Nate Cothran, our head of Authority Control recently returned from the Mid-Winter session of ALA. This is what he had to report:<\/p>\n
Backstage kicked off the year right by attending the ALA MidWinter conference held at Boston, MA.\u00a0 Even the weather cooperated.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, January 16 at 7:30am EST, the Authority Control dept hosted a Users Breakfast at the Seaport Hotel, which was just a hop, skip & a jump away from the new conference center itself.\u00a0 The breakfast was quite good and we had many clients and Backstage personnel co-mingling.\u00a0 It was also a great opportunity for me, Nate Cothran, to finally meet with a lot of you at last.\u00a0 Though I have attended ALA in the past, this was my first chance to attend the breakfast.<\/p>\n
John Merrill, our CEO out at Bethlehem, PA said a few words about our recent acquisition of the \u201cPresRes\u201d from OCLC, which handles Microfilm duplication, Storage and other Digitization services.<\/p>\n
I was also able to give a brief introduction to a couple new services we have to offer immediately:<\/p>\n
MAX can return your processed Current Cataloging bibs typically in less than an hour (our system can process about 20,000 recs\/hr).\u00a0 This service costs a bit more, and it is especially useful for libraries that need their records processed & returned immediately<\/em>.\u00a0 The great thing about MAX is that there is no minimum fee or schedules that need to be fussed over; simply send in your records through our website any time of the day in whatever size file works for you and we will get the results back to you fast<\/em>.<\/p>\n Backstage Authority Control has also incorporated the Bowkers\/Syndetics TOC database.\u00a0 What this means is that we now have a direct means of providing you with enriched (TOC, Summaries, Fiction profiles) content as part of your normal bib processing.\u00a0 Since we maintain the database in-house, this reduces the cost on our end and we pass those savings onto you by also lowering the cost of what you may have been paying elsewhere.\u00a0 We also thinks it makes sense to charge you only for the enrichments you actually receive.<\/p>\n Both MAX & Bowkers TOC are in place today<\/em>.\u00a0 If you\u2019re not sure whether either of these makes sense to your library, please ask us to setup a sample run for your records.\u00a0 At Backstage, we love to run samples for our customers as it helps us refine the process for them and also gives our clients the assurance they need for these exciting new services.\u00a0 For more information on these services, please feel free to contact me, nate@bslw.com<\/a>, or your Sales Representatives from Backstage.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve made it this far in the blog post, only a little further!\u00a0 I had the opportunity to attend some great presentations at ALA regarding cataloging and so I would like to pass the links to our forum that contain my notes:<\/p>\n Karen Anderson was scheduled to attend the all-day training session for RDA (Resource Description and Access) at ALA, but unfortunately slipped on a patch of ice at her house and broke her arm.\u00a0 So Maritta Coppieters, our Bibliographic Services Product Manager, attended in her stead.\u00a0 Maritta also had to catch a plane to England on Sunday, January 17, but I was lucky enough to glean some of her notes regarding the latest updates on RDA.<\/p>\n While we still plan on sending out regular updates on RDA (of which Backstage is one of the vendors training on it), I have posted my notes from Maritta in our forum:<\/p>\n\n