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TIL that searching a library archive by call number range beats the catalog search every time
I was at the Cleveland Public Library main branch last Tuesday trying to find old city planning maps from the 1920s for a project. The online catalog showed 3 results with nothing useful, so a librarian named Dave told me to just walk the G1400 to G1500 shelves in the map room and pull whatever was there. Found 11 maps in 20 minutes that never showed up in search, including a 1923 zoning draft I'd been hunting for months. Why do library catalog searches miss stuff that physically sitting on the shelf finds every time?
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pat3604h ago
G1400 to G1500, that's the classified range for zoning and land use. Catalog records for old maps are a mess because they get added by hand decades later, if at all. Half the time nobody types in the sheet count or the surveyor's name, so search can't find what was never written down. Dave knew the range, not the keyword. Learn the range, skip the search.
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