Cordwainer Bird Library

From SWILwiki

The Cordwainer Bird library is currently a SWIL-run or -collected library of science fiction, fantasy, random nonfiction, and Star Trek books, named after the pseudonym famously used by Harlan Ellison for works he publicly wished to disassociate himself from. It is maintained on the second floor of Cornell Library, in a little nook with couches. It is run on the honor system, which means most of our really good books can be found in George, which is under lock and key. The library is maintained by the SWIL librarian, and his/her minions. The future of Cordwainer is somewhat in doubt, since in 2007 SWIL made a decision to begin gradually removing books from Cornell to Weirich, the SWIL lounge in Parrish.

Table of contents

1 History

2 Checking out books

3 Duties of the Librarian

4 Past Librarians

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History

Cordwainer was established by Carl Fristrom '80, who donated it to Swarthmore, and was not associated with SWIL. The second librarian was Carl's brother, David Fristrom, a SWILnik. SWIL accidentally took over Cordwainer in 1984, when the Old Guard SWILies neglected to come to a SWILmeeting and, not realizing the library didn't belong to SWIL, everyone else elected Shoshana Green as Cordwainer Librarian. After the miscommunications were cleared up, David agreed to name Shoshana as his successor, and Cordwainer became SWIL's responsibility.

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Checking out books

Checking out books from Cordwainer works on an honor system. Anyone who can walk into Cornell can check out a book. When they do so, they should write their name and the date on the card in the book, and put it in the card file. Cordwainer books cannot be checked out at the Circulation Desk, and are not in Cornell's computer system.

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Duties of the Librarian

Currently, the keeping of the books in both Cordwainer and George is under the heading of a single entity, the librarian, although the Custodian of George probably has some influence there. (George's Legal Guardian, however, will lose all input in this matter when George turns 18, to say nothing of the now-defunct George's Biological Parent.) In general, the Cordwainer librarian is responsible for making sure the library continues to function smoothly.

The librarian should go up to the library fairly regularly to check the status of the card file. If books have been checked out for a very long time, the librarian should get in touch with the people who have them out and remind them to return the books.

The librarian should also check the donations box for book donations and should shelve those and create cards for them. If the shelves become overcrowded, the librarian should search for bad books or books that no one checks out, and remove them to George.

The other duty of the librarian is spring bookbuying, which should be coordinated jointly by the librarian and the presidents. Generally, the types of books we want to buy are either: new or newly popular science fiction books, books which complete partial series already in Cordwainer, or replacements of frequently-checked-out books that don't come back. Cordwainer was originally a science-fiction library, but there has been increasing interest in buying fantasy for it too.

Bookbuying should be arranged in such a way that people who care can have a say in the process. In general, this should not be by open nomination and vote in meeting, as is sometimes done with SWIL movies. In Spring 1999, we used a procedure which worked somewhat well, which was to solicit e-mail nominations and ask for e-mail voting (vote for anything you think you'd read) from people. Voter turnout is smaller than for movies, but enough to get a reading. One mistake which was made that year was that we did not make it clear which books had been nominated to fill out incomplete series, so people didn't vote for them as stand-alones.

Someone occasionally tries to completely inventory Cordwainer. I personally think it would be fairly cool to have an advanced and thorough project of this sort, putting the results on sccs or the swil web page where people could search them card-catalog style. Currently, since we don't have a complete inventory, we have no measure of book attrition which occurs as a result of people walking with cordwainer books and not taking the cards out. Because of this, i think a beginning-of-year vs. end-of-year survey of all of Cordwainer's books would be a very nifty thing for some librarian to do. Inventories of the books in George, and ambitious database projects, etc, should be online and linked to from http://www.swil.org/Cordwainer.

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