October is the tenth month of the year in the modern day Gregorian calendar and its predecessor, the Julian calendar.  The month kept its original name from the Roman calendar in which octo means “eight” in Latin marking it the eighth month of the year.  October was named during a time when the calendar year began with March, which is why its name no longer corresponds with its placement in the Julian and Gregorian calendars.  October's birth flower is the calendula.  The birthstone for October is the opal and it is said that the opal will crack if it is worn by someone who was not born in October.  http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/months/october.html

Richard Stanley "Dick" Francis  (1920–2010) was a British steeplechase jockey and crime writer, whose novels centre on horse racing in England.  After wartime service in the RAF, Francis became a full-time jump-jockey, winning over 350 races and becoming champion jockey of the British National Hunt.  He came to further prominence in 1956 as jockey to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, riding her horse Devon Loch when it fell, for unexplained reasons, while close to winning the Grand National.  He then retired from the turf and became a professional journalist and novelist.  All his novels deal with crime in the horse-racing world, some of the criminals being outwardly respectable figures.  The stories are narrated by one of the key players, often a jockey, but sometimes a trainer, an owner, a bookie, or someone in a different profession, peripherally linked to racing.  This person is always facing great obstacles, often including physical injury, from which he must fight back with determination.  More than forty of these novels became international best-sellers.  Francis's manager (and co-author of his later books) was his son Felix, who left his post as teacher of A-Level Physics at Bloxham School in Oxfordshire in order to work for his father.  Felix was the inspiration behind a leading character, a marksman and physics teacher, in the novel Twice Shy.  The older son, Merrick, was a racehorse trainer and later ran his own horse transport business, which inspired the novel Driving Force.  Father and son collaborated on four novels; after Dick's death, Felix carried on to publish novels with his father's name in the title (Dick Francis's Gamble (2011), Dick Francis's Bloodline (2012), Dick Francis's Refusal (2013), Dick Francis's Damage (2014), Front Runner:  A Dick Francis Novel (2015)).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Francis  Find a list of books by Felix and Dick Francis at http://www.felixfrancis.com/index.php?page=Books  Find a list of books by Glenis Wilson, who follows in the footsteps of Dick Francis,  at http://www.gleniswilson.co.uk/

SO LONG, DEWEY  Madison, Ohio, is ready to imagine a world without Dewey.  Madison Public Library has transitioned its collections from the Dewey Decimal System to Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC), with the help of Kent State University School of Library and Information Science alumnus Shawn Walsh.  Walsh is the emerging services and technologies librarian and maintains the IT infrastructure of the library.  BISAC is the classification system used in bookstores, which involves organizing books and other materials by topic, with words instead of numbers on the labels.  “Dewey is a linear classification, and BISAC is not,” Walsh said. “ This [change to BISAC] allowed us to create more usable space for our patrons.”  BISAC allows libraries to group like materials together and arrange shelves in new ways that are not typical rows of shelves, Walsh said.  This creates a more functional space for library users, providing more seating and small work areas, for example.  BISAC also allows for subject area groupings of library materials, arranging them by words instead of numbers with decimals, which are harder for most people to understand.  Madison Public Library hopes the change will make the collections easier for everyone to search.  “In theory, with the proper signage, a person unfamiliar with typical library arrangements can look at the signage and navigate to the desired topic,” Walsh said.  Walsh was also responsible for developing a relational database to keep track of the BISAC classifications, which included a “see also” database for synonyms.  The Madison Public Library started the transition to BISAC in the fall of 2013, earlier than many other libraries, but Walsh said several libraries in Ohio are making the change as well.  He noted that transitioning to BISAC is a slow-spreading trend in public libraries.  Perry Library in Maricopa, Ariz., for example, has also started to use BISAC. The classification was so successful there that they opened every branch library using the same system.  Some libraries are implementing Dewey Lite, a hybrid of Dewey and BISAC, he said, and several of these are closer to Madison than Arizona.  Libraries such as Williams County Libraries, Way Public Library and Milan Library are all using this system.  Latisha Ellison

