Day 7

Day 7
09/20/2011
Start time: 8:00
[1 Hour Lunch]
End time: 5:00
Hours Worked: 8
Total Hours: 56

The first thing I did today was start on a new ETD titled "Fathomless, Symbolic, and Threatening" : Capital Identity in Motion in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Styron's Set This House on Fire by Aaron Solomon Finley.  This ETD was about the myths of Southern identity following the Civil War and during the Industrial Revolution.  The author uses these novels to show "an inherent contradiction makes up the foundation of a Southern identity; and that the globalization of industrial capitalism exposes that contradiction."  I found the introduction of this ETD very interesting and would recommend it.

When it came to assigning subject headings for this ETD, I had problems finding the headings that I wanted to use.  I wanted to use The South and Identity in some combination, but I couldn't find the combination or even The South.  The correct heading for The South is "Southern States"  I also used "Identity (Psychology)."  I also wanted to be able to have a heading to capture the industrial capitalism aspect of it, but the only thing I could find was either "Industrialization" or "Industrial revolution."  I decided to use "Industrial revolution" because it means that a work deals with "radical socioeconomic changes" which seems to capture the point of the thesis better.

I couldn't think of a call number and had some questions about the subject headings I chose, so I asked Sevim to come over and help me with it.  The first thing she notices was that I didn't have any subject headings for the authors and their works.  So I created name-title subject headings using their entries in the Name Authority File.  After that, she thought that my headings were a little too broad, so we decided to change the heading "Industrial revolution" to "Industrial revolution in literature and add the subdivision "In literature" to the "Southern States" heading.  Finally she suggested that we do a search in WorldCat for "Southern States" and "Identity."  We found some works that had the heading "Group identity--Southern States" which seemed really appropriate for this ETD.  So we added that.

Determining the call number for this work was a little difficult.  Sevim thought it best to have a literature call number for this one instead of a history call number which makes sense.  But creating the literature call number is a little more intense.  We decided to find the call number for William Faulkner because he was the first author mentioned in the title.  Once we found his number we decided to use the call number for "Biography and Criticism" and then had to create a very specific cutter number that involved going to OhioLINK and finding cutters other catalogers had created for works about Cutter.  It was pretty intense.  This is both the call number and subject headings I ended up with:

090  PS3511.A86 ǂb Z783224  2011
600 10 Faulkner, William, ǂd 1897-1962. ǂt Sound and the fury.
600 10 Styron, William, ǂd 1925-2006. ǂt Set this house on fire.
651 0 Southern States ǂx In literature.
650 0 Group identity ǂz Southern States.
650 0 Industrial revolution in literature.

After finally checking that record, Sevim checked the records I did on Friday and found them both to be good except for the fact that I didn't make a call number for the Liquid Crystal ETD.  So we added one (the Physics call number) and were done.

The second ETD I was an art thesis titled Skeptical Perceptions by Jonathon Schwarz.  The artists project was a ceramic sculpture of himself (I think) sounded by a cage.  He explained that this work symbolized something about perception and people.  It will really strange.  This was the first art thesis I've done, and I figured it had a special format that I didn't know.  So I asked Bonita and Sevim about it.  At first, I thought that I should use "Ceramics" as the subject heading for the work, but the scope not for it didn't really seem to match.  I said to use "Pottery" for ceramic art, but the work didn't really seem like pottery.  When Sevim came over to help me, we found the heading "Ceramic sculpture" after she recommended searching for "Sculpture."  Bonita and Sevim told me that you have to add the heading for the artists and subdivide that heading by "Exhibitions."  We subdivided the "Ceramic sculpture" heading by "21st century," "United States," and "Exhibitions."  This was the final product:

600 10 Schwarz, Jonathan ǂv Exhibitions
650 0 Ceramic sculpture ǂy 21st century ǂz United States ǂv Exhibitions

The third ETD that I cataloged today was a chemistry dissertation titled Studies on the Coordination Chemistry of Vanadium, Barium, and Cobalamins by Riya Mukherjee.  This ETD was very complicated and hard for me to understand because of my lack of knowledge.  I also didn't have access the full dissertation, so I only had the abstract to work from.  I ended up looking up important words from the title and abstract as well as the author-supplied keywords in LCSH to see if they were there  There were a few that weren't but several of them were.  I ended up using all the terms I found in LCSH.  The main problem I had was deciding what call number to use.  I eventually decided to the call number QD189 ǂb .M85 because it was the one that came up the most when for all the terms I had.  This call number was for Inorganic Chemistry--Salts which matched the author-supplied subject heading "Inorganic Chemistry."  This one was pretty tough.  Wikipedia wasn't really helpful for this one either.  Here's the subject headings I ended up with:

650 0 Barium.
650 0 Vitamin B12.
650 0 Vanadium.
650 0 Captopril.
650 0 Bioconjugates.

The fourth ETD that I worked on today was a psychology thesis titled Meaning Self-Efficacy Scale (MSE): Development and Validation of a Measure of the Perceived Ability to Generate Meaning After Traumatic Life Events by Edward E. Waldrep Jr.  This thesis was testing the Meaning Self-Efficacy Scale (MSE).  Finding meaning "following traumatic experiences is associated with less subsequent distress."  So the study tests the MSE which is "designed to examine the perceived ability to generate meaning following traumatic experiences."  The first potential subject headings I thought of were for meaning and trauma.  These were also in the author-supplied keywords.  The other keyword was psychometrics which was also used in the abstract.  There are several subject headings for meaning, but I chose "Meaning (Psychology)" because it seemed the most appropriate for the purposes of this thesis.  The LCSH for psychological trauma (which is the type of trauma being studied here) was "Psychic trauma" which I personally think is a terrible heading.  It implies weird things.  The heading for psychometics is simply "Psychometrics."  I also found the heading "College students--Psychological testing" while doing WorldCat searches using various combinations of the other subject headings I chose.  After asking Sevim about that, she thought that I should use it.  So I did.  I didn't need Wikipedia to complete the subject cataloging for this ETD.  My final headings are:

650 0 Meaning (Psychology)
650 0 Psychic trauma.
650 0 Psychometrics.
650 0 College students ǂz Psychological testing.

The last ETD I cataloged today is an English dissertation named Traversing the 24-Hour News Cycle:  A Busy Day in the Rhetorical Life of a Polite Speech by John Oddo.  For this ETD, I did not have access to the full-text, so I had to rely on the abstract for my subject cataloging.  This ETD is an analysis of how journalists and the media transform rhetorical events like speeches by reporting on them.  The author uses a specific example of Colin Powell's 2003 presentation to the United Nations.  I got a lot of the potential subject headings from the abstract that I looked up in LCSH.  I found Wikipedia helpful in determining what some of these terms like critical discourse analysis was.  I've decided to use "Intertexuality" as my first subject heading because the author starts off the abstract talking about this and explains that this is the subject of the dissertation.  I choose "Critical discourse analysis" because it was one of the author-assigned keywords and after reading about what it was on Wikipedia, it really seems to fit the subject of the dissertation.  Then, I chose "Rhetoric" because it was supplied by the author and the abstract is talking about speeches and alluding to persuasion.  I also used the heading "Journalists" because the dissertation is about the intertexual transformation that journalists peform on things they report on.  It seems important, but I'm not sure about it.  I might remove it.  The final heading I choose is a name heading for Colin Powell his presentation is what is covered in the dissertation.  Here are my headings:

650 0 Intertextuality.
650 0 Criticical discourse analysis.
650 0 Rhetoric.
650 0 Journalists.
600 10 Powell, Colin L.