The LC: sorting

You may be thinking of Nicholson Baker's article "Discards" that appeared in the New Yorker in 1994. It was also later printed in a book of his essays, The Size of Thoughts. Although he had some good points, there were also some serious errors in understanding as well as factual errors. Imagine reading that the card catalog I walked past several times a day had been destroyed...

Yes, even if you don't care about the collections at all, the Jefferson Building is magnificent. More beautiful than the Capitol or the White House.

And if there are books you've been looking for, they probably have them. They do have photocopiers, and if you ask you can have some books pulled from the stacks and waiting for you so you don't have to wait 20-40 minutes for them. Many of the specialized reading rooms have extremely helpful librarians too.

It's too bad they don't get cataloged before they're stolen, so you'd at least know what was published.

For maps, you should be able to start with a map of the world and zoom in and see outlines of all the relevant maps in your library. The MARC format has space the labreastude and longitude range, but unfortunately many catalogers only include that information if it's easily available on the map itself.

-- Patrick