https://www.kent.edu/slis/news/so-long-dewey

BISAC stands for “Book Industry Standards and Communications.”  It is the subject category system used in bookstores.  Because BISAC has become more mainstream in the past decade, you might someday work at a library that will debate whether to use it or not.  BISAC is a list of subject headings that are used to express the topical content of books.  In a formal information science context, you would call them “descriptors.”  There are over 3000 BISAC subject headings available, and they are arranged under fifty-one major headings.  Only the major headings have scope notes and usage information.  BISAC comes from the Book Industry Study Group’s Subject Codes Committee.  The Committee updates BISAC every year, and you can view the current edition online at the BISG website.  American and Canadian publishers assign the subject headings as part of a complete metadata record that is used to market the book.  As happens any living classification scheme, the annual update of the descriptors indicates that the scheme is getting more detailed and expanding.  BISG guidelines ask publishers to go through the change list every year and update the categories to the most current.  If you are using BISAC as a shelf arrangement tool, this is something you must monitor and respond to in order to keep your browsing categories up-to-date.  BISAC also offers “extensions” that target specific audiences.  There are “Merchandising Themes” for groups of people, events, holidays and topics. Examples of Merchandising Themes are CULTURAL HERITAGE / Asian / Korean or EVENT / Back to School or HOLIDAY / St. Patrick’s Day or TOPICAL / Boy’s Interest.  BISG has recently developed an extension for Regional Themes, and it is discussing a new extension for Common Core.  Some of these extensions will have relevance for libraries, but currently only the regular subject headings are included in library catalog records.  https://cbtarsala.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/bisac-basics/

September 21, 2016  The first person to set foot on the continent of Australia was a woman named Warramurrungunji.  She emerged from the sea onto an island off northern Australia, and then headed inland, creating children and putting each one in a specific place.  As she moved across the landscape, Warramurrungunji told each child, "I am putting you here.  This is the language you should talk!  This is your language!"  This myth, from the Iwaidja people of northwestern Australia, has more than a grain of truth, for the peopling and language origins of Australia are closely entwined, says linguist Nicholas Evans of Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.  But researchers have long puzzled over both.  When Europeans colonized Australia 250 years ago, the continent was home to an estimated half-million to 2 million people who were organized into about 700 different groups and spoke at least 300 languages.  Linguists have struggled to work out how these languages were related and when they emerged.  Each was spoken by relatively few people, and as cultures were wiped out by disease and violence, many languages vanished before they could be studied.  Researchers prioritized gathering information from the few remaining speakers over deciphering ancient language relationships.  But in recent years, researchers borrowing methods used in biology to derive evolutionary trees have begun to unravel the Australian linguistic puzzle.  The approach takes a major step forward, with a combined genetic and linguistic study of the largest Australian language family.  The paper at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature18299.html offers a modern version of Warramurrungunji's story.  It paints a picture of how people entered and spread across the continent, giving birth to new languages as they went.  It's "a major advance," says Peter Hiscock, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney in Australia.  "It presents evidence for an elaborate population history in Australia, spanning 50 millennia."  The study, led by evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, also marks a milestone in collaboration between geneticists and linguists, who for years stayed in their separate camps.  Michael Erard  Read more and see graphics at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/why-australia-home-one-largest-language-families-world

The Model T was an automobile built by the Ford Motor Company from 1908 until 1927.  Conceived by Henry Ford as practical, affordable transportation for the common man, it quickly became prized for its low cost, durability, versatility, and ease of maintenance.  Assembly-line production allowed the price of the touring car version to be lowered from $850 in 1908 to less than $300 in 1925.  At such prices the Model T at times comprised as much as 40 percent of all cars sold in the United States.  Even before it lost favour to larger, more powerful, and more luxurious cars, the Model T, known popularly as the “Tin Lizzie” or the “flivver,” had become an American folkloric symbol, essentially realizing Ford’s goal to “democratize the automobile.”  The Model T was offered in several body styles, including a five-seat touring car, a two-seat runabout, and a seven-seat town car.  All bodies were mounted on a uniform 100-inch-wheelbase chassis.  A choice of colors was originally available, but from 1913 to 1925 the car was mass-produced in only one color—black.  The engine was simple and efficient, with all four cylinders cast in a single block and the cylinder head detachable for easy access and repair.  The 10-gallon fuel tank was located under the front seat.  Because gasoline was fed to the engine only by gravity, and also because the reverse gear offered more power than the forward gears, the Model T frequently had to be driven up a steep hill backward. Such deficiencies, along with its homely appearance, less-than-comfortable ride at top speeds, and incessant rattling, made the Model T the butt of much affectionate humour in innumerable jokes, songs, poems, and stories.  http://www.history.com/topics/model-t  See many details and pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T

The Ford Model A (also colloquially called the A-Model Ford or the A, and A-bone among rodders and customizers), was the second huge success for the Ford Motor Company, after its predecessor, the Model T.  First produced on October 20, 1927, but not sold until December 2, it replaced the venerable Model T, which had been produced for 18 years.  This new Model A (a previous model had used the name in 1903–04) was designated a 1928 model and was available in four standard colors.  Read more and see pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_A_(1927%E2%80%9331)

The recipients of the 2016 Nobel Prizes will be announced between 3 and 10 October.  These are researchers, authors and peace advocates who, according to the vision of Alfred Nobel, have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/about/prize_announcements/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1532  October 3, 2016  On this date in 1885, Sophie Treadwell, American playwright and journalist, was born.  On this date in 1916, James Herriot, English veterinarian and author, was born.