How to lose your identity in a book

      Long long time ago I got an abandoned book from a narrow, deserted road in our city. The area was mainly an outskirt of the city and was deserted due to a big mela in the nearby temple. I was eagerly walking due to some family engagements, suddenly my sights happens to fall on this big beautiful book, which was abandoned by someone, may be because of its sheer size or by the weeding out policy of some rich man’s bin.

     By happen to be a social being, bibliophile and all the above a professional from this Library field I choose to keep the book and find out the real owner if he really wants to give it the due respect which it deserves by being a book. There was nobody in the vicinity to ask and it was slightly getting dark, apart from that there were miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep, so I decided to go on.

    The book was around 10 years old with blue color and editor’s name on the front page. By flipping through the pages I realized that the owner might have thought that the book with its humungous content will take his quality time so he dumped it there. Even though, how far worthless it’s contents, such treatment towards a material of such nature hurts me deep in my mind. Since I brought it into our library next day, some thoughts flashed through my mind; if it was our book, where should I keep such a book with multimedia contents incorporated in it? I think it should get the reference status and a class number like 316.472.4. The book contains varied contents contributed by lots of people around the world. In addition a lot of plagiarism charges are pending over it; some from the book and some for the book. By close scrutiny we can identify that the editor is trying hard to keep the thieves away from the original and autobiographical contents described inside the book. Even all this he is still unable to release its 2^nd edition.

    Content analysis in this book will be an up-hill task, and will be a test of unknown waters like Hadoop, Apache spark and altmetrics like areas for us. Recently I tried to purchase it’s new copy for our library, but it was unavailable and above that I came to know that it is indeed banned in organizations like ours. And on enquiry they revealed that:

Its editor is one Mr. Zuckerberg and after reading you will never private.

Index and contents regularly checked and catalogued by Obama and his team (NSA)

Contents regularly contributed by millions of Indians also.

Published by one social networking group

Available exclusively at www.facebook.com

LOC cataloguing data for Z39.50 unknown

ISBN to be assigned.

Sorry for the time consumed. Is it worth giving access to facebook like sites in Library ? 

Subeesh A C

Pune.