mock library soup
Jul. 18th, 2005 12:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacPick up a trade book published in the US in the last forty years or so, flip over the title page (i.e. turn to the verso, as latinate bookaholics call it), and as likely as not you'll see a label reading "Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data" and, beneath it, the old-fashioned catalog-card format of the cataloging for the book, except that the collation and size are missing.
CIP is a program whereby LC catalogs a book from galley proofs and sends the info back to the publisher before the book is published, so that this can get printed in the finished book, which in turn (cutting a long story short) is convenient for libraries purchasing it.
Every once in a while, however, I see a small-press book with CIP so wonky or downright wrong that I wonder how it got that way. I'm not usually handy to the LC database when I see it, so there's no way to check, but though LC makes hilarious mistakes on occasion, there's a difference between the mistakes of a cataloger and the mistakes of someone who has no idea what cataloging should look like. Did some publisher's employee from another planet garble the data before typesetting it? It would be hard to imagine garbling that bad.
At the library conference I attended last month, I found out.
A dealers' room table had a small-press children's book publisher whose wares I examined, and which had this kind of really bad CIP. It's a one-man operation and the publisher was behind the table. A little gentle querying elicited the answer: he didn't know that CIP comes from LC. He thought he was supposed to supply it himself. And of course he had no idea what he was doing.
It wasn't a good occasion to discuss this in full, so I simply said that I'd like to e-mail him about this later. He seemed receptive and I've done so. There's nothing wrong with creating this data and calling it "publisher's suggested cataloging" or something, but he should get a cataloger to do it, and he shouldn't call it LC CIP unless it comes from them.
I've gotten a nice reply - I think he's going to drop this altogether for future books - and an offer of one of his books as a thank-you. Future present for a grand-nephew, I think.
CIP is a program whereby LC catalogs a book from galley proofs and sends the info back to the publisher before the book is published, so that this can get printed in the finished book, which in turn (cutting a long story short) is convenient for libraries purchasing it.
Every once in a while, however, I see a small-press book with CIP so wonky or downright wrong that I wonder how it got that way. I'm not usually handy to the LC database when I see it, so there's no way to check, but though LC makes hilarious mistakes on occasion, there's a difference between the mistakes of a cataloger and the mistakes of someone who has no idea what cataloging should look like. Did some publisher's employee from another planet garble the data before typesetting it? It would be hard to imagine garbling that bad.
At the library conference I attended last month, I found out.
A dealers' room table had a small-press children's book publisher whose wares I examined, and which had this kind of really bad CIP. It's a one-man operation and the publisher was behind the table. A little gentle querying elicited the answer: he didn't know that CIP comes from LC. He thought he was supposed to supply it himself. And of course he had no idea what he was doing.
It wasn't a good occasion to discuss this in full, so I simply said that I'd like to e-mail him about this later. He seemed receptive and I've done so. There's nothing wrong with creating this data and calling it "publisher's suggested cataloging" or something, but he should get a cataloger to do it, and he shouldn't call it LC CIP unless it comes from them.
I've gotten a nice reply - I think he's going to drop this altogether for future books - and an offer of one of his books as a thank-you. Future present for a grand-nephew, I think.
