Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 16

There was just a PA announcement, which is odd, because you don’t think of a library as having a PA system. Anyone in the library just heard that a theft had been reported, and all persons should not leave their belongings unattended.

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I really can’t help it; I always look through the art & photo books. Some that I’ve seen:

Photo book: Russian 1900-1917. The first photograph: looking from the street at a large building, a shop front, for the artistic photographer M.I. Rumiantsev.

Randomly from the middle: 1911 photo of school children outside their new school building in Archangelsk. Not a single one is smiling. Many are actively scowling. One girl has her arms folded, with a particularly severe look. Later, a photo from Malevich’s exhibit “Black Square,” showing his art on the wall, the various black, quadratic compositions as they were first viewed by the public.

The last photo: A group siitting at a board room table, a single bulb lamp hanging down above and between the heads of Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin leads towards Trotsky with a grin on his face, he is in on a joke which he hasn’t told yet; no one else is smiling.

Another photo book, the 1968 invasion of Czeckoslovakia. It is filled with photos where the only thing I can understand is the grafiti scrawled in cyrillic: “Go home.” “Moscow 1800 km –>” “We don’t need you. We don’t see you. We don’t hear you.” “Russians go home” “Why are you shooting friends we have no friends” “Ivan go home” “Soviet occupation” “Soviet fascists”

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PA: “May I have your attention please. A theft has been reported in the library.”

Media Librarian 1: Yet again.
Media Librarian 2: Stop walking off and leaving your bags!

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Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 15

Today starts with a bunch from a Hungarian publishing house, Akademiai Kiado, in Budapest. Some of their books are in English. I think one pair of books is the same – one in Hungarian, the other in English. But they have call numbers somewhat removed from each other, so either they are not exactly the same book, or the language change moves it around.

Another one in Hungarian, which is about ethnic relations in Transylvania, according to the subject headings. All I can think about is vampires, and how preying upon your neighbors wouldn’t make for good ethnic relations.

Sárközi seems actually to be a Hungarian name. I know nothing about the French president, but perhaps his ancestry is from further east in Europe.

I don’t know what the name of the Hungarian currency is, but it is abbreviated Ft, and it takes a lof of them to buy a book, so the prices printed on the back look oddly like elevations. 2600 Ft. This book printed at 2835 Ft. Written at 4400 Ft. Best read at 2980 Ft.

Also, I messed up today. The first Russian book after the Hungarian ones, and I added Cyrillic to the record I found, and updated it and then realized that I hadn’t really looked at it, I hadn’t added a barcode in the book or done any of the things to add it to our system, and furthermore, the existing record didn’t have call number so I shouldn’t have done anything anyway! I can’t assign call numbers.

In case you’ve been wondering, here’s an update on the media librarians: A serious discussion to determine whether an item is this four CDs accompanying a book, or a book accompanying four CDs? The question hinges upon whether the book exists only as liner notes for the stuff on cd. Also, different call numbers are assigned for an item from a public museum than for an item from a private museum, so there was some research into whether Oxford (in Britain) is public or private. Turns out the Brits don’t quite differentiate the way we do, but Oxford is about 80% funded by the government, so we’ll just presume it’s equivalent to public.

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 14

In no particular order, books that have caught my eye.

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Мы дзеці таве, Беларусь [My dzetsi tave, Belarusʹ] (We are your children, Belarus): A photo album of kids in Belarus, from infant to teen, doing a lot of extremely stereotypical Slavic things. In traditional dress, harvesting potatoes, singing, dancing, riding bikes, sitting with cats on top of stove, feeding chickens, peeling potatoes, riding sleds being pulled by horses or dogs. Just one page for riding skateboards & roller blades.

Agresja językowa w życiu publicznym : leksykon inwektyw politycznych, 1918-2000 / Irena Kamińska-Szmaj.
Polish: something like “Agressive language in public [something]: lexicon of political invective, 1918-2000”

“Istoricul tracţiunii feroviare din România”
Three colorful volumes (red, yellow & blue) on the history of railroads in in Romania.

A biography of Maxim Gorky. He is a mustachioed fellow; when I lived in Irkutsk there was a statue of him downtown that I thought was Stalin (also mustachioed) for a while.

Big fat book in Russian on the possible authorship of Shakespeare’s work. Who’s responsible? Everybody wants to know.

A catalogue of the Tibetan manuscripts and block prints in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciencee, by Gergely Orosz.

Миссия России : православие и социализм в ХХI веке / А.Е. Молотков.
Russian: “Mission of Russia: [Orthodox] Christianity and Socialism in the 21st Century” by A.E. Molotkov. I looked at this one and thought, ‘honestly? there is enough going on with this to write a fat book?’ and then I remembered I probably don’t know as much as I think I do.

Co dělat, když Kolja vítězí / Andrej Stankovič
Czech. Beginning of title looks like, ‘what to do’, no idea about the rest. Book copyright not the author, but Olga Stankoviča (heir). He passed away in 2001, but he’s still being published.

Oh yeah, doing this just on Fridays now.

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 12

More fun with Polish!

Here’s an English language book, published in Poland, on local adaptations and interpretations of Shakespeare. Flipping through it briefly, one case is about a Singaporean modern adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, called “Chicken Rice War,” wherein the unfortunate lovers are children of rival chicken rice vendors. Since everything is on the internet, here’s what the film’s website says: “It is in the midst of bitter rivalry, close friends and chicken rice that love begins to blossom.” http://www.mediacorpraintree.com/crw/index.htm

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So much Polish today! Here’s a book title I would reuse, in my imaginary rewriting of books based on how I think they translate: Dzień przed końcem świata, by Aleksander Jurewicz. Seems like “The Day Before the End of the World” to me. The cover features a 1940s black and white photo of a mournful little boy on a rocking horse, with a equally serious young man kneeling with an arm around the child. Perhaps it is actually a novel about WWII.

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A subject heading from a Polish book: “Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust”

That’s the thing — spend any amount of time poking around in Eastern European type things, and things start turning up about Jewish history, and the terrible things that happened to them. Not that I can keep track of all the books I’ve seen, but I can recall two or three just about the extermination of Lithuanian Jews during WWII. My supervisor, who is from Lithuania, mentioned that the financial crisis is bringing up anti-Semitic feelings there, given the stereotypical view of Jews being in charge of the financial system. Oh, and Bernie Madoff’s not helping.

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 11

Big excitement in Slavic cataloging! I found a book which is missing its last 14 pages. Goodness gracious! It will go back to the head Slavic librarian who orders everything, presumably it will be sent back as a defective copy, and exchanged for a complete copy. This is serious drama!

Okay, not very serious, especially compared to the trials and tribulations I hear the media ladies discussing (half of which have to do with cataloging, half of which have to do with their teenage children or aging parents). But my supervisor praised my eagle eye, and said I should get paid $20 an hour, which offer was quickly rescinded in the face of budget realities.

Budget realities, in fact, are pretty grim. I’ve also been told that incremental raises for student workers (every 150 hours you get a few extra cents!) are suspended for a year, and heard plenty of talk about how many people will be cut from library staff. No one has disappeared from the section I can keep track of, but there is lots of worried conversations about how they couldn’t possibly give up a specialist — “no one else can do the things I do” sort of thing.

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The non-financial sad part of this job: seeing really interesting novels that I shouldn’t even bother trying to read because it would take me years to get through 510 pages of modern Russian fiction. I only read short story collections, which are infinitely more manageable, but still get submerged by school work. The best story length is under ten pages, really.