Lines from the Library

The concept is this, basically: The Fales Library is the primary rare book/special collections/archival repository at New York University. As such, it is a closed stacks collection which puts some solid limits on browsing and discovery and serendipity and all those good things that happen when one is free to roam the stacks and pull books off the shelves.

So, perhaps, this blog can serve as a window into these closed stacks.

For instance, here's a peep at some of the shelves in the Fales American wing:

This picture shows three shelves full of books by E. D. E. N. Southworth -- one of the most popular and prolific American novelists of the nineteenth century. We have six shelves filled with different editions of her novels, and an abundance of works by other authors no one has studied for fifty to a hundred years.

I'll spend some time here describing exactly how one determines what we have on our shelves, but bear this in mind: Mr. Fales wanted to own a copy of every novel published in English in the nineteenth century. He didn't get them ALL, but he came pretty close.

One of the great challenges of using the Fales Library is the fact that many of our books are not yet listed in BobCat. The situation is much better now than it was when I arrived in Fales in the spring of 1998, but we're still far from the goal of every item in our collection being included in BobCat.

But there is a handy guide to a good chunk of the collection: the Fales Library Checklist Revised and Edited by Theodore Grieder (AMS Press, 1970).

The complete history of the Checklist is covered in the Introduction in Volume 1. The short version is that it was done on a primitive computer system, so entries are very very short. What it provides for you, the eager researcher, is an author and title checklist of what was held in Fales as of 1969, when volumes 1 and 2 went to press.

Here's an example -- page 601 from volume 2:

Note the vintage 1969 sans serif computer printout typeface. Also note that names of cities and publishers are abreviated. But this page does list the 26 titles by William Le Queux that were in Fales some 38 years ago, and that's enough to get you started.

The collection has grown considerably since 1969 and we have nearly tripled the number of Le Queux titles. If you search BobCat for "Le Quex, William" you will discover that we now hold 71 novels by the giant of the Edwardian age.

Then there are authors like Dickens, Thackeray and Scott who fill several pages each in the Checklist. We haven't added tons of new items for them because Mr. Fales already had just about everything.

The basic rule of thumb for the Checklist is that if an author is listed, it's likely we now have more of that author's works in the collection.

Although the checklist is nearly 40 years old, it is still an excellent place to start your research. There are several copies on the shelves in the Fales Library Reading Room, but those can only be consulted when we're open (M-Th 10-6, Fri 9-5). Another set is available in the Reference Collection on the first floor of Bobst (Call #: Z2014.F5 F34 1970). The copy in Reference doesn't circulate, so it's always available.

But you're probably all eager to hear more about William Le Queux...

Time now for a quick lesson on finding books in Fales through BobCat.

I assume everyone has BobCat bookmarked. For those who don't, click here:

http://www.bobcat.nyu.edu/

Which takes you here:

Click on the big blue ball to begin your journey.

Step One to finding things in Fales is to use the pull down menu to select "Fales/Special Collections" from the list of library locations.

From this point on your searches will only turn up items held in Fales. There may be copies in other library locations in addition to the copy in Fales -- we have some overlap with the New-York Historical Society, whose holdings are also listed in BobCat.

Step Two for the quick and easy finding of things in BobCat is to enter something in the search box. If you're looking for a specific title, go ahead and use the default Phrase Search. For instance, if you want to know if Fales has a copy of The Bending of a Twig by Desmond Coke, just do a Phrase Search and you will discover that we have six copies from various years.

If you are trying to figure out what we have on any given subject, I suggest doing a Keyword Search. Click on the blue box on the left side of the screen that says "Keyword Search" and you'll end up here:

To prepare for a talk I gave to a class working on Uncle Tom's Cabin I wanted to find out what other relevant materials we have in Fales, so I plugged in "slavery" in the search box and chose "All Keywords" from the menu.

By choosing All Keywords, BobCat will turn up items that have the word "slavery" anywhere in the record, whether in the title, the author, or a subject heading. Here's what this basic keyword search turned up:

This search turned up 163 records. The first one in the list is from 1968, but I'm most interested in items from the 1840s and 1850s, which leads us to...

Step Three: Sort your results.

In the image above, I drew a red circle around one of my favorite functions in BobCat, the Sort Results button. I use this all the time.

When you click on that button you get a screen that gives you a few sort options. You can sort your results by Title, Author, or Date and you can sort your results in Ascending or Descending order. The only drawback is that you cannot sort a list of more than 3,000 records. Alas!

After instructing BobCat to sort my slavery records by Date in Ascending order, it was very easy to skim through the records until I hit a rich vein of 1840s material. Here's just a small sample of that sorted list:

This is the method to follow if you want to find out what, if anything, Fales has on your topic. This is how I discovered that the earliest book on cheese in Fales is A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons (1820).