spring 2012 MLS internship

I wrote a blog entry on the Historical Library website about the John J. Cushing Collection, featured as a recent acquisition. The image is of one of my favorite stories the doctor tells of attending a woman in labor despite the family's objections to his homeopathic training and bachelor status. He (more precisely, his patient) successfully delivers an 11 pound baby, to everyone's amazement.

I have also begun my next project by verifying the newly acquired collection against the dealer's inventory and description. This mainly involved counting items in folders and checking their condition. I also got a sneak peak into the content, of course, and it promises to be interesting. This one is a variety of materials, about half of it makes up a fairly complete set of correspondence between two Yale educated brothers, both physicians in New Jersey.

Handed over the JR Paul books to Melissa!

Met again with Toby Appel over the Cushing letters. She had successfully located genealogical information on the Cushing family in the Cushing Genealogy of 1905 on Archive.org.

I arranged the letters into enough folders to fill a small archive box. Toby kindly emailed me her “cheat sheet” for archival records; I added 6XX fields to the preliminary bib for this collection. I searched LC authorities to use valid headings wherever possible; for the genre heading, I searched the Art & Architecture Thesaurus.

What records there were in OCLC were minimal or core level. I updated and added subject headings where necessary. None of them had 050 fields, so I also had the opportunity to assign call numbers myself. 

The first book on this list had a single LCSH, 'nervous system' which when I searched for it, yielded titles both classed as QM and RC. Eventually I chose QM541, because the book did not seem to primarily be concerned with pathology, so much as the physiology of the nervous system.

Finally, author cutters looked impossible to fit into the legacy scheme where the pub date followed by the first initial was used... until Melissa reminded me that these books are not going into a browse-able collection. Just put them on the shelf some place where it makes sense for them to be, she pointed with a broad gesture. Once again, the trees managed to obscure the forest for me!  

Stromeyer, G. Friedrich Louis. (1840). On the combination of motor and sensitive nervous activity: or, on the production of sensations by motions.

Parsons, H. Franklin. (1891). Report on the influenza epidemic of 1889-90. London: H.M.S.O., 1891.

Přibram, A. (1899). Der acute Gelenkrheumatismus =: (Rheumatismus articularis acutus). Wien: Hölder.

copy 2
Hirsch, A. (1860-64). Handbuch der historisch-geographischen Pathologie. Erlangen: F. Enke.

Melissa VT helped me with the OCLC Connexion Client. 

I started with organizing the remaining work on the J. R. Paul box. Searched 18th Cent. duplicates in locked stacks. 18th Cent. is shelved in a separate room outfitted with compact shelving that also houses 17th Cent., as well as a section of works about and by medical authors; plus an oversize and a mini section (not strictly miniature as some books in this section are over 10 cm). Then I imported my first OCLC record for a non-duplicate J.R. donation and made a record about as complete as I can at this point:

Detmold, W. (1840). An essay on club foot: and some analogous diseases. New York: George Adlard.