Category Archives: Cataloging

I am in the middle of doing some cataloging and while I can find lots of instances of ISBN 0807220299 , I am not find any for 0087220280. I don’t know if that means a major shift to Audio CD from Cassette, or I just have a strange item.

Queen Noor of Jordan, the former Lisa Najeeb Halaby, has written an autobiography, Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life . Her authority record at the Library of Congress shows her as Noor, Queen, consort of Hussein, King of Jordan, 1951- . But some versions of the MARC record for the book have “Nur, Queen of Jordan, 1951-.” which would also seem to be correct . This is making things a little confusing for library patrons and, in some cases, staff.

A proposal has been advanced to include an opinion to add to the metadata gathered when linking to another page. Not a terrible idea at all, but I am not sure how libraries would handle it. Adding value judgements to something is not our regular practice, despite what some people think.

Did you know that Star Trek fiction is an authorized Library of Congress genre heading? We are going back through and adding it to several hundred records. I also found out that we will be doing the same for Star Wars fiction.

Where’s Melvil Dewey when we need him? The 19th-century creator of the Dewey decimal system has helped generations navigate libraries. If only he could do the same for one of the 21st century’s burgeoning media: Web logs, the diary-like Web sites also known as blogs. – Geoffrey A. Fowler

It would seem the definition of Epistolary Fiction (I didn’t know what it meant, either) has been broadened to include e-mail for books like Meggin Cabot’s the Boy Next Door .

LJ has the article MARC Must Die by Roy Tennant. He says that the numbered tags are a problem. I like to think of them as language independent. He suggests that XML may be a replacement. However, XML records are very much larger and XML only specifies the carrier not the tags and content of those tags. There is a MARC XML standard available, but that is only useful for some tasks, I’d hate to work with that monster. Granularity is a problem with implementation, not MARC. If a cataloger does not use the necessary fields and subfields, it is poor cataloging, not a problem with MARC. I’ll not go through the other arguments against MARC. The ability to nest fields may be useful. Rather than moving to XML, I’d like to see a MARC-like implementation of FRBR . – David Bigwood

Everyone should read FRBR & Topic Maps to learn more about FRBR, which I think is tres cool.

Does anyone know why in the gsafd they chose bildungsromans instead of something patrons could understand like “coming of age fiction?”

I was reading in American Libraries tonight about the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records aka FRBR. Essentially, it takes MARC Records one step further. How frustrating is it when patrons want a copy of a book but do not care which edition? You end up either gambling on which one will be available first, or putting multiples reservers on. FRBR addresses this by allowing you to place a hold at the Manifestation (rather than Expression) level. Hopefully, the implementation issues will be resolved soon since there is already one vendor using it.