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Author Topic: Finding Pagan books in your local library  (Read 4511 times)

Jenett

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Finding Pagan books in your local library
« on: January 17, 2017, 09:22:10 pm »
A discussion in another thread lead to me offering to talk about how to find Pagan books in your local library, so here's a thread for that, using Sorcha's library as an example.

Before we get started:
1) Please ask questions!
I'm going to start with one small piece of this: given X catalog, how do we find books about Pagan stuff? There are a ton of related and relevant topics, but it's probably more useful to ask about the ones you're interested in. (I will eventually work this up for articles for Seeking or other resources, too.) I'll gesture at some of the other topics as we go by.

2) Area of focus:
The library workings I know are in the United States, and English-speaking (and Canada's pretty similar). Some stuff in other countries is similar, but the details will be a lot different when I start talking about subject headings. Feel free to chime in with how they

3) Some useful terms:
  • Catalog : method of keeping track of what the library has, so people can figure out what they want to use. Can connect people to material in different ways through author, title, subject, call number, etc. searches. Generally online these days, but used to be on physical cards.
  • Call number: Assigned location for an item on a shelf (or equivalent) so you can find it. Call numbers have a system, but they get really weird as you get deeper into the system.
  • Controlled vocabulary : term for 'we have decided on a specific word/words to represent this concept, topic, or subject'
  • Subject heading : library term for controlled vocabulary about subjects. In a catalog, every item should have at least one, and many have three or more.
  • Authority record: quality control for subject headings: gives details about why the subject heading for something is like that. Often includes some degree of Wikipedia links as 'disambiguation', so you can tell things with the same basic name apart.
  • Keyword searches search most things in the catalog record for the book. Subject searches just search the assigned subject headings.


Call numbers:
Books in US and Canadian libraries are mostly shelved due to one of two basic schemes. One is Dewey Decimal (most widely used in school and public libraries, usually just called Dewey) and the other is Library of Congress (usually LOC).

Dewey numbers look like a three digit number, a dot, and then some more numbers, usually followed by letters or letters and numbers. Because Melville Dewey was a man of his times, and quirky like a quirky thing on top of that, his system is very heavily Christianity and Western Europe centered, and basically anything that isn't one of those things gets shoved off toward the edges of the classification it's in.

Witchcraft (historical version, and sometimes modern) is mostly in 133.4 (133 is "Parapsychology and Occultism, Special Topics"). Modern Pagan religions treated as religion are in the 290s, mostly in 299 ("Other Religions"), but sometimes in other places in the 290s. This sometimes includes Wicca and religious witchcraft and sometimes not, for reasons I'll come back to at some point, but maybe not this post. 398.2 is for Myths and Legends. You can see the full set of classes here.

In LOC libraries (academic libraries, some public libraries) the call numbers have one or two letters, followed by numbers, a decimal point, and more numbers and letters.  Most books about Paganism will be somewhere in the BF section ("Psychology", and specifically BF1562.5-1584 is "Witchcraft")  or possibly also in parts of BL ("Religions. Mythology. Rationalism") List of the B classes here. It's a little less Christian Europe centered than Dewey, but it still pushes a lot of things to the edges.

In both cases, history, literature, etc. will be in other parts of the library.

So, if you just want to see what's on the shelf, those are the places to browse. (In most libraries, these will not be huge sections, so just going and looking can work fine.)

Basic question: how do we find Pagan books in a given library
As you can see, you can just go to a section and browse - but that assumes you know where to look, and also that the books are on the shelf, (Pagan books are among the most common books to go missing from libraries, for reasons that are probably more complicated than 'religious bias' though it's hard to get exact data.)

So, this is where subject headings come in. Libraries use standard subject headings to help catalog books, because if everyone used different terms for things, you couldn't link things about the same subject together easily.

(If you're familiar with tagging, tagging is what's called a folksonomy, something that grows organically. If someone has tagged something "cats", you will get whatever is with that tag - but you're going to miss the stuff from the person who has tagged their photo with "lions" or "Siamese" or their cat's name. The goal of a consistent set of subject headings is that everything that is about cats will show up when you search on that subject. It's an unachievable goal, but that doesn't mean people don't try.)

Many libraries use the Library of Congress subject headings (Canada also does, while adding Canadian specific ones) And actually, that approach is common for a lot of libraries: letting the LOC do the heavy lifting of figuring out new subject headings for most things, and adding their own or adapting for things really specific to their collection. (Like local history, or a particular individual)

Here's the problem: for reasons I am not going into in this post, "Wicca" only got added as a LOC subject heading in 2006. That is roughly 50 years after it began being used widely in print. Libraries move very slowly sometimes and changes in subject headings are particularly complicated.

