Okay… so a couple weeks ago I posted that I was looking
forward to “our further exploration of cataloguing!” Well…the exploration has
been extensive with MARC records, and I think my brain is hurting! I am
starting to dream about MARC records! So many numbers, so many tags, so many indicators,
and now the CIP (cataloging-in-publication). I had never heard of this before –
I always looked at this page when doing my bibliographies, but I did not
realize the formalities of it. I have to admit, I enjoyed looking at the CIP’s
and understanding them a little better. Then to find out that sometimes they
are incorrect was actually fascinating. It was interesting to learn that older
books’ CIP’s could be different than the MARC records – I would not have
noticed that.
After reading about copy cataloguing, I was certainly
wishing we could have used this for our MARC records in Assignment #2! Oh how much
easier that would have been! It was comforting to know that there are “cooperative
entities” (Lesson 7) which collaborate to put together these catalogue records.
I found the MARC records to be informative, yet very labor intensive to make
from scratch. One question that I did keep asking myself throughout this
lesson, however, was: if there are so many places to access MARC records for
free, then why would a library pay to get them? Or is it that the ones you pay
for are more standardized and complete? Or is it because of a compatible format
that you are paying to download? Interesting…
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