SC - Re: Fo: your fame spreads

[Mark Waks, AKA Justin du Coeur]

Jane Waks wrote:
> The Short Title Catalog microfilm is available through libraries.  Justin
> goes to his alma mater, Brandeis University, for it.  The films for
> the full set take a whole cabinet!

Five cabinets, actually, and fiftyish reels per drawer -- it's massive.

> The main trouble with the STC set is that it's not well-indexed; you
> can't just look up "cooking."  Which leads to happenstance discoveries
> of adjacent, interesting, items, but makes it hard to browse by
> topic.

In fact, it's even worse that that, because the microfilms were
apparently assembled as they could get their hands on the sources. So
even if you have the author's name, it's a two-step process: you take
the author's name, look them up in the paper STC to get the entry
number, take *that* to the microfilm cross-index to find what reel you
want, and then go to the reel.

On the other hand, it could be worse. Far as I can tell, the
corresponding sets of French, Italian, and German don't even have author
catalogs. (At least, none that I've found at Brandeis yet.) God only
knows how anyone is supposed to find anything in them...

Still, the very difficulty of looking up specific subjects tends to lead
to these "serendipity searches", of just taking a reel at random and
flipping through it. If you have a broad interest in period, you find
all kinds of cool stuff that way...

(Actually, I seem to recall that there *are* some interesting indexes of
the STC, maybe even a weak subject index, although I'm sure that I found
the index fairly mediocre if so. I may just be thinking of the Brandeis
card catalog, which for some reason has a lot of the microfilms indexed
into it...)

				-- Justin

Random Quote du Jour:

* It can be up or down. It's more fun when it's up, but it makes it
  hard to get any real work done.
		-- From "Why the Internet is Like a Penis"
		   (by Degan Dale?)
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