Library Hijinks

The reference staff of the New York Academy of Medicine has its own blog, now, which I was just informed of. (Actually, I knew about this a couple of weeks ago but between spending most of last week in California,  and being swamped with testing/implementing LinkFinder Plus, I just got around to posting it now.

It’s mostly for internal use which means that you have to be invited to post to the blog, but anybody is free to read it. It’s got tons of info about items and projects that go on here, so I’d suggest you take a look through it if medical libraries are your thing. Even if it’s not your thing specifically, blogging seems to becoming more popular in libraryland by the hour, so why not us? I’m also kind of happy to see it since it means I’m free to not necessarily make every other post about NYAM, although I’ll still post links to features on our website from time to time.

The blog is here and I’ve also made it a permanent link in the typelist sidebar.

For those of you really into RSS feeds instead (or as well), Bloglines, which is a decent RSS reader can be found here. Also, a list of related feeds and explanations of what they are can be found at the University of Manitoba.  Good stuff, yo. Enjoy!

I know, I’ve been away for a while. Between work, sickness (both mine and in my family) and deadlines for delivery of a hellish number of catalog records to the National Library of Medicine, it’s been both busy and distracting.

But it’s important to have fun while you’re cataloging a document. It doesn’t matter what it is. An example from this morning:

It’s a bit of fun to catalog the following grey lit document: “Marijuana and Methamphetamine Trafficking on Federal Lands Threat Assessment” from the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center. I don’t have a template for this one so we go with a new “Books” workform in Connexion Client (which I’m still getting used to, although I’ve decided from the experience I’ve taken from it over the past three weeks that I like it.)

The local item number is easy, so that’s my 099 $a NQ 15732. No problem. The title and statement of responsibility is more tricky. There’s no actual author mentioned anywhere in the text, so I settle for a 245 0 0 $a Marijuana and methamphetamine trafficking on federal lands threat assessment / $c National Drug Intelligence Center, and then before anything else, I drop down to the bottom of the form and get my corporate name/added entry out of the way: 710 2 x $a United States. $b Dept. of Justice. $b National Drug Intelligence Center.

Okay, now what? A couple of general notes : 500 x x "Product No. 2005-Q0317-007.", and "February 2005." take care of that. Whoops, forgot my publication statement and physical description, so let’s do that now:

260 x x $a Washington, D.C.: $b National Drug Intelligence Center, $c [2005]

. . . whereupon it occurs to me that there’s no real way to be totally sure of any publication date when dealing with non-copyrighted works like anything the the GPO is going to produce. Ah, well. Now to the physical description:

300  vi, 14 p. $b ill., maps ; $c 28 cm.

Gotta make sure the fixed fields match all that of course. No sweat. Okay what next? I’m still looking at the bottom of the page so of course I need an electronic resource trace:

856 41 $u http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs10/10402/10402.pdf (yes, that’s a live link)

followed by a 949 which I’m not going to put here (it’s on my constant data list anyway) and scrolling up to see what else needs to be here, I notice I still need a bibliographic resource statement. That’s easy, because it’s just one short page of (poorly cited, IMO) ‘sources’:

504 x x Includes bibliographical references (p. 13).

And a brief table of contents entry:

505 0   Executive summary — Background — Marijuana — Methamphetamine — Sources.

I miss the Clinton bunch–those guys could write heavy duty bibliographic reference lists. They loved research, they produced tons of it over eight years. This current bunch writes position papers that sound like they’re talking to a bunch of friends in someone’s living room–Sources? We don’t need sources. Those are for that reality-based crowd, you know like that asshole Ron Suskind talks to. Cretins.

Okay, after I save this to the local file, I have the real fun open in front of me. How to figure out what the heck MESH heading I can use for this.

Hmm. Marijuana seems pretty straightforward: "Cannabis" is all I get for the substance itself, although if people were smoking it, addicted to it, or dealing with the chemistry of the plant I’d have more choices.  "Pot" doesn’t work (I get thousands of responses all with those three letters in them); neither does  "reefer". "Weed" gives me a choice between "Dill weed", "Jimson weed", "Mayweed, Crown", or "Pineapple weed", which is instructive but not really helpful.  "Grass"  and "Herb" gives me every kind of plant known to modern gardening but no drug references, so I stick with what I have.

650 12 Cannabis $z United States.

I’d stick a qualifier in there if I could find one that had anything at all to do with moving the stuff from place to place. Actually, while I’m on the subject let’s stick 650 12 Federal Government $z United States in there as well.

Now for the second major subject:  "Methamphetamine"  is a MESH heading in its own right, but "Crank" is not (go figure.) Neither is "Crystal", which gives mostly chemistry terms, and "Meth" gives the same list as the full term. Still no qualifiers having anything to do with moving the stuff.

But . . . "Trafficking", it turns out is a valid search term but the list doesn’t give me anything I can use (I get twenty or so types of protein transport terms though). "Drug and Narcotic Control" helps a lot and it’s a valid search term. I think we’ll stick with that.

That’s a half hour out of my morning. I need seven more of these things to hit quota, after which I get to work on the serials databases, which is good, because there’s a few problems with the XML file that Serials Solutions is supposed to send us that need to be resolved. Work, work, work.

[Read more…] about Cataloging Grey Lit In the Trench

Things are someplace between late and never today. While not one to place blame on the tools of the trade, my PC at work was laid low by the RBot-I virus (I think), which worked its way through our branch of the internet this morning. Sophos caught it, but not before this thing had crawled deep into my hard drive, infected 10 different files, and froze my CPU almost solid.

Part of the problem (our very capable IT folks told me) was that the macro that usually updated my Windows 2K service packs had been shut off for some unknown (and, damn it, unknowable) reason, so the security upgrade I should have gotten last week never arrived. Which meant—in that cascading way that PC networks tend to follow—that the one hole in my security was exactly the one that the cretin who sent this bomblet my way was hoping to exploit. I’m not suggesting this jerk had me specifically in mind . . . mine was the only PC in the Technical Resources department to get swiped, but one in Access and two in the Rare Book Room got hit as well.

Anyway, Sophos lit a red flag at around 9.30 this morning, and work on the machine started shortly after. By that time my machine was badly infected and any work that had to be done on it (substantial to say the least) took several times as long as it might have on an uninfected PC. By ten o’clock it was clear that the security updates hadn’t arrived as expected . . . the IT guys I spoke to finally decided to delete the previous service packs and reinstall the newest one. The entire process of deleting the old files, downloading the upgrade, and installing the new files lasted until well after one in the bloody afternoon. (Say goodbye to the morning, Gracie.)

At half past one or so, I restarted the machine and it worked well enough. Then the IT guys logged into my PC by remote control and set Sophos scanning the hell out of my local hard drive, which took until just before four o’clock, whereupon 10 infected files were identified and killed. By that time, I’d passed up any opportunity for real work here . . . although I did have the chance to update about ten volumes of the New York City Rules & regulations: unlike 90% of what I do on a daily basis, like cataloging, serials management, or database management, replacing pages of the NYCRR takes only patience, attention to detail, and a bunch of trips into the stacks.

A word to the Wise Librarian . . . make sure your system service packs and virus definitions update regularly and on schedule.

And yes, this is why I haven’t updatted anything of worth today. But the weekend approacheth and with it, some free time. Tomorrow, Civil Liberties for sure . . .