You can see other terms if you click through to that link, namely "witchcraft" (where most modern religious witchcraft had been put) and "Neopaganism" (only added in the mid-90s). If you click around some more, you will find additional subject headings for things like "Goddess religions" "Dievturība" (Latvian paganism) and so on. ("Druidry and druidism" is also relevant to people's interests.)

Anyway, all of this makes it complicated to sort this out, and catalog books usefully. You can see some discussion from 2006 that references some things different libraries are doing.

How to solve this in practice
The quick and dirty suggestion I have for figuring out how your particular library works is to search on a couple of books that are likely to be in any moderate sized library collection. (Figuring *this* out is also a bit tricky, for reasons not discussed here, but that are about how libraries select books, but I can give you common titles!)

Good titles to use as a test case for witchy books include:
  • The Spiral Dance by Starhawk
  • Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham
  • Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler
  • Wicca for Beginners by Thea Sabin
  • The Goddess Path by Patricia Monaghan


You might notice that two of these books come from publishers who are mainstream publishing houses (not Pagan focused), and one is by someone (Monaghan) who had a fair amount of other interest and name recognition outside of her how-to Pagan stuff. You are looking at these books not because you want to read them necessarily, but because figuring out where they are will help out figure out where other things are.

So, if we look at the library system Sorcha's in (since she said I could use her as an example) and we do a search on "Wicca for Beginners" (which is a book I actively recommend for people interested in the topic) you should get a page that pops up that tells you which libraries it's in (right now, two copies are available and one is on hold), what the call numbers are (one is LOC, two are in Dewey, where it's in 133.4) and that the subject heading in their system is "Witchcraft".

That tells me that if I'm using that library, that's probably the subject heading I want to use for modern religious (and non-religious) witchcraft, as well as stuff about historical witchcraft. I'll have to wade through a bunch of books about Salem, but at least I'll know I'm looking in one of the right places.

You'll note that the subject heading is clickable (it's in the middle section of the page), so I can immediately search on that heading without retyping it (no big deal here, but a pain in the neck when you get into long searches).

If you search in my library system (which covers a chunk of the Boston metro, but not all of it) you'll find something similar, but with a few more options. If you show all the options for titles, you'll see a couple are in 299. (Go Woburn!) and also that the catalog record in this system includes the table of contents information, so that if you do keyword searches on something like "Wicca" or "the four quarters", it should show up even though those aren't assigned subjects.

You'll also see "Other books like this". So, here's two other tips: if you're trying to figure out specific books that might be in your library, try browsing other library systems and see what comes up. Your library or system may not have the same titles, but at least it will let you test and see and give you an idea what might be there.

One other site for this that's specific to libraries and hugely useful is Worldcat.org which if you do a search on a title can show you where the closest library copies are.

(Also, many librarians make extensive use of Amazon and LibraryThing, among other tools, to figure out related titles, or to track down the questions we get of "I remember this book was about this big, blue, and about dinosaurs!" but also for "What other books should we contemplate.")

One other approach is to search on words you think may show up in titles, even if they aren't going to be subject headings: Wicca, druid, goddess, circle, magic, etc. You may have to skim through a bunch of results, but you can usually do that pretty quickly in modern catalogs: it's usually obvious from the title at least 3/4 of the time whether or not it might be relevant.
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Sorcha

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Re: Finding Pagan books in your local library
« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2017, 11:37:19 pm »
Quote from: Jenett;201547
A discussion in another thread lead to me offering to talk about how to find Pagan books in your local library, so here's a thread for that, using Sorcha's library as an example.

 
This is wonderful! Thank you! I'll be back home in about a week and am excited to see what I can find.



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Sefiru

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Re: Finding Pagan books in your local library
« Reply #2 on: January 18, 2017, 06:05:51 pm »
Quote from: Jenett;201547

In LOC libraries (academic libraries, some public libraries) the call numbers have one or two letters, followed by numbers, a decimal point, and more numbers and letters.  Most books about Paganism will be somewhere in the BF section ("Psychology", and specifically BF1562.5-1584 is "Witchcraft")  or possibly also in parts of BL ("Religions. Mythology. Rationalism") List of the B classes here. It's a little less Christian Europe centered than Dewey, but it still pushes a lot of things to the edges.

 
When I was at uni, I found a lot of useful/interesting material in GR (Folklore) and GT (Manners and Customs). I really should get around to getting a library card for my local university library.
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