Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Junvenile, uvenile (for Juvenile)

If you've never read the blog Awful Library Books, you may not realize how outdated books in libraries can be. The most susceptible seem to be the juvenile books, which age faster than adult books. Kids will notice really quickly if the technology in the book is older than they are, or worse, older than their parents. The Library of Congress Subject Headings system makes it easy to find books for children, by putting a subdivision $vJuvenile literature, etc. at the end, but if the word Juvenile is misspelled, it will be much harder to find. Today's typos are examples of an extra letter, junvenile (found 12 times in the OhioLINK catalog and 138 times in WorldCat), and a missing letter, uvenile, which often happens (at least to me) when changing the delimiter marker from an x to a v.

Liz Bodian
Chicago Public Library

Image of the cover of a book recently posted on the blog Awful Library Books.

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