Non-Fiction Five Challenge: Book 4

Maxwell, Nancy Kalikow. Sacred Stacks: The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship. Chicago: American Library Association, 2006.

3 stars. The author draws an analogy between religious calling and the calling of librarianship. There were parts of this book with which I could nod my head in agreement; however, the author takes an analogy and consistently stretches it too far throughout most of the book. I had to force myself to continue throughout most of the early chapters, but the later chapters were written in a more engaging style. I struggled as to whether or not I should rate this as a 2.5 or 3. I decided to err with the more generous rating although I'm not sure that it's quite at that level.

Morristown Power Outage

Last Friday night, 2/3 of Morristown was without power. I was driving back from Knoxville and had noticed the outage as I got into town. I was very grateful that those of us who lived in the county had power, but it's pretty bad when your grocery store is pitch black. Morristown's paper does not publish on Saturday, but on Sunday morning we discovered what the cause of the outage was. It's one of those things that is too good to give away so I'll let you read all about it in the Citizen Tribune.

Nanny's Diary

I rediscovered my maternal grandmother's diary recently. It had been in a box that hadn't been opened in awhile. I pulled it out to read. One of the things that amazed me is that she would often mention events that occurred on that day in history.

For example, on Dec. 7, 1976, she stated:

This is Pearl Harbor day. Seems so long ago.
So many changes have taken place in my life since then & in the world also.

On April 25, 1977, she wrote:

On April 25, 1910 we had snow. It killed some of my father's young cotton and he had [to] plant over in some places.

Most of her entries talked about the weather or who had phoned or came to visit. However, these (and several other entries) offered so many insights.

I wish she'd gone on and on about how things were before and after Pearl Harbor so we could know a little more about the changes she had witnessed.

I wonder how she could so clearly remember the date of a snow 67 years before when I can't remember them from one year to the next!

Hazle Boss Neet (1921-2008)

Many persons doing genealogical research in northeast Mississippi will recognize the name of Hazle Boss Neet who published a book of records on Pontotoc County records. She died last Saturday and will be buried this coming Sunday. Her obituary appears in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.

Why I've Been So Quiet This Week

You may notice that I've not really been blogging much this week. It's because I've been spending a lot of time working on the church library. We are in the process of reorganizing it. We basically emptied the library and once we had it emptied for a fresh coat of paint and a little new furniture, we started selecting the books we wanted to keep. Several of us have spent most Saturday mornings this year going through the books. We finally made it through the 7000 or so books that were in there by the end of April or first week of May. I've begun the process of cataloging those that we are keeping on our new automation system. We will eventually mount the catalog for searching on the church's web site. I've trained several of the other volunteers in book processing. (Believe it or not, I'm way ahead of them. At my real library job, I struggle to stay ahead of our student workers who do the processing.) This week has been a bit of a challenge. The church's server crashed last week. While most of the offices are back online (and the server was being replaced today), the church library and things on that side of the building are still offline. I've not been able to import books from the Internet so I've been going through books to see which ones we are keeping lack ISBNs which is the field on which all imports are done on this system. I've listed those books with enough information in Excel spreadsheets that I can go home and do authority work and determine subject headings and call numbers for the items. I then take that back to the library so that I can plug away at it the next day in the church library. While I've made some progress this week, I've been able to do probably 25% of what I could have done if the Internet connection had been live. I've been spending the time I would normally spend blogging or synthesizing and inputting information from my recent New England trip trying to make my next day profitable. I got far enough ahead of myself last night that I didn't have to bring "homework" tonight!

So . . . what are we doing with all those books that we aren't keeping? I'm so glad you asked. We're having a book sale, of course! It's this Saturday at First Baptist Church, Morristown, Tennessee. We will be open for church members only in the morning; however, we are open to the public from noon to 3 p.m. All items are 50 cents. Besides books, there are records, audiocassettes, and videocassettes. Most of the books are duplicates or items that don't fit our new collection scope. (We had a lot of classic children's books but our new collection development policy limits what we are collecting to mostly Christian materials.) In other words, we have some good stuff available. The church is located at 504 W. Main. You may enter the book sale from the Jackson Avenue entrance near 1st North.

Tuesday Thingers

This is the first time I've participated in this meme. I saw it today at Boston Bibliophile.

Last week I asked what was the most popular book in your library- this week I'm going to ask about the most unpopular books you own. Do you have any unique books in your library- books only you have on LT? How many? Did you find cataloging information on your unique books, or did you hand-enter them? Do they fall into a particular category or categories, or are they a mix of different things? Have you ever looked at the "You and none other" feature on your statistics page, which shows books owned by only you and one other user? Ever made an LT friend by seeing what you share with only one other user?

I found 302 of my 1411 titles in LibraryThing were unique to my library. Many of my unique titles are from my genealogical books (especially surname-specific or locality-specific ones) or from my cookbook collection. (Most of those which were unique were locally published titles.) I have manually entered 222 titles; however, I often think creatively about which libraries might have a title before giving up! I have occasionally looked at the you and one other user page. In fact, I did tonight and discovered that my best friend and I share a book that we probably both purchased on a trip to San Diego a few years ago. I will have to say that I'm going to have to communicate with one of the others that I spotted on there who obviously shares an interest in Monroe County, Mississippi history and genealogy.