Wednesday, April 7, 2010

World War II ends...TONIGHT!

Or so I hope. Last night I discovered to my embarrassment (as I was helping a student, actually) that we still have books with subject headings in which World War II hasn't ended - the subject heading used is "World war, 1939-" instead of "World war, 1939-1945." I'm hoping they'll all "flip" to the correct heading tonight.

This is why ongoing catalog maintenance is a good idea. I've also noticed that, if a person has died sometime after 1950, there's a good chance they're still alive in our name and subject headings. "Aged" (which should be "Older people") is a known problem and being worked on - I could flip them overnight, but there tend to be more problems with these records than just a single out-of-date heading, so I'm doing them by hand. Headings containing "Afro-American" (which should be "African American") are also still in the process of being flipped - the remaining ones basically need to be done by hand.

::sigh:: I could really use a second me for full-time maintenance work. However, our "browse" searches are working much better than they used to.

2 comments:

  1. Oh...makes you want to check the Korean and Vietnam wars too.

    I think we each need a clone! Just think of all the things we could fix.

    Yes the catalog (Bibliographic database) is getting LOTS better.

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  2. ...Darn it, we've got "Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-" and "Vietnam (Democratic Republic, 1946- )". I've set those up for flipping 2 days from now. It looks like we're ok with the Korean War, though.

    ReplyDelete