Journal, week 13
Two things about this week were a bit unique. First, Allison was out for the whole week volunteering at NecronomiCon Providence, so for the sake of accountability I kept track of all the work I did and reported to her once I was finished. Second, I was at the library Monday through Thursday this week in order to catch up on hours to meet the PFE requirement. This put me at 127.5 hours at the end of the week, which means I'll come out to a neat 135 hours after my final visit next Monday. I'll break down my journal for this week day by day.
On Monday, the staff had a meeting about programming for the rest of the month. This was going to be a light week, so the tail end of the meeting was fairly short and everyone had said their piece within a half hour. Knowing that she was going to be out, Allison and I last week discussed some things I might spend my time doing outside of regular cataloging. I started my day by cutting long strips of beige card stock to use as book flags. In search of a way to allow for quick distinction between items needing to be shelved in different spaces, Allison had come up with the idea of using a differently-colored flag for cataloger's reference (CR) items. I cut a good amount of these new flags and then started on the task of remaking all of the CR flags I'd put together in the last few weeks. This way, there would be uniformity at least among all of the items whose records I'd already updated.
During the rest of last week, while I wasn't in, a few of the curators had left some new acquisitions on my desk for cataloging. I took care of those new items first, then went through a list of record cleanup that I'd put together for myself. A few of the records I'd been tasked with correcting hadn't been pulled physically from their shelves, so when I finished I let the appropriate staff know if there were any meaningful changes that needed to be updated on the items themselves (new call numbers, size designations, etc.). I spent the last of my day working through CR items, stopping at a large set of similar-looking books.
This "large set" ended up being the JCB copy of Joseph Sabin's 29-volume Bibliotheca Americana, and working on this item occupied the entirety of my Tuesday. Joseph Sabin was a notable rare-book collector and dealer in the 19th century; born in England, he spent the majority of his career working in Philadelphia. The Bibliotheca Americana was his "master work," beginning publication in the 1870s and concluding with the help of Wilberforce Eames and R. W. G. Vail after Sabin's death in 1896 (McKinney, 2005). It honestly is a monumental work, and talking with Cheryl Kaletsch, Cataloguing Assistant, I learned that it's one of the works the JCB staff rely on most heavily when researching authority records and the provenance of rare items.
Each of the books except for volume XXIX is a two-volume set, which means there are fifteen books in total. The books themselves were in varying condition, from good to poor to incomplete---for example, the copy of IX-X has a few loose leaves around page 64, and its rear cover is fully detached along with with pages 543-574; the copy of volumes XIII-XIV was missing its front cover up to page 34. In addition to plating and reflagging all of the volumes and refining most of the items' record's MARC fields, I also worked briefly with Terra Huber, Book and Paper Conservator, to hold together some of the less fortunate-looking items. Essentially, we just used twill tape to tie the volumes together while they sit on the shelf---reference items don't receive the same kind of preservation attention that rare books would, so rebinding the items or placing them inside an alternative bound box wasn't a crucial task.
On Wednesday, I finished my work on the Sabin volumes and reshelved the whole set. Then, I finished the task of reflagging the cataloguer's reference items with the beige flags. I moved onto a few other multi-volume collections, then spent the beginning of my Thursday finishing them. Knowing that I'd done a good amount of work and that my final day of my PFE was approaching, I sent Allison an email of the items I'd worked on and indicated where the next intern might want to begin when they arrived in a few weeks.