Holdings Users Group Meetings

About

Friday, February 28, 2014

The inaugural meeting! We had 37 people, representing 26 libraries - record attendance, great questions, great discussions, lots of ah-ha moments and suggestions. And Kathryn gave us a name and new acronym: Holdings Users Group Meeting, or HUGM!

Topics

• MARC (HoldingsMarcRecordDefinition)
  • MAchine Readable Catalog record; bibliographic records are coded into MARC format so that they can be processed by integrated library systems and online catalogs. Specific pieces of item information are stored in defined fields (for example, field 245 contains the "statement of resposibility" or title and author). MARC also requires special punctuation, formatting, and other codes in order to display the data consistently and correctly.
  • Understand MARC just enough to be able to look for elements (title, author, format, ISBN, etc.) in the catalog that match your item.
• RDA (http://www.loc.gov/aba/rda/)
  • Resource Description and Access; this is the new - offically adopted in 2013 - cataloging standard that is replacing AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2nd ed.), which was first devised in 1967. RDA attempts to bring item description into the 21st century, to better handle non-print materials, to make resource description more user friendly (for example - RDA uses English phrases rather than Latin abbreviations!), and to make record data easier for computers to process (separate fields for separate pieces of information).
  • RDA standards are encoded in MARC in the same way AACR2 standards are/were.
  • You will begin to see new fields, different terms, and changes in the way key elements are presented. Most obvious: author formatting, listing of editors and mutliple authors, resource format.
  • These changes also impact record display in the online catalog, but generally, they are not too disruptive. One exception: catalog search results can be filtered using facets (author, subject, etc.) - changes in the formatting of author fields can result in TWO author facets. Same author, but records with different punctuation are treated differently. (Computers are very literal!)
• Requesting New Titles / Orders
  • An overview of the process for requesting new title records to be added to the catalog.
  • When searching, start with a keyword search for author and title.
  • Searching by ISBN will sometimes miss a valid record. PLS allows multiple editions and imprints of a title to share a record - these different versions may have different ISBNs.
  • Submit a list of ISBNs to orders@pls-net.org. This email is processed by a computer script to search the catalog for matching ISBNs. If a match is found, that simply means that some other library submitted it first. You will recieve an automatically generated replky messge stating the results of your submission - when ISBNs had been previously submitted, if a matching record has already beena dded, if the number is not a valid ISBN, if the number is a UPC.
• Original Cataloging
• Catalog Corrections / RT
• Catalog Best Practices
• Copy Records: Circulation Modifiers and Statistical Categories
• Reports

Handouts