Buyin' books

In preparing to order some titles requested by faculty members, I also decided to review what has previously been purchased to increase my knowledge of the collection. I found this book record in a electronic file in our purchasing program:

Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. Bennett, Tony. London; New York: Routledge, c2004

and promptly looked it up in the online catalog to see how it is represented.

Now, you tell me, based on this catalog record, which museums are discussed in this book:

Museums -- Historiography.
Museum techniques -- Historiography.
Museum exhibits -- Technological innovations.
Evolution -- History -- 19th century.
Evolution -- History -- 20th century.
Science -- History -- 19th century.
Science -- History -- 20th century.
Colonies -- History -- 19th century.
Colonies -- History -- 20th century.

I'll give you another route: let's check the online table of contents:

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Dead Circuses: Expertise, Exhibition, Government
The expert as showman
Time and space in the museum
Evolution as temporal conscience
Expertise, exhibition, government and the 'new liberalism'
International networks and the new museum idea
Chapter 2 - The Archaeological Gaze of the Historical Sciences
The odds and ends of history
Reading the rocks
Filling in time
History in motion
Chapter 3 - Reassembling the Museum
Black-boxing evolution
Bureaucratising the past
Archaeological objects
Chapter 4 - The Connective Tissue of Civilisation
Accumulating pasts: habit, memory and self government
Archaeologising the self and the social
Evolution, culture and liberal government
Evolutionary accumlators
Chapter 5 - Selective memory: racial recall and civic renewal at the American Museum of Natural History
Evolution, ethics, government: philanthropy and the state
Nature's many lessons
Renewing the race plasm: accumulation and difference
Chapter 6 - Evolutionary Ground Zero: Colonialism and the Fold of Memory
Colonialism, liberalism, culture and the state
Vicious circles and rigmaroles: the plan of creation
Shallowing the past
From 'let die' to 'let live'
Chapter 7 - Words, Things and Vision: Evolution 'At a Glance'
The spaces in-between: evolution and its blind spots
Seeing and knowing
Classification and the arrangement of the visible
Object ventriloquism and evolutionary expertise
Developing clear-sighted attentiveness
Postscript: Slow Modernity
Endnotes
List of Illustrations
References
Index

Did that help? No? Of course it didn't!

This is what I call the prickly liminal space of cataloging. This record does in fact conform to the standards of cataloging. However, the essence of how someone might locate this book is not entirely captured, as the names of museums is not one of the searchable elements.

I'm not just picking on this book. Let's try the same exercise with this title:

Museums and social responsibility / edited by Robert R. Janes and Gerald T. Conaty. Co-published by: Museums Association of Saskatchewan.

Now, since the publishers are Canadian, the smart money bets that some Canadian museums might be included in this tome. But do we know for sure? Not 'til we glide to the 6th floor and select this item from the shelf.

There is in fact a reason why books like this have subject headings such as Museums--subdivision here. If a book talks about more than three items in a similar category, instead of listing out all the terms, a plural heading is applied. It took me a thorough read of Thomas Mann's Oxford Guide to Library Research (Oxford, 2nd edition, 1998) to really get this concept, but understanding it has helped me enormously as I know now when I simply have to hit the stacks and browse. Art researchers, do not despair and think that your discipline is the only one subject to the tyranny of the "more than three" rule of subject headings. Mais non! Here are some of my other favorite pluralistic subject headings that require physical browsing of titles:

For Belinda Edmondson's title Making Men, here are some of the subject headings:

Caribbean literature (English) -- Women authors -- History and criticism. Caribbean literature (English) -- Male authors -- History and criticism.
Indian literature (English) -- History and criticism.

Which authors??? Which titles??? And how many of you would have typed in the name of a character of you were researching a novel?

I shall begin winding down this tirade with just one more example:

The book Insatiable Appetite: the United States and the ecological degradation of the tropical world by Richard P. Tucker has the following subject headings:

Tropical crops -- Economic aspects -- History -- 20th century.
Tropical crops -- Environmental aspects -- History -- 20th century.
Investments, American -- Tropics -- History -- 20th century.
Environmental degradation -- Tropics -- History -- 20th century.

Now, part of the reason I am so intrigued with subject headings is that I struggled mightily with cataloging as a graduate student. Mightily. It took me several years of "on the job" investigation and actually handling sources and getting deeply acquainted with the structure of information in different fields before they truly made sense.

You, dear reader, are likely to be more adept at matching up the question you have with the representation of the knowledge storage container (catalog record) where the information resides. However, if you find your self at sixens and sevens with subject subdivisions like "handbooks, manuals, etc." or marvel that the subject heading for pop-up books is "Toy and movable books -- Specimens" then my friend, I can be of use to you!