More on cataloging challenges
Just to add to my comment/description above, the rate of books catalogued per hour was also slowed down by the fact that Library of Congress often did not have the items (pamphlets, self-published books, etc.) in this very special library, at least not by the title of the edition that I had in front of me. Many of them however could be found in libraries that specialized in or were local to the issues being written about. WorldCat was one way of quickly locating the item in a library. Then I “copy catalogued” what call number that librarian had assigned to the item. Often times, two libraries (for instances, both in the UC System but at different universities) would catalog the item differently. Here it wasn’t too useful to split hairs, as the main purpose of the catalog was to group like items with like items, and to be able to find the damn book!
Another interesting fact is that often times the professor I was working for would have gathered some interesting fiction that related to or illustrated a particular subject or era in history and shelved it (in his informal system) with the nonfiction (perhaps for use with a special class that he had taught). But in our new system, the fiction will be shelved far from its nonfiction cousins. However, Readerware stores keywords and subject headings, so I hope that the works of fiction can eventually be found again by consulting the catalog.
