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Campus News
     
Your faculty and staff news since 1965
Special Spotlight Issue:  April 22, 2002

If books could talk...
Stuber catalogs world's languages for UNM General Library

By Carolyn Gonzales

Jim StuberThe stack of books on Jim Stuber’s desk stands as a silent Tower of Babel. A cataloger of foreign language materials for the UNM General Library, Stuber’s world is filled with books in Hebrew, German, Arabic, Russian and a host of Asian languages.

If the books could talk, the sound of Russian would rise through the cacophony. Stuber looks at a Russian title, trying to determine if it is the final volume in a four-volume set.

“I can search in Cyrillic in OCLC,” he says, referring to the Online Computer Library Center, a shared cataloging system used by librarians the world over. Continued searching in Russian library catalogs fails to reveal whether or not the volume is the final in the set, so Stuber sets it aside for further research. Stuber also selects Russian language and literature materials for the library.

Next, the singsong sounds of Asian languages would rise from the stack. His computer is equipped with CJK, a program that allows for Chinese, Japanese and Korean character display.

“I can bring up the records for the titles in character. The program comes with six dictionaries — English-Chinese, Chinese-English, and so on,” he says.
Stuber can input and create records using CJK. Searching for, “Japan’s Beauty,” using CJK reveals that the multi-volume set was published in 1967-68 and that in Japanese its “Nihon no bi.”

Stuber can then add UNM to the list of libraries owning the title. “Library of Congress used to do the cataloging in house in character. They also transliterated the Asian characters into our alphabet,” he says.

Stuber catalogs approximately 100 titles a month. “It requires enormous intellectual energy. The Library of Congress system is rigid, but a beautifully categorized system. The cataloguer determines where each piece fits in the system,” he says. UNM’s librarians have been specially trained by the Library of Congress to catalog at a level not accessible to all, he says.

Before the computer age, Stuber had a Cyrillic Selectric typewriter, but “I handmade all the card catalog cards in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the Indian languages,” he says.

Stuber has been cataloging for the library since April 1974 after earning a bachelor’s in Fine Arts at UNM. He learned Russian at Highland High School and continued to study it at UNM. He also studied Spanish and German. Indian languages, East Indian, that is, he said he learned slowly. The Devanagari script, the alphabet system used in Hindi and other languages, is more alphabetical than character, he says. “The Arabic and Japanese I picked up on my own with some friends in the community.”

Away from the University, Stuber is an artist. “I’ve been doing some stone sculpture in serpentine, a green stone,” he says. He’s also working in marble and is currently working on a commemorative piece for Sept. 11. He was also creating a series of woodcuts of the bosque, “until the Montaño Bridge came in and destroyed it.”

Some of his hand printed catalog cards have become part of his collected art work, as well.


The detail work of cataloging

Stuber picks up a book of poetry by local author Wendell Anderson. He says that the library had several volumes by Anderson and that each had been cataloged at different times, resulting in a different author number for each volume. He pulled them all and determined one author number for Anderson. From there, he had to get approval from the Library of Congress for the number. They accepted it. The number is PS 3551.N399. The “P” stands for language and literature, the “S” for American literature. The “3551” means that Anderson is a current author and that his name starts with “A.” The “N399” represents –nderson.