Cataloging

The idea of taking a class on cataloging brought back all of my memories of the hours spent in the cataloging lab at Simmons during my first class on cataloging. In 2007 they opened a new renovated library, so it doesn't even exist any more...boy that makes me feel old. I have to admit I was surprised when I got my first “real” library job and discovered that most people don’t really catalog but rather copy things that others have cataloged. The only time that I actually had to originally catalog was when we acquired some unusual item that no one had cataloged anywhere else yet.

When I started working in a school the copy cataloging was a matter of necessity, there just was no time to even think about cataloging or process books for that matter so normally all of the new books came with a disk which would import nicely into the circulation software. With a little tweaking these records were pretty good. For my teachers I assign class tags so that they can search for resources that cover topics covered in for example “World History II”, Some vendors provide better records than others and some use Sears Headings instead of Library Congress, so all of those would need to be changed. Eventually I began looking to the internet. For most common items I use CWMARS. For the unusual I use Sunlink which is comprised of the school libraries in the entire state of Florida. It contains lots of unusual items that school libraries tend to have in their collections. I have found Library of Congress to be useful as well although I do find their website to be somewhat difficult to navigate and I don’t always find what I am looking for.

This week’s reading from “Catalog It” by Kaplan and Reiding has been a great refresher. I ordered it through the library system for this class but will purchase a copy because I think it will be a good resource to keep on hand and is a nice compliment to the four big green books of Dewey that I now own. I liked the Genesse Valley resource and when looking for it on the net stumbled across this link
http://www.caclibrary.org/Cataloging.htm
Which lists a whole bunch of sites to use for cataloging. I also like to use Auburn University's page
for a quick listing of Marc tags for when I need to quickly look up what a particular tag is.

So far this has been a nice trip down cataloging lane. I am re-learning some of the things that I have forgotten and it is so much less stressful knowing that I am not going to be sitting in a library with an item in my hand and a blank screen in front of me. Now I know that I need to know how and why it all works and the basics but that there are a lot of resources out there to help.