Today I began interviewing everyone in the technical services department about authority control.
Marcie Burton
I began by interviewing Marcie Burton. She is the Electronic Resources Cataloging Technical Assistant for Jackson Library. Marcie works mostly with copy cataloging. She is responsible for cataloging the electronic theses, websites and e-books. The electronic theses and dissertations require her to do original cataloging. She typically handles most of them in May, August and December when UNCG holds graduations. She often uses ProQuest to get information she might need to catalog these items. After being cataloged they are accessible through the catalog and online at NC DOCKS. NC DOCKS is the North Carolina Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship. It is a collection of the publications, theses and dissertations from ASU, ECU, UNCG, UNCP and UNCW. After Marcie catalogs the theses and dissertations for NC DOCKS Anne Marie puts them into the institutional repository (IR) for UNCG within NC DOCKS. For items that are already in NC DOCKS that need to be cataloged, Marcie uses MarcEdit. MarcEdit is a free MARC editing utility that was developed by Oregon State University’s library. With MarcEdit all Marcie has to do is to take the information out of UNCG’s IR in NC DOCKS and put it into MarcEdit to create a MARC record. That record can then be downloaded into the catalog. It is as simple as that.
As far as authority work goes, Marcie’s main job is to load the authority records into the catalog when Marcive sends them in. This happens once a month. Marcive will send an email saying the records are ready for download. The email also tells her how many records are available. She will receive an email for each title authority records, subject authority records and name authority records. Each email has a link that will take her to an FTP (file transfer protocol) site to download the record. Marcie then opens WorkFlows. She goes to Utility then to MARC Import. She then fills out the source and destination for the files. When it is done downloading a screen pops up that tells her how many records have been downloaded. She then double checks the number with the email she received to make sure the right number of records were downloaded. Marcie then must run the Load Authority Record Report in order to load the records into the catalog. This report creates records that do not exist and updates old records that need updating. At the first of each month Marcie has to extract any records that have been created by catalogers at Jackson Library and she must send this out to Marcive for authority control. There is another company that records are sent to in order to get any table of contents information that might be available.
Anne Marie Taber
Next I interviewed Anne Marie Taber. She handles most of the new book cataloging at Jackson Library. She is the Electronic Resources and Metadata Cataloger. She is the main cataloger for the NC DOCKS projects. She handles all of the faculty profiles as well as uploading the articles, etc. into UNCG’s IR for NC DOCKS. Most of the information that NC DOCKS had on UNCG’s faculty was pulled from Soldona. According to Anne Marie, Soldona is what the faculty use to list information about themselves. This information in entered by the faculty themselves. So when this information was pulled into NC DOCKS there were many inconsistencies. This caused many problems with searching, etc. To counteract this problem, Anne Marie created a NC DOCKS name authorities list. This list contains the uniform title for each school and their departments here at UNCG. It also includes the university’s independent units and their programs. Now that this has been created, whenever a department or school changes their name or merges with another(for example, Music, Theatre and Dance are getting ready to merge into one), ERIT can change all of these entires at once. Also when dealing with the NC DOCKS Anne Marie always checks the professor’s or student’s name to see if they already have an LC Name Authority File. If they already do, then of course that is the file that will be used when the file is cataloged.
Jennifer Ormsby
Jennifer Ormsby was next on my list to interview. She is the Processing Manager and Copy Cataloger. Jennifer spoke with me about the old government documents that she has been cataloging lately. Jackson Library has many old government documents that have not been cataloged, so they are not in the catalog and they cannot be searched. She said her main problem with these items is that first off the cataloging rules have changed since the items were published. Second, the groups that were originally responsible for the publication of many of these items have either changed their names, are no longer in existence or have merged with other organizations. This poses a huge problem when trying to find a uniform title for the corporate name that is attached to an item. Jennifer must do lots of research in OCLC in order to make the best guess on what the corporate should be in the MARC record.
Mac Nelson
Mac Nelson is Jackson Library’s Cello Music Cataloger. He works mostly with original cataloging since much of the material he is working with is held exclusively by UNCG. He catalogs many collections of sheet music. Mac deals with authority control issues frequently. The 700 field is a very important field in music cataloging because music items often contain unrelated works, and these unrelated works will be noted in the 700 field. Another use of the 700 field includes a work of music that is known under many titles. The established title under which items that have been published under various titles is placed in the 240 field. Alternate titles are placed in the 700 field, as are arranger and performer listings for a piece. The 240 field contains the uniform title under which the work is now known. The 400 field is also used to list alternate titles the work has been published under. Mac also must make the decision when dealing with theses and dissertations, from the School of Music, if the item is in fact a book or a score. Mac believes that authority control is so important to music cataloging because if you consider classical music, consider the number of languages it is composed in, the number of centuries that have gone by since much of it was written, the whole notion of what is classified creates a published history that is mind numbing. Bibliographic intellectual content is a complete mess without authority control. Physical content varies so authority control is also very important where that is concerned too. What hope does scholarship have without authority control? There must be rules that are followed so that order can be brought to the chaos of information.
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