Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

Luckily just a silly article, rather than another statement about the decline of the profession:

Homo Britannicus by Professor Chris Stringer, a groundbreaking historical biological work about the origin of humans in Britain, was met with confusion at Manchester University, where librarians have filed all their copies in the “gay and lesbian” section.

Source.

Not sure where they get ‘all their copies’ from as the catalogue shows one holding only, and it seems to be shelved in 913 (Ancient World)….presumably the power of the Observer’s scorn has corrected any classification errors [Still, one wonders where the error could come from; either the cataloguers are copy-cataloguing from an authoritative source, or they’re doing it themselves by carefully cataloguing from the item; either way they should see what it’s actually about….)

LibWorld is a recent publication that’s worth a look for anyone interested in library blogging worldwide. It’s a collection of 30 articles, originally posted on Infobib.de. Each article discusses the library and information blogosphere in a different country; from the large and well-established (USA) to the smaller and perhaps more obscure (Trinidad and Tobago, Malawi). Walt Crawford did the introduction. And I did the New Zealand chapter. I’m mentioning that several paragraphs into the post because I’m not 100% happy with what I wrote; it was a bit of a rush job and I didn’t revise it subsequently for the book (the idea for the book came about when I was offline for several months).

However, there it is, in print. Go take a look, I’m sure something in it will be of interest. You can purchase a copy from the link at the start of this post, or download it for free (PDF, 211 pages).  Kudos to Christian, Nadine and Sarah for making this happen, it must have taken a lot of effort to coordinate with all the authors.