Everything in its place
As an indexer, I tend to be obsessive about organizing things alphabetically—the books on my shelves, the spices in my cupboards, the DVDs and CDs in the basement . . . Of course Joan Aiken should come before Kate Atkinson,…
Adopt-a-Library
Sarah Ng is passionate about school libraries, especially the one at Britannia Secondary School in Vancouver. When Sarah was a student at the school in the 1980s, she and the other kids not only had to leave their classrooms to…
Celebrating Canadian children’s literature
We at West Coast Editorial Associates regularly edit and proofread books created in Canada. And, yes, some of us write them too. Immersed as we are, it’s easy to assume that everyone reads Canadian books. But a 2018 report by…
A visit to one of the world’s largest rare book libraries
One afternoon last April, on a quest to gather information about biologist and author Rachel Carson for a book I would be writing, I guided my behemoth rental car along the grey streets of New Haven, Connecticut. The windshield wipers…
Behind the scenes at the word museum
In August 2016 I wrote about the Library of Congress in Washington, DC—a must-see for any language and literature buffs visiting the US capital. A January 25, 2017, Washington Post story reported that a new attraction for word lovers is…
What’s in a subject heading?
It seemed like a straightforward announcement from a body that is rarely in the public eye. On March 22, 2016, the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) of the Library of Congress (LoC), the national library of the United States, issued…