#catalogers

Today we bid a fond farewell to Special Collections Project Cataloger, Jennifer Dunlap, as she embarks on a new adventure at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. We wish her well! Jennifer’s parting gift to us (and you!) is a highlight of some of her favorite items here at the UChicago Special Collections Research Center. 

Top to bottom:

1. Duns Scotus’ Ordinatio I. [Venice] : [Johannes Herbort, de Seligenstadt, for Johannes de Colonia, Nicolaus Jenson et Socii], [1481]. This volume contains the first part of Duns Scotus’ Ordinatio or Quaestiones in quattuor libros Sententiarum (commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard). This volume is perhaps the most interesting binding of all the SCRC incunabula featuring blind tooled pigskin over wooden boards with brass “furniture” (metal attachments on the cover, usually to protect the binding), catches, and clasps. (Incun 1481.D9 Rare c.1) 

2.  Boethius. Boetius De philosophico consolatu … [Strassburg] : [Johann Grüniger], [1501]. Aside from the wonderful hand-colored woodcut illustrations, SCRC’s copy is full of provenance information including annotations, manicules, former owner’s inscriptions, and a few manuscript poems. (alc B659.D2 1501 Rare)

3. Barentsz, Willem. Deliniatio cartae trium navigationum per Batavos, ad Septentrionaelm plagam, Norvegiae, Moscoviae, et Nova Semblae … [Amsterdam] : [Cornelius Nicolai], [1598]. This map was produced to highlight the three expeditions undertaken by Dutch explorer and cartographer Willem Barentsz (c.1550-1597) between 1594 and 1597 in search of a Northeast Passage. It depicts he Arctic regions including Greenland, Iceland, northern Scandinavia, and northern Russia, as well as the routes that Barentsz’ ships took, not to mention numerous map monsters. (alc ff G3270 1598.B3)

4. Tennyson, Alfred. The ode by Alfred Tennyson on the opening of the Exhibition, 1862. [Coventry] : [Charles Newsome], [1862]. Part of the Gerald N. Wachs Collection of Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, this silk souvenir ribbon from the 1862 International Exhibition features Tennyson’s Ode on the opening of the Exhibition and a woven image of the Crystal Palace, where the exhibition was held. Tennyson was asked to write a piece which would be set to music by composer William Sterndale Bennett and performed at the opening of the Exhibition. The ribbon was designed by Edwin Rollason and produced by ribbon manufacturer Charles Newsome of Coventry. Newsome’s intertwined monogram appears at the top of the design in gold and cream. (ff PR5568.O15 1862)

5. Apian, Peter. Astronomicum Caesareum. [Ingolstadt] : [Peter Apian], [May 1540]. Another beautiful hand-colored 16th century imprint, this edition includes 22 volvelles, several of which feature the striking dragon design seen on the title page. SCRC’s copy is inscribed by Tycho Brahe to mathematician and astronomer Paul Wittich. (alc ff QB41.A639 1540 Rare)

6. Gart der Gesundheit. [Augsburg] : [Johann Schönsperger], [5 June 1486]. This German herbal printed in 1486 includes a wonderful example of a printer’s error, that of fallen type, near the end of the text. Fallen type occurs when a piece of type gets snagged on the leather covering of the ink balls while one of the pressmen is inking the form, gets pulled out of its place in the form, and ends up getting imprinted long-wise onto the page. These errors are fairly infrequent as the error would typically be noticed when the paper was removed from the press and the printer would return the fallen type to its place in the form and continue on with the job. (Incun 1486.G17 RareCr)

Our post today comes from Melissa Freiley, an LIS student at the University of North Texas and the library cataloging technician at Denton (TX) Indepedent School District.

“I get the biggest satisfaction from teaching,” Dr. Lois Mai Chan declared when asked about her greatest achievement in this 2014 video created by the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA). From 1970 until 2011, Chan influenced hundreds of future catalogers as she taught cataloging at the University of Kentucky (UK) School of Library and Information Science in Lexington. But this wasn’t all she did.

