Carr, CIMT 522
Kelli Carr 991628323 CIMT 522 Proficiency 3 Option 1 October 4, 2012
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Option #1: Interview either a college/university librarian or public librarian about this proficiency. Your interviewee should be someone knowledgeable about the cataloging operation of their library. When you make your appointment be sure to share the proficiency with them so they may think about the interview prior to your arrival. When conducting the interview be sure to take basic notes while remaining engaged in the interview. If your interviewee is amendable, tape record the interview, but be sure to have the interviewee sign an Informed Consent Form. During the interview be sure to ask your subjects about cataloging process in their libraryassuming they have an online catalog, how are new items added to the database? How frequently are updates made? Who does their cataloging? How much of their cataloging is outsourced? Finally, what is their understanding of the term bibliographic integrity? After the interview, be sure to thank the interviewee for his/her time. A hand-written follow-up Thank You note is a nice professional touch as well. Write up your interview findings by describing the type of library where the subject works, the town/city in which it is located, and their professional credentials, i.e. professional training, how long in their current (past) position(s). The meat of your interview should be written in a conversational narrative tone. Your concluding section should summarize your findings with particular attention given to any surprises that you discovered for yourselfthat is, things that you would not have thought of without benefit of a practicing librarians experience.
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Jody Gray is a 1996 graduate of the MLIS program at the University of South Carolina. After graduating, she was an Acquisitions Librarian at Coastal Carolina University for one year. She then accepted the position of Automation Coordinator for the Horry County Library System where she worked for 12 years. For the past 10 months she has been the head of Technical Services for the Horry County Library System. Jodys office is located in an Administration Building that is separate from the 10 branches that she serves. The Horry County Library System is made up of 10 branches and 1 bookmobile. She adds, We serve a population of close to 200,000 people in Horry County. And because we are a tourist destination and we border North Carolina, we serve a lot of out-of-state people, too. The past two years we circulated over 1 million items. The technical services department consists of 4 staff members and Jody that order, receive, process, catalog, and invoice over 50,000 new and donated items a year. One person places the orders, invoices, and assists with processing. One person receives and processes the inventory, and the other two catalog all of the items. Jody helps out in all areas all the time. In her opinion, Thats a lot for 4 staff people to accomplish in a fiscal year. She is not sure how other TS departments run in the state but she is trying to make contacts in and outside of our state. In the Horry County Library System new items are added in different ways. Gray says they do about 90 percent of their ordering through Ingram, After each order we place, Ingram sends us a batch load of MARC records that come from OCLC (Ohio College Library Center). We in turn upload these records into our ILS SirsiDynixHorizon. She says this process saves her catalogers a lot of time. There are a few
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vendors that she uses like CenterPoint, Thorndike Press, Recorded Books and MidWest Tapes. She is currently looking into the option of MARC record batch loads from Thorndike and Recorded Books. Vendors from which they do not receive MARC records require the cataloger to go out to OCLC in order to download the record. How frequently is the cataloging process updated? Since I came into this position which was about a year ago we started receiving our MARC records from Ingram. This was a big time saver. Other than that not a lot has changed with the cataloging process. How frequently are the items that have been added to the system updated? The only time a fiction record might be updated is if they are adding a soft cover copy to a hard cover record or vice versa. Records with volumes get updated frequently, and items are added to the database daily. Who does the cataloging? The library system has two non-professional catalogers for an 11-branch system. We have a collection of close to 400,000 items. How much of the cataloging is outsourced? Ingram does the processing for library barcodes, property stamping, spine tape on soft cover books, and Mylar covers on hard back books. They import the batch MARC load and make a few additions to the records as needed and print spine labels. They process , in-house, all books on CD that are purchased. All of the DVDs they order come from MidWest tapes with barcodes and property labels. And they process, in-house, the CenterPoint and Thorndike Press items. Again, Gray is looking into MARC records from these two companies. Gray says, Bibliographic integrity is standardized bibliographic data. Without this the storage and retrieval of the data would be impossible. MARC formats are what make this possible. Bye, bye AACR2; Hello, RDA. She says they see inconsistencies
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in their catalog all the time. Over the years non-professional catalogers have come and gone and their database has suffered. She is in the process of pulling together a reclamation project to synchronize their librarys holdings with WorldCat through OCLC. This will allow them to clean up the database. After having this conversation with Jody, I took some time to look up OCLC and I found that Alden Library at Ohio University was the first library to use online cataloging in 1971. In 1967 three university presidents and four university librarians from the Ohio College Association met to agree to sign the articles of incorporation for a nonprofit organization called the Ohio College Library Center. This group enlisted Frederick G. Kilgour. Freds idea was to merge the newest information storage and retrieval system, the computer, with the oldest, the library. His vision was that this new computerized library would be active rather than passive, that people would no longer go to the library, but that the library would go to the people. I also found on their site that they participated in producing RDA. It also states on the OCLC site that the Library of Congress will fully use RDA by March 2013. The standard has been used by other libraries since it came out in beta form in 2010. I enjoyed interviewing Jody Gray. She is looking forward to the OCLC using the RDA standard as she has been receiving newsletters and emails about the implementation in the future. Sources: Gray, Jody (2012) Horry County Memorial Library Systems, Technical Services. Interview on October 3. Ohio College Library Center (2012) Retrieved October 4, 2012.
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http://www.oclc.org/us/en/default.htm.
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