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thewayneI run interlibrary loan (ILL) for our university branch campus library. Effectively we're a community college, but we don't yet have that in our name. Anyway, I had a lot of books to process today - two incoming, no big deal, but five outbound and one was a monster two volume set!
And that two volume set is the cool part.
The title of the book is The History of New Mexico. Okay, that's not terribly notable or interesting, in and of itself. There's lots of books on the history of New Mexico. We have quite the storied history going back over 400 years to Nuevo Mexico. As I said, this is a two-volume set. Hardbound. Over a thousand pages. One of the things that I do when I mail out books is I flip through them to see if there's any apparent damage: loose pages, writing, highlighting, etc. And I note them on a sort of transaction invoice that goes with the book so the receiving library knows if it comes back from their patron the worse for wear.
Well, flipping through this, the first thing that's apparent is that it's a old photocopy of a very old book. Like, the copy was made back in the '60s or '70s perhaps, though this printing is somewhat newer. Usually the Library of Congress code on the spine of the book lists the date, but that's a newer thing and this one doesn't have that. So I look up the publish date.
1907.
For those of you without instant recall, or knowledge of when states were added to the Union, that is FIVE YEARS BEFORE NEW MEXICO BECAME A STATE! (Arizona and New Mexico both became states in 1912, NM on Jan. 6, AZ on Valentine's Day, then Alaska and Hawaii rounded out the 50.)
Now, in my book (honestly, no pun intended), that's pretty cool. I can't wait to look at it a bit more closely when it comes back.
Discoveries like this is why I think ILL is the coolest job in the library.
And that two volume set is the cool part.
The title of the book is The History of New Mexico. Okay, that's not terribly notable or interesting, in and of itself. There's lots of books on the history of New Mexico. We have quite the storied history going back over 400 years to Nuevo Mexico. As I said, this is a two-volume set. Hardbound. Over a thousand pages. One of the things that I do when I mail out books is I flip through them to see if there's any apparent damage: loose pages, writing, highlighting, etc. And I note them on a sort of transaction invoice that goes with the book so the receiving library knows if it comes back from their patron the worse for wear.
Well, flipping through this, the first thing that's apparent is that it's a old photocopy of a very old book. Like, the copy was made back in the '60s or '70s perhaps, though this printing is somewhat newer. Usually the Library of Congress code on the spine of the book lists the date, but that's a newer thing and this one doesn't have that. So I look up the publish date.
1907.
For those of you without instant recall, or knowledge of when states were added to the Union, that is FIVE YEARS BEFORE NEW MEXICO BECAME A STATE! (Arizona and New Mexico both became states in 1912, NM on Jan. 6, AZ on Valentine's Day, then Alaska and Hawaii rounded out the 50.)
Now, in my book (honestly, no pun intended), that's pretty cool. I can't wait to look at it a bit more closely when it comes back.
Discoveries like this is why I think ILL is the coolest job in the library.
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Date: 2024-09-03 11:17 pm (UTC)Hugs, Jon