Broken Pieces: A Library Life, 1941-1978
Michael Gorman
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 0838911048
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From his earliest reading memories in wartime Britain through five decades of librarianship, eminent librarian
and former ALA President Michael Gorman offers insights from his extraordinary career in this new memoir.
Gorman relates his personal and professional journey in prose that is by turns charming, opinioned, and
revealing. He made perhaps his most significant contribution to librarianship as editor of the 1978 Anglo-
American Cataloguing Rules, a major development that receives detailed attention here. The debates and
arguments that would shape professional practice for years to come are dramatically presented, with a vivid cast
of characters including leading librarians from two continents. Broken Pieces, Gorman s account of being on
the front lines of many of the most important decisions made in librarianship during his career, is a timely and
entertaining read.
cricketer, which goes to show that there is some good in everyone. My fellow pupils were mostly of Irish descent (Lenihan, McEnroe, O’Hanlon, Fitzgerald, Murphy, Mahoney, Powers, etc.) with a sprinkling of Balts, Hungarians, Italians, and other Catholic results of the displacement caused by the war. There was also a Jew called Lipitsch who, brave lad, left the classroom during prayers. I still have no idea what his parents were thinking and how he endured the year or so of school attendance in a
French doors opening on the scruffy cement patio that lay below the garden; down two stairs to the kitchen and down another stair to the scullery beyond. The cellar/coal hole brooded in the dark and harbored terrors down yet another flight of narrow stairs. The second floor contained three (two large and one small and narrow) bedrooms, with stairs going down to a lavatory and a bathroom and another bedroom, and stairs going up to a bedroom on the third floor, which, in turn, opened on an
become interested in two strands of radical politics—anarchism and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). I was very attracted to the ideas of philosophical anarchism typified by Kropotkin (not to be confused with the violent anarchism, verging on nihilism, of which Blanqui and Bakunin were the inspiration) and in particular his ideas on cooperation as an alternative to social Darwinism. My third life, and my happiest, was with Anne Gillett. Early on, she was living in Mill Hill with her
carried out largely via conversations with cataloguers in the British Museum and the NRLSI on how we could harmonize their and BNB’s cataloguing practices. The vast collections of the National Lending Library in Boston Spa were not catalogued but arranged by author and title in the pious hope that those data given on the spines of the books were, first, the 146â•… •â•… B R O K E N P I E C E S forms by which they were sought, and, second, agreed with the data given on the title leaf. The
Terry, about whom I knew two things—that he had been in the Coast Guard and that he was from Fresno, California. I had never heard of Fresno and assumed, because of the Coast Guard connection, that it must be on the coast. I was not to be disabused of that idea until I was interviewed, fourteen years later, for what turned out to be my last job, in Fresno in the heart of California’s Central Valley, known for good reason as “the other California.” The students were very friendly to me and seemed,