#library records

Details from Woman posing for a studio portrait, ca. 1938.

So whenever I see someone post “tig ol’ biddies,” I’m reminded of something from my days working in library acquisitions.

The way we had our computer records system set up, we’d have one entry for a subscription -- or, more commonly, a subscription bundle -- and separate entries for each individual title we got through that subscription/bundle.  "Bundle A gets us titles B, C, D, and E,” “This Title D is part of Subscription A,” and so on.

In many places, this would be referred to as “Parent” records and “Child” records -- the subscription/bundle is the “Parent,” and the individual titles are the “Children.”  (And sometimes Grandchildren, in cases where a title is received b/c we get another title which we get b/c of a subscription.)

But I’m in the South.  And the head of Acquisitions at the time this system was being set up grew up on a poultry farm.

So instead of “Children,” the individual title records were “Chicks.”

And instead of “Parent,” the subscription records were “Biddies,” which is a term used to refer to mother hens (used, as far as I can tell, only in the South).

Subconsciously, the raison d'etre of library records and beat tapes has become a talking point within our in-house assessments about our future directions in sound: What if, rather than pursuing a full three minute pop song, we instead aim to quickly devise a two minute instrumental that can temporarily set a definitive mood?