Notes from the presentations at the Catalog Management Interest Group, January 16, 2010 from 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm.

Sharing Cataloging Expertise Alternatives

Ohio State Univ - Magda El-Sherbini

Talked immediately about the high cost of cataloging and asked how to reduce it? One option that is readily taken is to:
1. Participate in OCLC, then
2. Send records off to catalog vendors (outsource)

Cooperative Cataloging
Libraries catalog many similar / identical materials, perhaps as much as 50% shared. Therefore many catalog the same material at the same time. Some libraries acquire materials where they lack expertise on how to actually catalog the material, so they resort to outsourcing that material to other vendors.

Some alternatives:
• Sharing cataloging according to the strength of each library’s collection
• Eliminate cost of vendor services through this cooperation?
• OCLC appears to be struggling with all the duplication in their catalog

Disadvantages:
• Coordinating with each library
• ILS systems differ, so what’s the standard to be used?
• It’s difficult to maintain / retain specialized catalogers

Catalog for a Fee
Libraries can utilize a variety of catalogers (students). You don’t have to treat it as a contract per se, but instead as a cost-recovery plan.

Advantages:
• Hi-quality bibs
• Cataloging-based fees much lower than contractor vendor fees

Disadvantages:
• Continual commitment to the project
• Turnover of catalogers is high (students especially)

Local / Regional Cooperation of Catalogers
Advantages:
• Simple, easy to implement, coordinate

Disadvantages:
• Commitments, remaining partners

OhioLink (technical service group)
OSU provides a list of expertise in the consortium so that they have an available pool from which to draw. Magda mentioned how OSU farms out students to work at very nearby libraries for onsite cataloging or having those same libraries send 100 or so materials to catalog on a periodic basis. She also has ideas for a cooperative authority control venture but didn’t have time to share that today.

Expanding Catalog Records with Elements of Descriptive Bibliography

Gaucher College Library - Allison Jai O'Dell

Talked about the close physical description of books and how that should influence you while cataloging your materials. Mentioned formats, signatures, and collection notes as items to include; presented a fold-out example of an octavo leaf.

While some libraries may choose differently, Allison’s library adds in the full 260 (publishing info) data to the record. Also, they try to include whenever possible: Dedicatory notes, binding descriptions, other notes.

They index extensively with authority control in mind (controlled vocabularies). They like the idea of tag clouds.

Gaucher sets limits on when to put data in and when not to do so. There was quite a bit of feedback on this point. They use “cheap labor” (i.e., students) to do preliminary cataloging before it gets to the “main” catalogers. So a graded system where very easy components are done first, followed by more in-depth processing.

http://libraryguides.goucher.edu/SCACatalogingTools

Cataloging Staff Participation in Community Tagging

Univ of Georgia School of Law - Suzanne Graham

It’s important to know what your catalog has so you should perform routine tests on the data.

Tags can be personalized, vernacular, and can be used to relocate or discover other items of interest. A folksonomy is a collection of tags, so librarians should give tag clouds to users to help them discover.

VuFind (Univ of Georgia) has personal tags for relocation and users can search (other users’) tag index.

PennTags (UPenn) allows its patrons to browse and search tags.

Encore (Univ of Georgia, Law) incorporates tag clouds for community sharing. Apparently, III will only allow tag clouds to be created from 6XX $a fields, so potentially very useful $x, $y, $z fields are completely ignored. There is a workaround in place, though it means duplicating the info in these subfields in separate (unused) 6XX fields (e.g., 653 $a20th century).

Suzanne said her team frequently engages in “cuddles”—cataloging huddles. It helps them address their patrons’s needs. They are pushing to try to get their system to utilize a Google search box.

Batch Loading MARC Records for Electronic Resources

Univ of Michigan – Connie McGuire, Vickie Dillon

UMich has committed enormous resources to purchase e-books from several different sources, with the implication also added that most libraries can relate / have done this as well.

There are four separate libraries that comprise the UMich system. They are not quite ready for UTF-8, using MarcEdit to view their records in MARC-8 instead. They employ a lot of manual review to determine quality of incoming records. Mentioned Lint & Errorcheck (both apparently free) to check MARC records for inconsistencies.