Welcome, Library colleagues! C&MS News is a quarterly update of events and activities in Catalog & Metadata Services.
C&MS Vision
After working through several drafts, the staff of C&MS have selected a vision statement for the department:
“Catalog & Metadata Services remediates and creates meaningful metadata as efficiently and economically as possible, using a variety of means and adapting these means as new needs, technologies, and uses arise. Our goal is to make all Library resources discoverable for our community and our peers by connecting users to the information they seek while assuring the quality demanded of a world-class institution.”
If you have feedback, we’d like to hear it.
Vendor Services Update
This has been a very busy first quarter. The Hadler and Violich collections have returned from vendors and are now available to our users. We’ve sent off MRC’s Conversations with History collection (358 items) as well as a backlog of MAIN Burmese materials (229 items). Those collections should be back by the end of the year. We’re tidying up final details to send off a backlog of Indonesian and Malay materials (1,452 items), to be followed in November by 937 items from MRC’s International Latino Film Festival collection. Coming soon, over 9,000 records for English-language monographs at NRLF will be sent for automated matching. Those volumes that fail an automated match will be sent to a vendor for manual cataloging. Little by little our backlogs are being eliminated and the Library’s low-level records are being remediated – thanks almost entirely to Library Strategic Project funding.
Staffing Updates
Please join me in congratulating Trina Pundurs as she leaves Catalog & Metadata Services after 11 years of service to join the staff of Library IT in the role of Metadata Analyst. Her last day in C&MS is November 5th. Trina has been a great colleague to C&MS. She will be missed. Congratulations, Trina!
Good Cat, BadCat!
Happy Birthday to BadCat which turned 9 earlier in August and surpassed its twelve-thousandth ticket at the same time! The work of BadCat is accomplished in large part by Michael Meacham and Mark Takaro. However, seven other C&MS staff members are also regularly assigned BadCat tickets which are added into their ongoing workloads. The problems reported to BadCat run the gamut from the seemingly easy to the obviously complex. A seemingly easy ticket, such as a bibliographic typo, often ends up being, if not a complex issue, then at least a multi-faceted problem. For example, the time a serial title change was reported, it turned out that with print, microfilm, and electronic access, two merged titles, and yes, one title change, almost a dozen different records needed to be updated or created. Or the report that a bibliographic record needed an edition statement added, but upon review, the volume needed an entirely different record because the added copy was the 3rd edition which had been added to the record for the non-numbered first edition. Or the books lacking vendor records in the catalog – which turned out to be a problem with the vendor changing the structure of the file names so that the LIT automated processes couldn’t find, retrieve, and load the files. Yikes! So happy birthday, BadCat, and thank you to everyone who discovers and reports problems to this service. And thank you especially to the C&MS staff who are able to look deeply into records and see their relationships to other records and to other processes and are able to resolve the myriad problems that hide there.