Susan Sontag

A good portion of Sontag's personal library is listed here:

http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt2489n7qw&chunk.id=c01-1.2.11.18&br...

Apparently she donated her entire library of over 20,000 books to UCLA, but this seems to be the full extent of the online listing for it.

I've set up a profile as SusanSontag and begun entering the library.

Cool! Please add brief biographical and bibliographical notes (i.e. where the books are coming from) to the profile, plus the "real name" in that field, and I'll get it set up. Also, the finding guide you link to notes "See also Books from the library of Susan Sontag (Collection 892)." - have you checked that out?

I haven't been able to locate any online or other date about this Collection 892. I've emailed one of the libraries and will report if I find anything. I did notice that there is some sort of SON Susan Sontag Library for a special collection of some of her books that can be accessed through the normal library search. Apparently there are only 151 books in this library, and almost all of them are various translations of her books.

http://catalog.library.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=son+susan+sonta...

I can't tell if these are books that were from her collection or just some books that the library have lumped together in this collection. Some of the books are posthumous editions of her work, which she obviously didn't own, but others seems so random that she must have owned them personally, e.g. The first great ocean liners in photographs. Anyone have any ideas as to what these are or if they should be included?

EDIT: that link doesn't seem to work here, just go to http://catalog.library.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First and search for SON Susan Sontag and it will bring up the 151 results.

Searching the UCLA catalog for "Susan Sontag" in the special collections field now brings up over 10,000 entries:
http://catalog.library.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?SAB1=susan+sontag&BOOL...

All of these are listed as being part of the Susan Sontag collection, so it should be possible to work off a catalog search for this.

The problem then is that the catalog won't let you find more than 10K entries, and her library was around 20K.

One solution then might be to limit the search by date, and do them in batches at a time (pre-1900, 1900-1909, etc.). You can "set limits" in the advanced search, and then search "susan sontag" as a phrase in Special Coll/Archive SPAC.

It would be necessary to watch for duplicates with what's already been entered, but that should be easy enough to do by giving the ones currently in LT a special tag or putting them in a collection (or even comparing entry dates if duplicates are later found in the LT catalog.)

I think we should revivify this one, and maybe go directly to the library? jbd1 do you want to make the entre?

Will our back-end MARC importer tool still work? If so, I'll ask for their big file and see what we get ...

Sure. I don't think we need to use the back-end one, since we have a MARC importer public now.