[Poll] On Wickerbottom

[GetNerfedOn]

31 minutes ago, gaymime said:

forgive me for being so aggressive....i am a bibliophile, i've been madly in love with books for longer than i have had formed memories(of my first dozen most of them have a book physically in my hands with almost all of those open and being read or read to me). i have been awed and in adoration of libraries since the first time i went to one and have been an avid proponent of them for most of my life up to and including filling out forms for book requests and participating in about two decades of purchases and donations and i took that personal feeling into this conversation. i'll dial it down.

 

since you used cataloguing and classifying interchangeably with your options AND did not provide the cataloguing type that the nypl used at the time  it made more sense to not assume you made a distinction & were only talking about the internal method she would have used. if we are making that distinction then there is no answer since she would not have used any of the ones provided unless she did so in defiance of her training and place of employment. having the answer be "most probably" correct also feels unfair since it disallows an accurate answer. additionally, please note that the billings system did have a standard and it was recommended that libraries using the billings system also hold the same standard for cataloguing its books as is shown here;

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC234707/

the books are internally ordered by the title of the book(for expediency) and are further catalogued by authorship, number(based on when the book was received numerically) and summery of the book as well as its encasement(or lack thereof). this instruction would be given to libraries outside of medical ones under his direction/the direction of the board he sat on as well which included the nypl(and as such there is no reason to assume he did not follow his own standard)

meanwhile the system you said was "most probably" is categorised by author's name as it is spelled in english before other descriptors(if i am correct it is last name first?)

for sure though the link i shared was not to push the idea of foc it was to show that even 70+ years after the billings system stopped being the primary system of the nypl bits of it remain and as such provide primary-source evidence for my original claim(and to be fair when i checked to reconfirm i was surprised to see that the billings system was still being used in new acquisitions up through the 1970's. i knew it had been changed over in the 50's and so assumed all new books would get the new system applied while they slowly worked through existing books).

i suppose though if you really are ok with stretching the technical truth and playing in a bit of conjecture there is a high-density archive at the nypl that is organised by subject with the the books in each subject grouping organised by it's size in relation to the other books in that subject grouping....but, like that is just something a fair few archives do even outside of libraries when there is not a lot of room(i cant remember the name but some years before covid there was this museum in germany that had shells archived this way; genus as the cabinet label and species ordered by size inside. it was beautiful and made me want to see more than just the single drawer i got to look at) and it is outside of my knowledge about when that practice was taken up by the nypl only that it is done now and you have to get special permission to request a book be pulled out of the archives to be picked up(frankly though i dont like playing in conjecture when i have verifiable sources i could use instead)

 

as for the transition? you have my sympathies! one of the places i worked at in my twenties went from paper billings to computer billing and the system was so noxious that first year only one person on staff could manage the transcription(sorry i don't remember the exact word for this) process. i did NOT envy giving her paper receipts(many of the newer ones i had written myself) to try and sort over and translate into something the computer would accept but also made sense to the staff. some of the books we had dated to back from before i was born and the computer did not like that they were sub-sorted seasonally and by payment method with no regard for names in the ordering and with not everyone who took the payments putting their own name down on every single receipt(we had button-land-lines so the phone wouldnt tell who did what you just had to look the name up of the person on-call that shift in a different book or infer that the person who wrote 15 of the 16 receipts out in that hour also wrote that 16th one as well) x____x

I appreciate your dedication to the written word. A rare quality.

We're drawing into the realm of widest conjecture and while I appreciate the dedication to pinpoint accuracy, the bottomline of the situation is this:

 - Question two is a trick question intentionally designed to waylay people into answering incorrectly, and then pique their interest given that the DDC appears the most accurate answer, and then most particularly, introduce the concept of Descriptive Cataloging as a separate, distinct discipline from Subject Cat and Classification.

 - Question two's verifier is that it primarily looks for Descriptive Cataloging systems as answers, explicit in its wording. Therefore, at least by process of elimination, people using the question as reference would have immediately ruled out any classification system, be it the DDC, LCC, Colon Class, UDC or Billings.

 - Therefore, I structured the question to have the 91 rules as the most likely answer in lieu of the perfect answer given the sources at hand do not provide, also by process of eliminating the examples outside the timeline of Wicker's work.

 - This process of structuring is something that at least allows a chance for a forumgoer to apply logical strategies to arrive at an answer however approximate, because were we to go through the whole process of research detailed in our paragraphs of discussion we would only satisfy ourselves. Granted, given the results of the poll, it is nothing but ironic.

[gaymime]

27 minutes ago, GetNerfedOn said:

I appreciate your dedication to the written word. A rare quality.

We're drawing into the realm of widest conjecture and while I appreciate the dedication to pinpoint accuracy, the bottomline of the situation is this:

 - Question two is a trick question intentionally designed to waylay people into answering incorrectly, and then pique their interest given that the DDC appears the most accurate answer, and then most particularly, introduce the concept of Descriptive Cataloging as a separate, distinct discipline from Subject Cat and Classification.

 - Question two's verifier is that it primarily looks for Descriptive Cataloging systems as answers, explicit in its wording. Therefore, at least by process of elimination, people using the question as reference would have immediately ruled out any classification system, be it the DDC, LCC, Colon Class, UDC or Billings.

 - Therefore, I structured the question to have the 91 rules as the most likely answer in lieu of the perfect answer given the sources at hand do not provide, also by process of eliminating the examples outside the timeline of Wicker's work.

 - This process of structuring is something that at least allows a chance for a forumgoer to apply logical strategies to arrive at an answer however approximate, because were we to go through the whole process of research detailed in our paragraphs of discussion we would only satisfy ourselves. Granted, given the results of the poll, it is nothing but ironic.

maybe it is just i am not suited to this sort of game then? while i can abstractedly grasp at what your intent is now that you laid it out for me i am still struggling to not just run back to my original statement that we have a fairly solid idea of how a real librarian would be cataloguing books based on historical evidence. tying this fictional librarian to a real-world space & time disallows me the flexibility to follow along.

 

can i say at least though that "only satisfy ourselves" could easily be the forum motto of most the people here including sometimes us as well? because i feel like i've lurked in plenty of conversations like this one over the years