Saturday, February 26, 2011

Rainbow of withdraws

In order to make our days a little more interesting, my coworker Meaghan and I decided to being tossing our withdraw copies of books up on the shelves by color, thus creating a book rainbow.  These are the books that, about once a week or so, get boxed up and sent to Internet Archive as they have been withdrawn from UF's collection.  We put the books up on these shelves one by one, or only a handful or so at a time, so it really doesn't take any more time than just putting them up in the order than we get them (thus, it is not impeding our duplicate processing efficiency).  And because they are withdrawn and will eventually end up in boxes to be shipped away, they need not be in any particular order.  So, without further ado, behold the awesomeness:


The funky border is from the stitching program I used to make a panorama because I had to take this picture through the shelving opposite our book rainbow and was unable to capture all of the amazing in just one shot.  These books have since been sent away, but we are in the process of creating a new and improved rainbow, this time moving left to right across the shelving for a continuum of color.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Longest title I've ever seen

I pulled this book today.  The whole title is The college of life; or, Practical self-educator, a manual of self-improvement for the colored race, forming an educational emancipator and a guide to success, giving examples and achievements of successful men and women of the race as an incentive and inspiration to the rising generation, including Afro-American progress illustrated, the whole embracing, business, social, domestic, historical, and religious education.  Pretty crazy, huh?

But the part I like best is the publisher.  This book was published by Mnemosyne Publishers Inc.  In case you are a little rusty on your Greek mythology, Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory and the origin of the word mnemonic.  Funny, because you would indeed need a mnemonic if you ever wanted to remember the title of this book in its entirety.