Anne Welsh‘s latest publication is a blog post at myVLF.com sharing top tips on how to organise your library.
You can read the tips in full on the myVFLF Blog (update: myVLF ceased trading in 2021, and the blog is republished here) alongside lots of other bookish posts. Librarian to the core, we thought it might be helpful to share a bibliography of the books and articles mentioned. Wherever possible, we’ve shared links to fulltext, WorldCat libraries, the original publisher, and secondhand sellers, in that order.
Are you one of the many readers who have so many books on your To Be Read shelf (or pile) that you don’t know where to start? Thankfully lots of bookstagrammers have the answer for you. Here are ten of my favourite TBR jars:
Don’t worry – we’re not going down the road of product placement, shoe-horning links to, I don’t know, fishtanks or phishfood ice-cream into our writing. Several major book sites to which we link anyway – Abe, Abe UK, Betterworld Books, Foyles and Waterstones – offer affiliate links, and so all we’ve done is convert those. (See our book publications page for examples). We’re also not stopping linking to places that don’t offer affiliate links. Facet, who publish books by both Katharine Schopflin and me, will always be the first place we link for those books, and we’re still linking to WorldCat and other library catalogues.
The only change, from our point of view, is that when we link to Abe or Betterworld, for example, we’ll use the affiliate links they offer.
We continue to support independent bookshops, ordering directly from them where we can. However, I find Abe helpful to find rare books and, indeed, bookshops that are new to me. The books pictured in today’s shelfie were all tracked down via them this summer, when I had to replace the collection of old books that is still locked down in my old office, while campus is closed for Covid-19. I have supported Betterworld Books since it first launched, with its regular donations of books to others. It’s my preferred way to dispose of unwanted collections of textbooks, knowing most will find good homes.
I’ve commissioned Andy Horton (BPP University), who wrote his Masters thesis on corporate book donation schemes, to write a Beginnings article on this topic. I’m also commissioning some pieces on indies. If you have a favourite independent bookshop, especially if it trades in second-hand or rare books, and would like to submit a piece to the blog, do get in touch via email to find out about how we commission and remunerate guest posts.
If you have any concerns about our use of affiliate links, you can get in touch directly via info [at] beginningcataloguing.com
Cataloguing, digitisation, decolonisation, activism, independent publishing & joining the research conversation. Our 2018 conference panels explored a range of current issues & practices in art librarianship #arlisuki18https://t.co/3qX5mFi6eO
— ARLIS UK & Ireland: the Art Libraries Society (@ARLIS_UKI) August 5, 2020
Includes Panel 1B, in which Anne Welsh gave the paper, ‘The following | sing | I | a | book’: A Humument as ‘work in progress…Gesamtkunstwerk’ and the definition of the Work in library cataloguing’:
We were really happy to welcome participants to Beginning Bibliography, whose first unit materials went live yesterday.
With books stranded in my old office, my London Library membership really came into its own in preparing the course – first time using postal delivery. As usual, their service was superb.
I’ve also acquired some new old books, ordering online from various booksellers, who have similarly been quick and efficient in posting out. You can’t teach material culture without the materials, that’s for sure!
Beginning Bibliography begins on Monday. We don’t set any reading that can’t be accessed for free, so this month’s Beginnings article highlights my top five book purchases in the field.
1. Bowers for the Detail. Love it or loathe it, you cannot ignore Bowers’s tome, Principles of Bibliographical Description (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1949). You would imagine bibliographers to be obsessed with detail, and Bowers was certainly that. I first read this book in 1990 and in thirty years, I’ve not found a single challenge in bibliographic description for which I have not been able to find an answer within it. If only he had been able to write in an engaging, encouraging style, I’d go so far as to say we would need no other book on how to describe a printed book. Alas! He conveys all of the detail but none of the love, and I have met some very distinguished bibliographers who have confided to me they have never been able to read his Principles from cover to cover, only dip in and out of it as and when required. Copies are available from Betterworld Books and second-hand from Abe and Abe UK.
