jducoeur

I'm starting to seriously clear the house. It is *full* of boxes and papers and cruft, and I am beginning to realize that, if I'm going to actually list it in March, I need to get cracking on clearing stuff. So today's focus is going through miscellanea and making the fast separation: Keep, Discard, or Hold Onto For Further Study. And there's this box labeled "Library Articles".

Most of it is sadly frustrating. I clearly need to get rid of it, because I have *no* use for it myself. I'm hoping that I can find some school somewhere that would be interested in it (Simmons, maybe?), because it's a fascinating archive of the history of online librarianship, from the early days in the mid-80s. Jane clipped a vast number of articles about solo librarianship, research and search over many years, with the result that you can study much of the history of the field just from the contents of this one box.

I'm only keeping the bits that are exceptionally interesting or personal. Some of that is the humor -- random library-related cartoons and the like.

And then there is the ANSI Standard. An innocuous little pamphlet, very official, of ANSI Standard K100.1-1974:

Safety Code and Requirements for Dry Martinis

It's the best grin I've gotten in some time.

Read it for yourself -- the link above is to the official NISO PDF online. It's almost straight-faced at times, wandering off into beautiful excesses such as Table 1, "Maximum Permissible Olive Displacement". The best bit is the end, as they evaluate the possible mixing techniques, eventually recommending the "Radiation" method.

It's a delightful piece of silliness, and I'll be keeping it, even as I sadly deaccession a career's worth of meatier content...