Monday, October 1, 2007

Ridiculous Library of Congress Subject Headings: Week of October 1, 2007


On Saturday morning, I purchased a book called "Hanimals" at the Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale in Magnuson Park. When I opened the book, I was disappointed to find that there were no subject headings such as "Body parts as animals," "Shadow puppets, postmodernist" or "Painted digits." This art book had escaped the all-knowing eyes of catalogers and reminds me of how much work we have to do in this world. That's why I get up every morning...the anticipation of adding value to information.

This week's submissions come from first-year students who attended the ALISS/Silverfish brownbag event on Friday. Each student had about five minutes to flip through the big red subject heading books (located near the student mailboxes) to come up with the wackiest terms. Here is what they uncovered:
  • Forest fires, citizen participation
  • Botany, experimental
  • Umbrella repairers
  • Quitch - grass
  • Beanosaurs (Trademark)
  • Proctoscopy
  • Manned maneuvering units
  • Miniature horses
  • Prune industry
  • Cockroaches in Literature
  • Quails as pets
And the first prize winning entry was...
  • Metabolism in Architecture (found by Zach Hale)
Finding a quality picture of a pet quail was a lot harder than you'd imagine...but it wasn't so hard to find quail poetry.

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