MARS Authority Control

Patricia Stelter, our Vice President of Bibliographic Services put together a really informative primer on what Marcadia is, and how it helps libraries. I thought I’d share what she had to say here.

Trying to get your materials cataloged with less staff? I’ve been in your shoes and I know the solution! Marcadia is exactly what you need in these lean times.

We partner with OCLC to provide Marcadia and it is one of the unique divisions that make up Automation Services here at Backstage Library Works. One of the many advantages of Marcadia is that you don’t need an OCLC membership to get select WorldCat records. Also, it doesn’t matter what type of library you work in –if you complete acquisitions and cataloging –we can help you!

Marcadia is an extraordinary automated cataloging service that matches brief records to WorldCat MARC records according to your specifications. Even if you have newly published materials we can take as little as one or two fields of information and return premium WorldCat records to you for a very affordable $1.75 per result.

I’ve been a Library Director and I know firsthand that patrons can sometimes be demanding and how I struggled to get items cataloged and available to them. If I had known about Backstage Library Works it would have made my life much easier and I would have been able to concentrate more on grant writing, starting my Friends of the Library group and providing needed outreach to my community!

In retrospect, these are experiences that I look back on, but for you that are struggling with today’s budget shortfalls and cutbacks Marcadia can even be more beneficial. You’ve lost cataloging staff? We can do the work for you and make your life easier!

We all know that catalogers have varying opinions on what constitutes a perfect record. With Marcadia you get the perfect record every time. You tell us exactly what you want, including your preferences for certain cataloging levels or records from regarded universities, and we deliver with great efficiency the same records that trained cataloging staff would choose.

Discover how Marcadia can make your life a little more idyllic. Define your perfect record and schedule your free test run today.

Patricia Stelter

VP Bibliographic Services

Backstage Library Works

Every year in late November early December Backstage Library Works gathers its staff and jointly develops a plan of action for the following year.  Each department evaluates the market and its resources to develop a modus operandi for the New Year.  It is truly a grass roots process that invites all good ideas to be heard and plans to be developed.  The following is the direction the MARS team agreed upon for 2009.

What the automated authority control team would like to convey to our clients and to the library world is that Automated Authority Control is really for every library.  We feel that the automated authority control is a savings to all libraries.  The reduction in time spent by your staff as well as the access rich database the finished product produces is easily quantifiable.

We are implementing a three part approach to improving our product and our services for this year.  We will be focusing as always on service first and foremost.  We think that enhanced automation capabilities will improve our ability to deliver at a very cost effective rate.  We plan on preaching the gospel of authority control this year.  A detailed account for each area follows.

Service:

Our premise is that no matter how good your product is, your company will not progress nor stay in business if you do not deliver service above everything else.  Communications is the key to good service.  We not only want to communicate to our clients we want to reach all people interested in Authority control.  We have moved to do this by creating a communications center that leads to our recently created wiki, our blog and a new authority control form.  Last year we started our client centered listserv.  It has helped a few of our clients get answers to their ILS specific questions. http://ac.bslw.com/community/

Our client vendor relationship continues to be the best in this field.  We hope to improve on our vendor to ILS vendor relationship this year in hopes of making it easier to get ILS specific answers as needed when doing your automated authority control with Backstage.  We also want to establish more web based training for those of you who do not have the luxury of traveling for your organization.

Automation:

The Backstage authority control team is in the business of automation.  Our ability to design products that save you time and money is key to our success. Well designed processes that execute quickly and with minimal human intervention is our goal in automation.  Backstage was very successful in 2008 with bringing in new and large clients.  We deliver faster than any of our competition.  However, we believe we can do better. Our focus for 2009 will be to incorporate more multitasking into our automated processes.

Last year we moved the automated authority control software into the twenty-fist century.  We created a modern process run on today’s technology.  This year will be the year of enhancements.  The following are enhancements being considered by the MARS 2.0 team.

• Death date fix (cost free)
• Juvenile heading enhancement
• Bibliographic maintenance product*
• Auxiliary file improvements
• 781/18X validation
• Union Catalog of client local authority records

Cost Effectiveness:

Over the years the MARS team has developed a close relationship with their marketing and sales staff.  We plan on continuing this great relationship.  Our goal is to help them bring our message to the library world.  That message is this; automated authority control is the most cost effective way of doing authority control in your library and it is for all libraries. We want to bring our message to you.  We will be at all of the major trade shows this year.  We would love to come and see you personally and teach you and your staff about our automated process and the cost benefits.  Our sales representatives and product managers plan on literally hitting the road.  We will gladly visit your staff or present at your conferences. Let us know what your needs are and we will deliver.

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* Currently Backstage maintains all of your authority records on site and delivers to you these authority records when a change occurs.  We would like to take this one step further and maintain your bibliographic database to be delivered to you along with the updated authority records.  This would eliminate relying on ILS reconciliation of new authority records with authorized bibliographic headings.