Word of the day: ephebiphobia – the fear of teenagers. Believed to be treatable by (spot the oxymoron) liberal use of ASBOs. (Via.)

We’ve got a system upgrade in process at work so most of this week I’ve been at a different campus, passing the downtime by reclassifying pamphlets with National Library of Medicine shelfmarks to the Dewey Decimal System.

In my lunch hour yesterday, I went for a walk up the road and stumbled upon a gate marked Fettes College – alma mater of the PM. I couldn’t see much of the college itself but today I walked a different way and found myself looking down a long drive at the school’s imposing main building.

As of Monday, I’ll be back in my usual office but seconded for several weeks to the Systems team, so my work will change from standing orders, cataloguing, classifying, invoice processing, etc., to techy stuff with the library management system, which will be very interesting.

Speaking of libraries, and of people I hadn’t heard of until today, I was sent a link to a site about “legendary cataloger Sandy Berman“.

Berman, it turns out, is one of these awkward people who thinks he knows best and is prepared to take issue with authorities who disagree – and, in some respects at least, a good thing too. His most famous campaign seems to be an attempt to get the subject cataloguers at the Library of Congress to make their subject classifications more contemporary and reader-friendly (for example, using “Trucking” rather than “Transportation, Automotive-Freight”) and less discriminatory: Hennepin Country Library, where Berman was Head Cataloger, was using Apartheid as a subject heading in 1973; the Library of Congress recognised it in 1986.

In his 1971 book Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People Berman identifies unacceptable LC terms and gaps in terminology to do with ethnicity, religion, gender, sex, age, sexual orientation, labour, and developing countries, among others, and suggests replacements. Many headings that Berman created for “new concepts” and used in cataloging at the Hennepin County Library, such as “GAY RIGHTS”, “ACID RAIN”, and “PUNK ROCK MUSIC”, were later added to the LCSH.

Until this morning, I’d never heard of Ernö Goldfinger. Then I read this article from the Guardian Hay festival.

When the film Goldfinger came out, the architect was afflicted by spoof calls in the middle of the night. Callers would intone in bad Sean Connery accents, “Goldfinger? This is agent 007,” or sing the film’s theme tune, “an irritation still endured by members of the family who list their names in the telephone directory,” Nigel Warburton, of the Open University, told a breakfast-time audience.
…
Erno Goldfinger was one of the 20th century’s prime advocates of London tower blocks. He designed the often reviled Alexander Fleming House at the Elephant and Castle, Trellick Tower in Ladbroke Grove and Balfron Tower in Tower Hamlets.

This morning, Nigel Warburton’s book was there on the shelf at work, ready to be catalogued.