GODORT

Jessica wrote this morning about abbreviations in librarianship. You should go read her post. And maybe the rest of her blog, and her twitter feed. She’s one of the people I want to be when I grow up. Her post reminded me of a brief anecdote:

When I became a member of the ALA (American Library Association), I also became a member of a roundtable/section or two.  Do I remember which? No, of course not. My interests are too varied and it was all I could do not to join them all. I didn’t know what I would get out of membership in said roundtable/section.

Fast forward a few months and I get a random publication in the mail. Let me say that since I’ve become a member of the ALA and of AALL (American Association of Law Libraries) my mail has quadrupled. The DCBar generates nowhere near the volume of mail that each of these organizations generate. I get lots of mail from vendors. And this random publication looked, I thought, like a catalog. I didn’t recognize the name of the sender, and it sounded more like a company name than anything else: GODORT.

I opened the “catalog” and saw some writing, and thought maybe it would be worth skimming. Which is when I realized that it wasn’t a catalog after all. It had interesting stuff in it. I realized GODORT must be an organization of some sort, but I’d never heard of it, so how did they get my address? Or know that I would be interested in it? WHAT IS GODORT DARN IT??

I read half the publication before I found a notice to members of the GOvernment DOcuments RoundTable. Protip: name your organization in your publication. Maybe on the cover. Or with the post office disclosures on the inside front cover.

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