Once again I'm a bit stumped - there's nothing mysterious within the material I have at home, so I'll have to rack my brains and think back to some of the more surprising things in our collection.
So we don't have any "mysterious objects" in the collection itself, not really - if it's not a book, we're not likely to have it anyway. There are a few random objects, photographs, microfilms, even a CD-ROM or two, but they're not exactly surprising things for a library to have. Certainly not mysterious!
One of the things I suppose I could talk about are some of the mysteries I had to try and solve when I took over the library from the retiring librarian. Of course there was a handover, but everyone knows that there's tangible knowledge and intangible knowledge, and it's all very well handing over the library manual or whatever, but there's so much information stored away inside a librarian's brain that doesn't get handed over.
I certainly found that despite my best efforts each time I went on maternity leave - we get lots of books, and it's always a puzzle to work out where they've come from and why (when they've not been ordered, that is). I've got this down to a pretty fine art now, but it's something I was taught when I started there, and then honed through the years, and I come back and find that a book hasn't been treated how I'd expect it to have been treated because the source wasn't identified correctly in the first place - I hasten to add this is only the case for a small number of books, the majority of work people did in my absence was fantastic!!
My library manual currently runs to 17 pages, and most of what I do still isn't in there yet *weeps*.
But anyway, one of the mysteries I had to solve was trying to understand the contents of the shelves of the library office.
I'll be honest, there's still plenty there I haven't worked out yet, but here are some of the mysteries I have solved:
So we don't have any "mysterious objects" in the collection itself, not really - if it's not a book, we're not likely to have it anyway. There are a few random objects, photographs, microfilms, even a CD-ROM or two, but they're not exactly surprising things for a library to have. Certainly not mysterious!
One of the things I suppose I could talk about are some of the mysteries I had to try and solve when I took over the library from the retiring librarian. Of course there was a handover, but everyone knows that there's tangible knowledge and intangible knowledge, and it's all very well handing over the library manual or whatever, but there's so much information stored away inside a librarian's brain that doesn't get handed over.
I certainly found that despite my best efforts each time I went on maternity leave - we get lots of books, and it's always a puzzle to work out where they've come from and why (when they've not been ordered, that is). I've got this down to a pretty fine art now, but it's something I was taught when I started there, and then honed through the years, and I come back and find that a book hasn't been treated how I'd expect it to have been treated because the source wasn't identified correctly in the first place - I hasten to add this is only the case for a small number of books, the majority of work people did in my absence was fantastic!!
My library manual currently runs to 17 pages, and most of what I do still isn't in there yet *weeps*.
But anyway, one of the mysteries I had to solve was trying to understand the contents of the shelves of the library office.
I'll be honest, there's still plenty there I haven't worked out yet, but here are some of the mysteries I have solved:
- Guidebooks of Italian churches - these are part of the Pouncey donation still waiting to be catalogued
- Intelligent Design and other strange and irrelevant titles - these books used images from our collection just to make their books pretty
- Lots of our catalogues - for a while the librarian wanted to house the archive of museum material...separately from the archives...
- Part of our collection of auction catalogues - some of them are richly annotated so held separately from the rest of the collection (I can only assume)
As I said, there's still plenty I haven't figured out yet (and I've had the last 8 years to try!), for example:
- What's on the floppy disks??? (I've got nothing that will read them!!)
- What are all the Russian books? (Are they even Russian?!)
- Where's the missing volume from the set of original catalogues?
- What is the thing that looks like an enormous stapler but has nowhere for staples to go?
Maybe when I get back I'll have a go at trying to solve a few of these mysteries!
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