Help for Serials Catalogers

I spent one summer working on a retrospective conversion project at Mount Holyoke College. Besides working in a beautiful library surrounded by lush lawns and shade trees, I had the good fortune to experience serials cataloging.

It was rather scary at first, but I had great support from two experienced serials catalogers and I learned a lot. Soon I began looking at the process like a jigsaw puzzle - putting all of the pieces together to create a larger picture that others could recognize.

Slowly, I've been building a list of helpful sites for serials catalogers. Today, I added three more sites. They are

MARC 21 Format for Holdings Data from the Network Development and MARC Standards office of the Library of Congress;

Primer: MARC 21 Format for Holdings Data, a 24-page pamphlet in .pdf from OCLC; and

Guidelines for Recording Serial Holdings handy help from Yale University.

If you're not already familiar with these resources, I hope you find them helpful. If I were still cataloging serials, I suspect I would refer to them on a regular basis.

Do you have a favorite site that I've not yet discovered? Please let me know.

Continuing Education Opportunities

I've just completed the CMRLS Continuing Education Catalog for winter/spring 2010. It will be arriving in Central Region member libraries next week.

Technical Services programs scheduled are

Technical Services Roundtable, Wednesday, March 3 from 10-noon at the Jacob Edwards Library in Southbridge;
Serials Roundtable, Thursday, March 11 from 10-noon at the Webster Veterinary Library, cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Grafton;
Number, Please! Dewey Decimal Classification, Thursday, April 1 from 9:30-12:30 at the Rutland Public Library;
BISAC or Dewey: How Do You Classify Your Collection?, Tuesday, May 11 from 10-11 AM via GoToWebinar.

Other programs that are not spcifically Tech Services but which I organized are
Degunking your computer, Thursday, April 8 from 1-3 PM in the CMRLS Computer Lab;
Local History & Genealogy Roundtable, Friday March 19 from 10-noon at the Forbush Memorial Library in Westminster;
In Search of Old New England: Local History & Genealogy Field Trip to Old Deerfield, Wednesday, April 21 from 10-3;
Stress Reduction & Relaxation Techniques, Tuesday, Febrary 23 from 2-4:30 PM in the CMRLS Meeting Room.

Go to the CMRLS EventKeeper Calendar to register.

Hope to see you at a few of these programs

NETSL conference 2010

NETSL has just announced the date and title of its spring conference: April 15, 2010; Crosswalks to the Future. The location, as always, is Holy Cross College in Worcester.

Keynote speakers will be Dr. Barbara B. Tillett, Chief, Policy and Standards Division, Library of Congress and Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager for Google Books, Google Magazines, and Google Patents.

I'm no longer on the NETSL board, so I can't tell you any more about the content, but this is always a great conference, so mark you calendars. I have. After attending several of the NETSL Spring Conferences I wanted to join the NETSL board and finally had a chance 3 years ago. I'm so glad I did.

Bits and Pieces

The release date for RDA has been postponed causing some comments on the various e-mail discussion lists such as RDA = Release Delayed Again.

The most recent official notice says that RDA will be published in June 2010 and that pricing and purchasing information will be announced at the time of the ALA Midwinter Meeting, January15-18, 2010. Stay tuned.

There have been some updates to the catalogers pages on the CMRLS websites. They are revised whenever I learn of a new blog or site or organization. Links are removed if a blogger has not posted in a long time or a site appears to have been removed.

ACQWEB, a "gathering place for librarians and other professionals interested in acquisitions and collection development" has been added to the page Sites for Catalogers. ACQWEB has been around for many years, but has recently been redesigned and updated.

A new blog, Cataloging Thoughts, has been added to the Blogs page. Author Stephen Denney talks about his job at the University of California, Berkeley library. He explains his day-to-day responsibilities as a copy cataloger as if his audience is non-librarians - or at least non-tech services librarians. It's a very different perspective from most cataloging blogs and I like it.

How to Catalog a Hiccup has the totally opposite perspective and is aimed at experienced catalogers. Suzie DeGrasse Pocataligo chronicles her "independent study on cataloging ephemera (art, sound, people, smells, hiccups, etc.)" and only an experienced cataloger would have any idea what she's talking about. While unusual media are outnumbered by the plain old book, they take an inordinate amoun of a cataloger's time because they are unusual and we don't have lots of practice with them. In one of her earlier posts, Suzie actually supplies a MARC record for a hiccup. A more recent post is a CDWA record for a hiccup.

Next step: update my blogroll.