First, I just want to say how much I appreciate Catalog It! It's succinct and addresses most of the problems I feel like you'll encounter as a school librarian without getting too heavy. The summaries at the end of each field description will be very useful in the workplace.
A couple observations:
1. 041 - Kaplan says it's the field of the future in libraries and that it'll be nice when we can search that field and get just Spanish language works and translations. Why can't we do that now? Public libraries' OPACs are able to filter by language. On this record, for example, you can see that in 041, it's noted that the book is in Spanish. I would think it's what makes their filters work. Have school library OPACs just not incorporated that filter? Why not? Seems like it would be a simple enough addition. Or is the public library OPAC pulling it from the 546 field?
2. I finished reading this at the BSO on Saturday night, and the man next to me seemed to be reading over my shoulder. I almost suggested he become a cataloger if he felt the book was that interesting...
3. My maiden name was Verso and no matter how many times I read "verso," it still throws me. (Shouldn't have changed my name...)
4. The push in RDA to record things as you see them is very interesting. On the one hand, it seems great because you don't seem to need to spend so much time looking things up to make sure they're what everyone else is using. On the other hand, if you aren't incredibly precise and others aren't as well, I wonder if you could run into problems of items not being cataloged the same. But if they're at different institutions, I suppose this may not be a problem, especially for school libraries.
5. I appreciated the guidelines on cataloging equipment since that's not as obvious as a book would be. Kaplan's push to catalog the items and put them in the OPAC was appreciated.
Having said all that, I am happy to be done with reading about cataloging. It does get tiring after a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment