Yale University Library: Human Resources

Late summer, 3193 B.C.
First serial title change attested: to "Royal Sumerian Academy Publications."

537 B.C.
The National Library of Babylon, finally switching to papyrus, ceases maintaining its clay tablet shelflist, but is unable to discard it for nostalgic reasons. 2 years later, under seige by the Persians, the city finds a new use for the old tablets and manages to inflict severe losses on the beseiging army by pelting them from the ramparts with large quantities of shelflist tablets. 295 B.C.
Roman General Laudamus Principalis, struggling with the problem of too many soldiers and not enough uniforms & weapons to go round, introduces a battle selection method called 'Slotare'. Each time a soldier is credited with killing an opponent in battle, the date of the battle is sewn into the lining of his underwear. Annual undergarment checks are carried out, and any soldier who has not registered a successful 'hit' in the last three years is deselected from the Legion, has 'Withdrawn' sewn into his underwear, and is made available to the citizens of Rome for purchase.
[contributed by A. Jackson (University of Dundee)]

43 B.C.
First attested use of an ISBN (for the special collector's edition of Caesar's Gallic Wars with an introduction by Marc Anthony): IXIVVIIXVIIIVIIIVIVII. 427 A.D.
The Library at Alexandria decides to contract out its annual weeding project; Vandal hordes are the lowest bidder.

June 21, 762 A.D.
Death of St. Minutia. The birth date of St. Minutia is unknown. The only reliable chronicle has an unlucky lacuna: "Sa. Minutia in [.......an]no domini nata est", where only the last two missing letters can be supplied with any certainty. Vitae of the saint written later naively abbreviate the "...no domini" as 'n.d.', and this is the form traditionally cited for her birth. Minutia is said to have been born in the former Roman province of Nova Panonia (part of the present day Czech Republic), in the village of Sineloco (modern day Odnikud). Her time and place of birth, therefore, are usually given as "s.l., n.p., n.d." Happily, a generous amount of hagiographical material on St. Minutia has survived, perhaps the most popular of which is a collection of her homilies and sayings, including the motto most closely associated with her: "Non pilus tam tenuis ut secari non possit."* She appears to have had some interest in ecclesiastical architecture; one early vita has references to a church which was built using plans drawn up by Minutia herself. The actual building has not survived, but there is a fragment from a contemporary description: "On either side of the main entry, St. Minutia caused innumerable added entries to be placed, such that people marvelled at the great multitude of doors, and rebuked the Saint for the labor wasted in putting them there. 'No labor has been wasted', she answered them patiently, 'for by these means no one will be barred from my church through a lack of access.'" Another account explains that her plans were an improvement on earlier designs which had called for a single entry at the east end, near the tabernacle; the inconvenience of relying on this so-called Corporate entry was immediately recognized and rectified by the saint.St. Minutia using a sword to split a hair. She was, not surprisingly, an influential member of her convent. There are a number of references to her reorganization of its agricultural property: she is said to have divided the land into holdings devoted to permanent crops (fixed fields) and holdings given over to crop rotation (variable fields). The variable fields were further divided into smaller parcels (subfields) assigned individually to peasants attached to the convent.
*translation: There is no hair too fine to be split.[Contributors to the St. Minutia entry include D. Boice (Divine Word College) and J. Mirejovsky (UCI).] 1066 A.D.
William the Conqueror defeats his cousin Harold at the Battle of Hastings and imposes the Anglo-Norman Cataloging Rules, 2nd ed. (ANCR2) on his new subjects. 10 years later he commissions the first systematic catalog of selected realia (the Domesday Boke).

August 5, 1782
Birthdate of the Werke brothers, Gesammelte ("Gus"), Sämtliche ("Sam"), and Ausgewählte ("Wally"). In addition to being prolific authors, the brothers were devoted to their military careers and were seldom seen out of uniform.
Gus Sam Wally

1883-4
Cattlemen at the Bar and Drum Ranch, outside Lone Stack, South Dakota, develop the 'barcode' brand as a way to keep track of individual animals in the herd. 1920
Henry Ford, seeing his monopolistic grip on the US car industry loosened by the advent of new companies and models, decides to introduce a 'unified driving system'. This involves a front end which can be bolted onto the dashboard of any vehicle, making the driving experience identical from vehicle to vehicle, and removing the need for separate standards of instrumentation and control. The project, which was doomed to failure, was given the Code No. Z39.50.
[contributed by A. Jackson (University of Dundee)]