i’m number six! i’m number six!

December is a magic month for infomusings the blog. It was a year ago that one site listed this blog as the #1 LIS blog. Another year, another spammy site. But now I have fallen to #6.

I will let you in on the secret of how to be one of the best LIS blogs: abandon the blog for long stretches of time and then come back just to post some LCSH that belie your juvenile sense of humor. Occasionally write a rambling post on some obscure thing without making much of a point.

There, now that I’ve given you this valuable information, would you mind posting 100 links to this blog on your own blog? Sigh…

titles in worldcat.

All my friends and why Mario is the best
All my friends are animals
All my friends are cowboys
All my friends are dead
All my friends are electric
All my friends are evil
All my friends are fish
All my friends are funeral singers
All my friends are getting married
All my friends are ghosts
All my friends are going death
All my friends are going to be strangers
All my friends are gone
All my friends are here
All my friends are in bands
All my friends are leaving Brisbane
All my friends are made of paper
All my friends are married
All my friends are on Prozac
All my friends are superheroes
All my friends are trombone players

the revenge of Mrs. Bridges

via Catalogue & Index:

I picked up from John Attig’s blog (thanks!) the following outcome of the JSC meeting on 17th March, in the context of the development of RDA:

“The scope of Person will be extended to include fictitious persons. As a result of this, works that purport to be created by fictitious persons such as Miss Piggy will be treated as creators of those works.”

Vaguely relatedly, I was reading Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife & Times of Thomas Paine by Paul Collins recently. Fascinating book. Anyway, Collins comments on the fact that LC cataloged a book purportedly written by Paine after death under Paine, Thomas (Spirit). And then he goes on to discuss TomS vs. TomC (Tom, corporeal). (this is on pp. 82-3 of the advance reading copy I happened to get my paws on.)

File under more ways to amuse my cataloging students… and to make their heads reel from exposure to catalogers’ logic.

new feature.

With this post, I announce a new feature of this blog.

No, it is not posting more than once every two weeks, or posting anything of real substance.

I will begin collecting small scale category/classification schemes that I find amusing or interesting.*

A prize to start the collection… from a story about an MLA conference panel about sex at the MLA conference** that Simon tweeted:***

Many presenters at the MLA use categorization to make their points, and this session was no exception. Jennifer Drouin, an assistant professor of English and women’s studies at Allegheny College, argued that there are eight forms of conference sex (although she noted that some may count additional forms for each of the eight when the partners cross disciplinary, institutional or tenure-track/non-tenure track, or superstar/average academic boundaries).

1. “Conference quickies” for gay male scholars to meet gay men at local bars.

2. “Down low” sex by closeted academics taking advantage of being away from home and in a big city.

3. “Bi-curious” experimentation by “nerdy academics trying to be more hip” (at least at the MLA, where queer studies is hip). This “increases one’s subversiveness” without much risk, she said.

4. The “conference sex get out of jail free” card that attendees (figuratively) trade with academic partners, permitting each to be free at their respective meetings. This freedom tends to take place at large conferences like the MLA, which are “more conducive” to anonymous encounters, Drouin said.

5. “Ongoing flirtations over a series of conferences, possibly over several years” that turn into conference sex. Drouin said this is more common in sub-field conferences, where academics are more certain of seeing one another from year to year if their meetings are “must attend” conferences.

6. “Conference sex as social networking,” where academics are introduced to other academics at receptions and one thing leads to another.

7. “Career building sex,” which generally crosses lines of academic rank. While Drouin said that this form of sex “may be ethically questionable,” she quipped that this type of sex “can lead to increased publication possibilities” or simply a higher profile as the less famous partner tags along to receptions.

8. And last but not least — and this was the surprise of the list: “monogamous sex among academic couples.” Drouin noted that the academic job market is so tight these days that many academics can’t live in the same cities with their partners. While many colleges try to help dual career couples, this isn’t always possible, and is particularly difficult for gay and lesbian couples, since not every college will even take their couple status seriously enough to try to find jobs for partners. So these long distance academic couples, gay and straight, tenured and adjuncts, must take the best academic positions they can, and unite at academic conferences. “The very fucked-upness of the profession leads to conference fucking,” Drouin said.

Sad, sad, sad…

The comfort is that, much like the job market in LIS is not much like the job market in the humanities, my (albeit limited) experience has been that our conferences aren’t much like MLA.

And if I’m wrong, don’t correct me. I like this illusion. Seriously.

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* Ok, so this probably doesn’t really count as a new new feature, given that I’ve been posting interesting or amusing subject headings and classes on this blog for ages.

** How meta! We like meta around these parts.

*** Will I ever be able to talk about Twitter without a smirk? Maybe one day it will not seem ridiculous to talk about tweeple tweeting. I mean, circa 1999 or so, “Google” sounded pretty ridiculous, right?

the LCSH insult challenge

Tim Spalding at LibraryThing asks: “…if LCSH is a language (of sorts), how good is it for that most important role of languages—conveying insults?”

And of course since I collect headings that have amused me, I had to play…

The first one that popped to my mind was Horses–Anatomy. Also Horses–Manure.

Of course, there is always just Asses or Asses–behavior.

I know at least one person I might call an Emotional contagion. To such people one might want to say “You are my Nausea–Etiology.”

It’s bad if you are not the sharpest knife in the drawer and you are a member of the Dull Knife family. And then there is the Butt family. And my ancestors, the Downer family.

Someone can be a Headache or an Intractable pain.

I find it curious that there is no –Pain, since it could be used with many other headings. The closest I could get to my goal with this one was Buttocks–abscesses.

I do not know what a Bog-butter is, but it sounds like an insult. So do Butt rots.

Something sorely needed, perhaps as a part of employment tests: Thickness measurementability testing (not sure if that’s valid).

Some people just leave one speechless. One might call them Curiosities and wonders if one wanted to be nice.

Dam failures only works if spoken aloud.

Some people are full on Disasters (often with –Chronology tacked on). Often they are Messes in art.

And then there are your Monsters and your Freak shows.

Surely there are occasions to tell someone they need Anorectal function tests or that they need Defecation disorders–Diagnosis. I know I’ve at times wanted a Defecation–Fiction stamp to use on papers that I end up throwing across the room.

In fact the freefloating –Fiction can be used in so many places for sarcastic effect: Competent authority–Fiction, Ability–Fiction, Intellect–Religious aspects–Fiction, Food–Quality–United States–Fiction, or Hedge funds–Fiction.

And now back to work with me. Of course, I could stretch it and say this is work since I’m teaching more LCSH next week. But in reality we all know this is Procrastination. If Proposal writing in library science doesn’t kill me, not doing it will.

And now, the Exorcism of Distraction (Psychology).