Monday Morning Blog

I don't know if I'll have time for a Metadata update this week.  However, I did the exercise for 23 Things this morning on Prezi.  It's an interesting tool.  In a few minutes I made this presentation:  http://prezi.com/y5on3l9in7go/using-music-in-informational-and-instructional-videos-and-presentations/ I think that I like that it is so quick and easy to make a presentation.  However, I usually use other software that has more features and offers me more control so I found some things about Prezi to be a little frustrating.  While a person can sit down and use it almost right away, it is often difficult to achieve the precise results I want.  I found that as I was working with it I just gave up trying to get certain effects.  Instead I just did the sorts of things that the application is well-suited to doing.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing if all I want to do is bang out a nice-looking presentation quickly.  However, if I am trying...

So, this week I don't have any heavy metadata things to report on.  Instead I have my survey from 23 Things.  It was very easy to set up and I think that it will be useful.  I will share the results with this blog in a week or so.  Please take the survey if you have time:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dHkyQUwyVXhmYzJ5VzRYdVdYUUxKWmc6MQ  And, you can forward it to others as well. Thanks and have fun.

Ok, this post is lazy.  I admit it.  I found a nicely-written blog post that describes two of the sessions that I attended where RDA was discussed.  I'm not sure who Steve is but I think that he captured the content of those sessions well: http://cloud.lib.wfu.edu/blog/pd/category/rdafrbr/ Not to be completely lazy, I was a blogger for ALA Mid Winter as well.  Here is a blog post that I wrote for the Copy Cataloguer's Interest Group that fills in some of the gaps that Steve missed.  You can read it at: http://www.alcts.ala.org/metadatablog/2012/01/copy-cataloging-interest-group-jan-21-2012/ I hope that you can access my blog post without being a member of the metadata bloggers group!

The question was raised at the cataloguing meeting this morning as to when authority records for series titles was discontinued by Library of Congress.  Time flies....  it was June 1st,2006.  Here is a link to LC's policy about what they do with series titles:  http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/series.html  .  According to this document, their decisions was "not to create/update series authority records and not to provide controlled series access points in its bibliographic records for resources in series." This document also says that there is more information about series titles and the 490 tag in the Cataloger's Desktop.  Our subscription has been renewed so we should have access again if you want to read more about it.

While we don’t catalogue too many films, I just happen to have a documentary DVD on my desk at this moment and it needs subject headings and a call number.   Yesterday I started thinking about subject-headings for this DVD and reflected on the idea of separating what the DVD is about and what type of film is presenting that information.    In the process I was reminded of the concepts behind genre forms.     Last night as I was paging through notes from the conference I read that that there was a group working on a policy document on how to apply genre forms to different types of films.   Then, as I was wading through my email this morning, a link to that document happened to show up on one of my list serves:   http://olacinc.org/drupal/capc_files/LCGFTbestpractices.pdf .   So, it seems natural that this week’s post should be an extension to the introduction to genre/heading forms I wrote in last week’s blog. I think that I’ll use the docu...

Maybe you've noticed some new coding in MARC records in the last few months that you don't reco gnize.  It looks something like this:  655 #7 $a Road maps. $2 lcgft or 651 #0 $a Alamo Reservoir $v Maps. 655 #7 $a Bathymetric maps. $2 lcgft So, what is this all about?  Why is the second indicator a 7 and does it mean that the $2 or |2 is some sort of local coding from another system that just needs to be stripped out?  Until last week, I was stripping these out thinking that it wasn't anything that we would want in our records. Woah nelly.... even though our OPAC won't do anything with this type of 6XX field, don't strip it.  It's a new extension to MARC developed by LC that is gradually being adopted called "Genre/Form Terms".  Here is a link to a useful FAQ that explains all about them:  http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/genre_form_faq.pdf . In short, genre terms have been developed to allow cataloguers to describe in a 6xx ...