Uncovering Modern Greek theology books

On By europeancollectionsIn Modern Greek
item 1 in the bound-with (see further down the post)

Correcting long-standing problems in our library catalogue is a satisfying if time-consuming task.  We normally do this work when we happen upon errors, but work that has started in South Wing to make room for new books across the open-shelf floors of the Library by moving older material to a borrowable class at the Library Storage Facility (LSF) means that we are now trying to tackle these problems more systematically, sticking to the LSF principle that no material should go to the store without adequate catalogue description.  This blog post looks at a few examples of books that have only come to the surface thanks to this project.

The examples in this post are all books in Modern Greek and all are originally from South Wing 3, where books on religion and philosophy live.  Before the current project, none of these books had a proper record (usually only a record that said “Record in non-roman script”, dating back to the enormous conversion cataloguing project that brought the UL’s main academic catalogue online; we’ve been chipping away at such records for years, but many remain, and the book move project has given us great impetus to see the rest dealt with promptly).

The most challenging volume I dealt with was what we call a “bound-with”, where two or more items have been bound together after publication; in the past, this was frequently done by the UL, and to this day we sometimes receive donations where this has been arranged by a previous owner.  They are slightly tricky to deal with on the staff side of the catalogue (the excellent instructions written by a former colleague include bits like “Add a 773 field (first indicator 1) with the title (in subfield $t), MMSID (subfield $w) and barcode (subfield $g) of the first item in the volume to the bibliographic record of the second item. Note that the barcode must be preceded by “no: “.).

Item 2 in the bound-with – click on image to find the extra iotas

Trickier still was that I couldn’t for the life of me find a catalogue record elsewhere to use for the second of the two works (both about the administration of Mount Athos); our copy appears to be unique across European and North American academic libraries.  Trickier yet further was the fact that the second book’s title employs something called “iota subscript”, which even the Classics Faculty librarian had never seen before; her academics had, but of course they’d never faced the issue of dealing with them in a catalogue record.  We agreed I would give two versions of the title (one without the subscript iotas and one with) in the record, to maximise its findability.  The two books in the bound-with are:

  • To hieron psēphisma tou Hagiou Orous Athō kai ta synaphē episēma engrapha : keleusei tēs hieras koinotētos. (Thessaloniki, 1913)
  • Hypomnēma tēs Hieras Koinotētos tou Hagiou Horous Hathē hypovlēthen tē A.Th.P. tō Oikoumenikō Patriarchē kyriō kyriō Germanō tō e kai tē peri auton Hagia kai Hiera Synodō keleusei tēs Hieras Koinotētos (also given as Hypomnēma tēs Hieras Koinotētos tou Hagiou Horous Hathē hypovlēthen tē A.Th.P. tō Oikoumenikō Patriarchē kyriōi kyriōi Germanōi tōi e kai tēi peri auton Hagiai kai Hierai Synodōi keleusei tēs Hieras Koinotētos) (Constantinople, 1914)

At the moment, their records give their location still as South Wing 3, but this will change in due course.  If anyone would like to see the volume in the meantime, do get in touch (greek@lib.cam.ac.uk).

The work to clean up our catalogue metadata can feel overwhelming given the scale of historical oversights to be sorted out, but it is great to be doing something of such benefit to our readers.  Bringing our existing holdings further into the light (and sometimes, as here, for the first time during the nearly 50 years of our online catalogue) is rewarding work.

We plan further blog posts as the work continues.

Mel Bach

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