Sounds like a good deal to me.