This morning, I had the satisfaction of solving the problem of a missing Ukrainian book. It hadn’t been missing in the normal library sense of not being on the shelf. Instead it was entirely missing from the catalogue.
A little while ago, a colleague sent me a few photos of covers of Ukrainian literature and history books in the University Library, and among them was this:
I looked up in the catalogue what I saw on the cover – Tvory [Works] by Leonyd Hlibiv. Nothing came up, so I tried to think about what mistakes previous cataloguers might have made, eg Tvori by Leonid Glibiv if they had applied Russian Cyrillic transliteration rules to the Ukrainian Cyrillic here. Again, no results, so then I tried Hlibov (a common version of his name, still in Ukrainian) and then Glibov to cover that version if misidentified as Russian. Nothing. So then I tried the publisher – Si︠a︡ĭvo (a lovely word meaning shining or glittering). Again, no luck.
The colleague involved had moved on, so at this point, I realised that the only way to track this book down would involve a search for it at the shelf – or in the class catalogues, where each book catalogued in the past has its own entry in order to be given its final and unique classmark. To save time and eyesight, I chose the classmark sequences most likely to be involved given Hlibiv’s work (chiefly prose) and the book’s likely publication date (20th century) and size (in the “d” and “c” size spans, covering 17-25 centimetres in height). Until 2011, Ukrainophone literature and Russophone literature were classified together – a wrong we hope to right retrospectively – so I quickly scanned the relevant subject class catalogues with those date and size ideas in mind, in order to pore over them at leisure today from home. Many scanned pages later, I was absolutely delighted to find it – entry 756:33.d.90.103 below, under Hlibov.
So where had this book’s information got to in the catalogue? A search for that classmark in iDiscover and the Alma staff side that lies behind iDiscover came up with nothing. Happily, a colleague in today (many thanks, Katharine!) was able to go and fetch the book and could confirm the unique barcode it bore: B6IL6. This did bear results in Alma, but in a very unexpected way:
The item record for our Hlibiv book had been attached in error to the complete works of the Russian writer A.A. Fet… This would likely have happened in genuine error, during the period when catalogue records for books in one online system were merged with barcoded individual item records in another system (the latter used for circulation). As has come up in other blog posts, the merging worked largely well but did leave a fair amount of mess when it came to multi-volume sets where the single catalogue record should have been matched with many item records. I can only imagine that some kind of error with the Hlibiv main catalogue record saw that lost and left its item record unattached, and that someone at some point (the item record was last edited over 20 years ago) who was doing some matching of item records with multi-volume bibliographical records attached the Hlibiv item record here thinking mistakenly that they were correct.
What a tangled web and what a result it has had: no-one has ever borrowed the Hlibiv book, despite it being one of very few we have by him and despite it having been transferred to the UL nearly 50 years ago, in 1975. What a relief to have found it and to be able to get this all straight. Next week, I will look at the book’s new record (which will not show in iDiscover until tomorrow) and at our other Hlibiv/Hlibov books in more detail.
Mel Bach
Languages across Borders 