In reference to the recent discussions re: whether the Daniela Turudich books were ever printed, I emailed a friend of mine who works as a library cataloger in Canada and she sent me the following regarding how to tell if a book listed is really in print or not - library listings aren't always reliable, neither are vendors.
Allison T. _______________ Agreed that WorldCat is not a reliable source ... some libraries suppress on-order information and only let a book show in the public catalogue, but the majority display their on-order titles; these can be ordered anywhere from a month to a couple of years before publication, depending on how early publication is announced (and libraries often get promo info long before the general public does). And, despite its name, WorldCat only accesses customers of the OCLC cataloguing service, and not all of those connect correctly (we use it occasionally at work, when our regular and more reliable sources let us down). Vendors are also not your best source of what is actually in print, especially where specialty publications are concerned. Out of the palaeontology books I've been mentioning on LJ lately, only one title was listed as in-print/available by the usual big online vendors ... if I'd trusted them, I would have been sorely disappointed. Your best source is the publisher's own site, if you know who that is (this is how I confirmed the true availability of my books ... I've added a ton of publisher site links to my oddities website, so check there is you've got a publisher) ... most list their forthcoming titles with projected publication dates, as well as their current catalogue. Another good source is the author's own website if they have one ... they'll definitely be promoting their latest and upcoming. If no author site and you don't know the publisher, second best source for you is the Library of Congress ... if the book is listed in there, then open the record, click on the "marc view" tab at the top. The fields of the catalogue record are the set of numbers down the lefthand side. See if the record has a field numbered 263 ... the data in that one is the projected publication month and year provided by the publisher (the publisher name is in field 260, so you can use that as your pointer to the publisher's own page). If there's no 263 and the 300 field has the actual number of pages filled in, then the book is, or has been, in print. If not in LC, check the national library for the country of publication ... they all use the marc system, so the field 263 rule applies to all. If you're striking out on all this, there's the "last resort" Google technique that I teach in my cataloguing cheat workshop. Go to Google homepage and click on the "advanced search" option to the right of the search box. In the Advanced Google, type the main title of the book into the phrase box (the second one on the screen), and the author's surname into the "with all of the words" box (the first one on the screen) ... if the author's given name is distinctive, type that into this box as well. Hit search. This should cough up some leads to publisher, distributors, libraries that have it on order (which will at least net you the publisher name, so you can then track their site down). NOTE: if the book title is single word or "ordinary", e.g. just called "Fashion"or "Psychology", reverse the procedure ... title in the first box and entire author name in correct order in the second box. _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
