Random bullets of cataloging (and other randomness)

  • Our cataloging class had its final meeting on Tuesday night. It was a good class; I still don’t think I’d want to be a cataloger full time, but I enjoyed learning how to do it. Next term I’m taking a course on content representation, which deals with some of the same intellectual territory.
  • I’ve also handed in my end-of-term project: I had to pick five books and catalog them. Among other books chosen for the cataloging challenges they posed (series titles, anonymous authors, corporate authors, tricky subject heading choices), I threw in Edward Gorey’s The Broken Spoke, just for the fun of it. I don’t think classing it in the GV1040s with other works on bicycling was quite cricket, but there’s a logic to it, at least.
  • I just finished reading Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, which is partially based on the life of the soprano Olive Fremstad. I loved it. It had been sitting unread on my bookshelf for ages, part of a little cluster of novels about opera that also includes Robertson Davies’ The Lyre of Orpheus (read, enjoyed immensely) and James McCourt’s Mawrdew Czgowchwz (not read yet, but soon). The latter is #5 on the list of most-shared books for the operaphiles’ LT group. The fiction+opera tagmash page suggests others to investigate, though in this case the LC subject headings are actually useful.
  • In unrelated news, I’m gazing longingly at the spate of fabulous new perfumes from the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (they finally made a scent inspired by Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan," among other things), and reminding myself that I must pay my tuition bill first, then contemplate blowing my budget.

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