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"Wow, when you leave this job, you could be a social worker."

Do you have any information about my relative who lived here before Vermont was even a state?

Today I met the 8th-great grandson of Roger Enos, founder of Enosburg Falls.  He was on a trip with his family, and they were heading up to Canada before returning to their native Kansas, so he thought he'd stop by the library and see if there was any information about his 8th-great grandfather.

This was so exciting!  I am not kidding when I say it was a bit like meeting a celebrity.  He even wore a t-shirt advertising the 1990 Enos Family Reunion!  He and his family asked for books where his forebearer might be mentioned, although they didn't have time to really pore through them, and then asked for advice on where else they might go in town to see some local history.

This happens a lot:  people come in, or call, wanting to hunt down ancestors.  We're fortunate to have a good Vermont section (although it may border on a Vermont hoard), and in particular a lot of books about local towns and villages.  People are often disappointed that we don't have birth and death records - there was a fire at some point, from what I understand - but we give them what we can, and it usually catches their interest.

I've found, however, that I'm really at a disadvantage, only having lived here three years.  If you say "Oh yeah, he lived in the old Benoit house," I don't know which house that is.  If you want to know which of Enosburg's six or seven small cemeteries your ancestor is most likely to be buried in, I can't help you.  I can't tell you whether the falls I'm thinking of are the Enosburg Falls.

I really need to do a better job of educating myself about the town.  Some of it will come with time, I guess, but I could be working harder about it, too.  In the meantime, I have the Historical Society's information constantly accessible, know the names of all the town's churches, and can give directions to just about anywhere you want to go.  It works pretty well, for now.

Do you have any French picture books?

Today a young girl - a summer person - asked for picture books en français.  Of course we don't have any, but we really should, considering how close we are to the border, and how close we are to the lake.  I decided to buy us a few, just enough that there's something familiar on hand for a child who doesn't read in English.

I looked in a variety of places online, most notably Amazon.com and European Schoolbooks Limited.  My process for this type of book order is this:  Keep two windows open.  On one window, have the search page for BibzII, our book vendor.  On the other, have the information for the book I'm looking for.  From there I copy-paste the ISBN from the information page onto the search page.

Anyway, I did this for a while.  I found a lot of books that looked good on European Schoolbooks, looked them up on Amazon, copied the ISBNs, searched for the books in BibzII, and got messages back saying no results found.  After about six tries I hipped to the fact that I probably wasn't going to find any of the books I was looking for.  But I also hipped to something else.

French ISBN-10s start with 2!!!

This is huge!!!  This means that ISBNs are not arbitrary!  I mean, I always thought 978 meant Yo this is a book, but further than that I thought the numbers were just numbers.  This means that we're saying Yo this is a book and it's written in English/published in America and then even more!  Amazing.  Absolutely amazing.

So here's what Wikipedia says.  (I know, not a reliable source, but reliable enough, in this case.)  Take a book with the ISBN 9780793837687.

• 978 (or 979, although I've never seen it) - An ISBN-13 starts with a GS1 prefix.  GS1 is an international standardization company.
• 07 - The registration group element, which indicates a language-sharing country group, individual country, or territory.
• 9383 - The registrant element, which is assigned by the publisher.
• 768 - The publication element, which is title information.
• and 7, the check digit.

Also from Wikipedia:

I guess I should have known an ISBN was more than just arbitrary numbers, and I'd daydreamed on and off about how they were assigned*, but this realization that they're assigned regionally absolutely delighted me.

I wonder what exciting discovery will be next!


*Because librarians daydream about ISBNs.