The Lonely 000s Computer Science, Information, General Works

Well, I finally made it to the library (there's honestly no reason why that took me so long - I can see it from my bedroom window) to do some research and have discovered that most of the 000s seem to be unreadable to the point of not existing in my library. (Which was further confirmed by the fact they are located in a dark corner. Sigh.)

Anyway, this is what I have come up with:

001 Knowledge - The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan - A book I stole from my Mother and has been on my tbr for quite some time. My understanding is that Sagan is quite readable.

002 The Book - A gentle madness : bibliophiles, bibliomanes, and the eternal passion for books by Nicholas Basbanes - He has a few others that fall into this category as well.

003 Systems - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

004 Data processing and Computer science - Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet

006 Special computer methods - Decoding the Universe

011 Bibilographies - Book Lust

016 Bibliographies of works from specific subjects - The Reading List: Contemporary Fiction

022 Administration of the Physical Plant - The Book on the Bookshelf

025 Library Operations - Double Fold

027 General libraries - Library: An Unquiet History

028 Reading, Use of Other Information Media - Reading Memoirs Go Here. Including but not limited to Book by Book or Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading or Bilbliotopia - a book of facts about books.

031 General Encyclopedic Works - American - The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs - Ok, actually read this one! And it's wonderful. Highly recommended.

032 General Encyclopedic Works in English - The Myth of the Britannica

034 General encyclopedic works in French, Provencal, Catalan - Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, the book that changed the course of history

051 General serials & their indexes American - My library had a few copies of The Yale Review here. No idea why. And why only The Yale Review? Why not, say, The Virginia Quarterly Review?

069 Museology - The Stranger and The Statesmanor Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder

070 News Media, Journalism, Publishing - Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism by Lillian Ross - Readable but there are lots of other options here.

071 News Media, Journalism, Publishing in North America - The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril by Leonard Downie - Quite good, but again lots of options.

081 General Collections American - Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World by Sarah Vowell - Love Vowell, but again a fair amount of choice.

082 General collections In English - Fancy reading Bartlett's Quotations from cover to cover? I don't know why 081 is essays and this seems to be solely books of quotations.

I must say I was quite frustrated by the lack of books in the rest of the 070s. I'm a Journalism major so even if it was a dry, scholarly work on newspaper production in Ecuador, I'd probably be interested but my library had nothing outside 070 and 071.

Oh, dear. I made the mistake of trying to edit that post and now I can't get the touchstones to reload for the life of me. So sorry!

I posted about the non-reloading touchstones in Bug Collectors a few days ago, but no one seems to care :(. It really bothers me that I can't edit any of my TBR lists to cross out books as I read them without losing all the touchstones.

Here are your touchstones, though. At least most of them.

001 Knowledge - The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan - A book I stole from my Mother and has been on my tbr for quite some time. My understanding is that Sagan is quite readable.

002 The Book - A gentle madness : bibliophiles, bibliomanes, and the eternal passion for books by Nicholas Basbanes - He has a few others that fall into this category as well.

003 Systems - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

004 Data processing and Computer science - Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet

006 Special computer methods - Decoding the Universe

011 Bibilographies - Book Lust

016 Bibliographies of works from specific subjects - The Reading List: Contemporary Fiction

022 Administration of the Physical Plant - The Book on the Bookshelf

025 Library Operations - Double Fold

027 General libraries - Library: An Unquiet History

028 Reading, Use of Other Information Media - Reading Memoirs Go Here. Including but not limited to Book by Book or Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading or Bilbliotopia - a book of facts about books.

031 General Encyclopedic Works - American - The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs - Ok, actually read this one! And it's wonderful. Highly recommended.

032 General Encyclopedic Works in English - The Myth of the Britannica

034 General encyclopedic works in French, Provencal, Catalan - Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, the book that changed the course of history

051 General serials & their indexes American - My library had a few copies of The Yale Review here. No idea why. And why only The Yale Review? Why not, say, The Virginia Quarterly Review?

069 Museology - The Stranger and The Statesmanor Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder

070 News Media, Journalism, Publishing - Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism by Lillian Ross - Readable but there are lots of other options here.

071 News Media, Journalism, Publishing in North America - The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril by Leonard Downie - Quite good, but again lots of options.

081 General Collections American - Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World by Sarah Vowell - Love Vowell, but again a fair amount of choice.

082 General collections In English - Fancy reading Bartlett's Quotations from cover to cover? I don't know why 081 is essays and this seems to be solely books of quotations.

I should add that I didn't check whether they're the right touchstones, so there may be some interesting links there.

When my Touchstones don't reload, I go away for a bit (5-10 minutes) and then come back, and they will load about 60% of the time.

I don't think it that necessarily works when there's a really large number of touchstones, though--I once went away for half an hour and they still weren't there.

Re: 051, I kind of think of the Virginia Quarterly Review as more literary than the Yale Review (at least originally when the call number were figured out).

Thanks for the touchstones, Zoe!

I did try waiting a while but it didn't seem to help. I even tried taking off the brackets and putting them back and they still didn't want to load.

As for VQR vs. The Yale Review, they're both literary reviews so I find it hard to understand why The Yale Review escaped the periodicals. It does claim to be the oldest - maybe that has something to do with it?

P.S. The only strange touchstone I noticed was for this book: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Right now I'm reading an 001 book that I found at the library, Cryptozoology A-Z. It's OK but not fabulous (about what I expected).

I looked at the Table of Contents for a March 1905 edition of the Yale Review (in Google Books), and it had articles like:

labor protection
price of silver
American Sociological Society
Disfranchisement in West Virginia

It didn't seem very literary at that point, and maybe that is the era when it got its call number to represent its broad sweep.

Ok, that makes more sense. I took a very brief visit to their website and only noticed the "oldest" moniker. I didn't look very closely but it also seemed like the copies that were there were older. So maybe it has been relegated to the periodicals by now.

I have no idea how The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch ended up with a DC # of 004 for Data processing & computer science, but it does for LT. It was a quick read. It was inspiring, much better than I thought it would be. Glad I knocked out #004 with that one.

12>

It's that old "biography" loophole. The professor in question was in computer science, so a biography or memoir gets classified in the subject-matter area rather than in a biography-area.

I love that loophole. :)