Journal, week 4
There was no staff meeting scheduled for today and the pollen index had decreased, so when I arrived I got right to work. I figured I could get through six books, one for each hour I was in, minus the half-hour I took for lunch, and then spend my final hour reviewing and plating.
Of the work I had to do today, one notable item was a two-volume set of "French explorers of the Pacific." I wasn't sure how the library wanted me to account for the two books' relationship, so I created three distinct entries:
- One entry for the first volume on its own.
- A separate entry for the second volume on its own.
- A third, separate entry for the two volumes collected as one single item.
In situations like this, I have been turning toward the OCLC records to make my decision. Usually, there will be one method that has been held by a large number of libraries, and I will take that to be the industry standard. In this circumstance, however, there were many different versions of this item available, none of which were particularly accurate and none of which seemed to be favored over the other. Reviewing with Allison, I learned that best practice is to treat the two-volume set like one item, assigning them both the same call number with vol.1 and vol.2 text appended to the end of the call number on either volume's flag. Conceptually, this makes a lot of sense to me, as even though the two volumes were published a few years apart they were clearly intended to be received as a single "work."
Another exciting item I encountered today was given to me by José Montelongo. It is a newly-published transcription and translation of the Book of the Dead from Huexotzinco, edited by Tara Malanga. The original manuscript, which JCB itself holds!, is a Nahuatl-language death registry kept by the Indigenous community in Huexotzinco, MX, between 1619 and 1640. It's notable because the registry was demanded by Spanish colonial government but all the work of keeping the record was performed by members of the Indigenous community, so the ways in which deaths, lineage, community allegiances, etc. were described offers insight into the ways in which these communities saw and organized themselves. The translation I cataloged had a really fascinating, informative introduction, and I do hope to see the original manuscript before my time is over here—I'm going to ask José at a later time.