Dorothea claims that the way to tell a librarian from a library technician is by whether that person knows his own Cutter number or not. While I don't disagree that it can be hard to tell those with a degree in library science from those without (alas, I used to be one of those people who thought a librarian was simply someone who worked in a library), Cutter numbers aren't quite as simple as this table implies.
You see, while the standard LC Cutter numbers are a good starting point, the actual Cutter number is going to vary somewhat depending on the depth of your collection in a certain subject area. If you have something close to that number already, you're going to want to tweak it to fit in between the call numbers you already have and leave some space around it for future additions.
For example, Melton
is fairly simple. There are relatively few Meltons around, so M45 works sometimes, but I'm also seeing M458 in the UW catalog. On the other hand, if you're a John Smith, good luck guessing your Cutter number anywhere.
So knowing your LC-style Cutter number isn't all that great. Not only is it bog-simple to calculate, it probably isn't even accurate. On the other hand, Dewey-style Cutters use pages and pages of tables and are so complicated that OCLC even offers a program for generating Cutter numbers based on Dewey Cutter tables. For example, look at The Merritt Mathew Melton family in East Texas : ancestors and descendents, which was written by James Vard Melton. The Cutter number on that book is M495M.
Whew, there we go. And I didn't even get into the concept of main entry.
I think I may have proved that I'm an even bigger geek than Dorothea, at least in this little area, if only because I actually wrote all this stuff out... but who's counting?
Dorothea Salo says:
I happily yield mastery of Cutter geekery to you.
You're just demonstrating my point, though. Anybody who knows this much about Cutter numbers has gotta be a librarian.
Laurabelle says:
Of course no one who's not a librarian would care a whit about Cutter numbers, but that doesn't mean that someone who doesn't geek at the drop of a hat like I do (can you believe that I pulled all that out of my memories from cataloging class way back last fall?) isn't just as much a librarian as I. To put it another way, Cutter geekery is an indicator of a librarian, but lack of such doesn't mean anything.
Personally, I think librarianship is an attitude. When did I stop calling myself a and start calling myself a pure and simple? I don't know, but it doesn't have anything with getting a job. It's all about the 'tude.
Dorothea Salo says:
Oh, now you're taking me far more seriously than I meant to be taken. The whole secret-handshake thing was intended as a minor giggle, not a serious discriminator.
I don't think I'm a librarian quite yet. But I'm getting there.