Reading Reflection Lesson 5 - Cataloguing Process and Standards

With this lesson, I have NO background knowledge of how resources are catalogued in a school library, so I am looking forward to finding out how items get ORGANIZED!

Personally, when I am doing a search for a resource, some main points that I look at are: the title, the author, the brief description, the summary, quite often I look to see how many pages are in the book, and I will check to see what the format is – whether it is a book, video, audio, etc. Something else I realize that I look to first, is the photo of the book. I know that if there isn’t one, I am disappointed.

I was interested to learn about the ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description), and how they divide the resource description into eight units, called areas, and that they are listed in a particular order:

Title and statement(s) of responsibility

Edition

Material (or type of publication) specific details

Publication, distribution, etc.

Physical description

Series

Note(s)

Standard number

In examining these areas, for a teacher or student who is trying to find the particular Mother Goose book as pictured in this week’s lesson, I would think that they would tend to look up the book based on the subject – in this case Nursery Rhymes. I am guessing the subject of the book would be included under the "area" of Material.  If a teacher/student knew that they were looking for "Mother Goose" in particular, then I think they would most likely use the title search of Mother Goose.

Hmmm…I almost feel like I need to design AREAS for the rest of today’s blog!

INSIGHTS FROM THIS WEEK’S READINGS:

In the Manitoba Education and Training handbook (1997, p.1.4) , this section stood out for me as the main reason cataloguing of resources needs to take place:

The catalogue enable users to

• retrieve information efficiently

• increase understanding by students and staff of information retrieval systems

• plan, order, and check resources efficiently

• develop information retrieval skills that are transferable from one school library to other school, public, college,  university, and special libraries

As I read through Chapter 3 in the Manitoba Education and Training handbook regarding organization of the school library, they are very specific in how the resources in the library should be arranged. I am hearing more about some school libraries developing their own way of sorting resources in the library, and how some are going away from the Dewey Decimal system. Is this something that is going to become more prevalent?

Chapter 4 of Standard cataloguing for school and public libraries by Intner, & Weihs, (2001). This chapter was rather confusing to me, and most of the time I kept thinking how glad I was that our district has people who catalogue the books into the system!

KEITH’S QUOTES: (the instructor for this course!)

“Housekeeping details supplied by cataloguing agencies are of little interest to the teacher-librarian. However, any information added as housekeeping at the school level is often vitally important to collection management.”

“Consistency is important in bibliographic control and is a factor in effective information retrieval.”

QUESTIONS I PONDER:

T-slips…are these still used??!! This is the first that I have heard of them. This manual work sounds like something that would not be done anymore with latest technology.

Although the Manitoba Education and Training handbook is from 1997, I do see the benefits for each of these topics. I wonder though, with the wider scope of written and online resources that are available, if this is going to become increasingly difficult?

NEW TERMS!

Some terms I learned this week (ones that I had heard of, but didn’t know what they stood for):

I learned the words for ISBN! I always knew what it referred to, but did not know it is called the “International Standard Book Number.”

Also, I didn’t realize that a MARC record is a "Machine Readable Cataloguing record"

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I didn’t fully understand the article by Conners (2008) on Main Entry. I think this is partly because I have not worked in a library yet, so I don’t understand the different distinctions for entries. I do agree though, that if something such as Main Entries is now redundant, then it is time to move on to something more current, and reflects the needs of today’s library.