Oh the Mysteries of the Massive Internet of Congress

September 14, 2012 8:15 PM

Help me with this mystery document/page from the Library of Congress....

I am researching the man mentioned on this linked page, but I can't figure out how to find the source of it... What the hell is "mtfgc"?? Have I found a transcription that's still in the works or something? How do I cite it, and how do I find the pages before and after? The title of the book? I'm stumped. I'm sure this is solvable by people savvier than moi.

posted by RedEmma to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

The text is very similar to Henry Anson Castle's History of St. Paul and Vicinity—as if one were paraphrasing the other.
posted by Knappster at 8:37 PM on September 14, 2012

Best answer: Here is the rest of the book. And here is the title page.
posted by Knappster at 8:41 PM on September 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Knappster just beat me to it, as I was trying to back into what part of the LOC contained it. The text is a partially failed OCR of this page, which has a snazzy picture of the gent.
posted by cobaltnine at 8:43 PM on September 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Addendum: Here's the worldcat link. If you follow it, it leads to the LOC page saying it's a digitization in progress. If you're in Minnesota or Chicago, there may be some local holdings available to you, and Worldcat gives you enough info to do a proper citation.
posted by cobaltnine at 8:46 PM on September 14, 2012

Best answer: Or read it at Archive.org.
posted by MonkeyToes at 8:49 PM on September 14, 2012

Best answer: What the hell is "mtfgc"??

"mtf" is an abbreviation for "Meeting of Frontiers":

Meeting of Frontiers is a bilingual, multimedia English-Russian digital library that tells the story of the American exploration and settlement of the West, the parallel exploration and settlement of Siberia and the Russian Far East, and the meeting of the Russian-American frontier in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.

This project contains material from many sources; it seems that "mtfgc" indicates something from LOC General Collections, while, for example, works from Rare Book & Special Collections are coded "mtfrb", works from the LOC Law Library are coded "mtfll", newspapers and such from General Collections are coded "mtfgs", etc. These codes appear in digital IDs assigned to works in this project; see, for example, the bottom of this page. (The link that cobaltnine refers to will, apparently, eventually point to a similar page for the work you're interested in. As you say, it appears to be a digitization in progress.)

Disclaimer: This is all inference based on poking around the LOC website for a little while; I have no special knowledge of this project or the LOC generally, and didn't find anything explicitly describing the system of digital IDs. So, take my assertions with a grain of salt.
posted by stebulus at 9:47 AM on September 15, 2012

Best answer: Saint Paul, history and progress; principal men and institutions; biographical sketches and portraits of leading citizens; descriptive accounts of her enterprises, Castel, Henry Anson. St. Paul, Pioneer Press co., 1897. Digitized from the Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/service/gc/mtfgc/2135/0760074.txt).

Or something along those lines.
posted by MonkeyToes at 11:05 AM on September 15, 2012

In fact, why not Ask a Librarian?
posted by MonkeyToes at 11:45 AM on September 15, 2012

Response by poster: Thank you SO much, folks!
posted by RedEmma at 7:04 PM on September 15, 2012