Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

March Legacy Mob: U.S.S. California

After the success of cataloging the 1963 White House Library, we’ve made it into a monthly thing.

This month, starting at 12:00 noon EST Wednesday, March 3, and continuing for 24 hours, we’re going to be cataloging the on-board library of the U.S.S. California, as it was in 1905.

This California‘s library catalog were written up and published by the Government Printing Office, and has been scanned by the Internet Archive. Designed to serve the California‘s 830-odd officers and men—the libraries were separate—it offers a unique view of the navy of the time, and of the country. The ship, then rechristened the San Diego, and its library, went to the bottom of the ocean in 1918, the victim of a German U-boat. Six sailors died.

The “Legacy Mob” is an amalgam of two LibraryThing inventions:

Labels: flash-mob cataloging, legacy libraries, legacy mob

2 Comments:

  1. Karen Coyle says:

    This is utterly brilliant — the books in a book. Notice that the book was addressed to the University of California librarian, J. C. Rowell, a famed librarian whose classification system was used at UC Berkeley until the LC classification took over in 1913, and where you can still occasionally find a book with a "Rowell number".