Born on July 30, 1934, in Taiwan, Chan studied foreign languages at National Taiwan University and went on to earn a Master of Arts at Florida State University. In 1966, Chan began working at UK as a serials cataloger. She joined the faculty of the then-UK College of Library Science in 1970, and in 1980 became a full professor after obtaining her Ph.D. in comparative literature at UK.

Dr. Chan had a deep impact on cataloging and classification. Not only did she teach hundreds of future librarians during her forty-five years at UK, but she also wrote over sixty research articles and published over twenty books throughout her career, including the popular textbook Cataloging and Classification: An Introduction, now in its fourth edition. In 1989 she earned the Margaret Mann Citation, “the highest honor in cataloging bestowed by the American Library Association,” which has been given annually since 1951. [We just published a post about Margaret Mann, for whom the citation is named, earlier this month! --ed.] CALA awarded her the CALA Distinguished Service Award in 1992 for outstanding leadership and achievement in library science at the national and/or international level. In 2006 she received the Beta Phi Mu Award for her distinguished service in library education. During her career, she also served as a consultant to the Library of Congress and OCLC’s Faceted Application of Subject Terminology project.

Dr. Chan died on August 20, 2014, but her legacy lives on through the newly-created Lois Mai Chan Professional Development Grant, established by the Cataloging and Metadata Management Section (CaMMS) of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) in 2017. The grant seeks to assist library workers from under-represented groups who are new to the metadata field in attending the American Library Association Annual Conference. The UK Lois Mai Chan Enrichment Fund also seeks to honor Chan’s legacy by providing assistance to UK students studying library science.

Dr. Chan may have believed that luck was the reason for her success, but her hard work and passion for library science and teaching are undeniable and inspiring.

Additional sources:

Happy National Black Cat Day! In honor of this day, we are sharing photos of one of our cataloger's cats. Clawdia, the black cat, is dressed up for Halloween as a lumberjack (or should we say, a cat-a-logger)!

Today’s post was written by Lorna Peterson, who is also the source of our posts on Betty Jenkins (2017), Clare Beck (2017), Aurelia Elizabeth Whittington Franklin (2016), Leaonead Pack Drain-Bailey (2015), and Clara Stanton Jones (2014). The image above is from “Small in Stature, Great in Spirit: A Tribute to Frances Yocom” by Betty Bolton, which appeared in North Carolina Libraries Volume 22, Number 3 in 1964.

Born in Pennsville, Morgan County, Ohio, on May 13, 1899, librarian Frances Lydia Yocom’s contributions to librarianship are many, but most notably are marked by her thoughtful, groundbreaking works on subject retrieval of research about and by African Americans, her book reviews of works concerning African Americans, and her bibliographies, which preserve for us titles that without her documentation would likely remain lost to future readers.

Her published works provide a bibliographic foundation for understanding the complexity of subject information retrieval, controlled vocabulary, and implicit bias.  Notably, her Berkeley MA thesis published as A list of subject headings for books by and about the Negro, by the H.W. Wilson Publishing Company in 1940 and cited in Arna Bontemps 1944 Library Quarterly article “Special Collections of Negroana is one such seminal work.  Her 1942 review of The Negro Federal Government Worker by Lawrence J. W. Hayes in the Southern Economic Journal minces no words on discrimination and shortcomings of the Civil Service merit system as researched and described by the author Lawrence Hayes.  In the same issue of the Southern Economic Journal Ms. Yocom reviews with great care and praise, Eliza Gleason’s The Southern Negro and the Public Library[1] which in turn has been cited by library historian Cheryl Knott.[2] These titles are just a few of the works published by a scholar who is in need of remembering and deserving of a deep, and rich, biography.

Who was this white woman who worked at historically black colleges and universities as well as predominately white institutions, and was a librarian who used her bibliographic skills in the crusade for racial justice? Who and what shaped her mission to live in a world of racial equality?