Independent Study, 9/30/09

The interviewing continued today.

Kathy Shore

Kathy Shore is the Monographic/Maps Cataloging Assistant. She also deals a lot with series cataloging. Authority control is not really an issue with her. Her concern are the 400 fields. She checks the series information. If the record was downloaded from Library of Congress then it is taken without question. If the record was obtained from another source then the record will be carefully checked. The only thing she has ever ran into is sometimes author names in the 100 fields do not have dates attached to them. This is a red flag because often times names without dates will not control and so they must be checked out in OCLC to make sure they are in fact correct. OCLC recently decided that the 440 field would no longer be used for series information. They are now using the 490 field. The 490 field now contains the non-authoritative version of the series and the 830 field contains the authoritative form of the series title.

Jason Alston

Jason is the Diversity Resident at Jackson Library. This is a new position that was just created and Jason is the first to occupy it. He has been working closely with Paul Hessling who is the Special Collections and Chief Monographic Cataloger. Jason has been working with finding aids for the archives and manuscripts using EAD (Encoded Archival Data). He works with EAD in NoteTab. EAD is being used now as a set standard for cataloging archival or special collections materials. Before the Library of Congress established EAD there were no set standards for cataloging archival or special collections materials. Most institutions set their own individual standards. This meant that no two institutions standards were the same. This caused many problems when information was shared or users went from one archive to another.

Reference Questions, 9/29/09

It is I once again here providing reference services to the UNCG campus at large. On this episode of Irma Knows Best...

1. A student needed books on English monarchs and Marie Antoinette.
2. (Phone) A student had a question about how to cite an online source in APA format.
3. A student needed to know where the bathroom was located.
4. (Chat) A student was looking for books on myths and legends in England, specifically werewolves, vampires, fairies, etc. I could not find a thing. :(
5. A student was looking for a textbook on microeconomics.
6. A student wanted a newspaper she could have to take out of the library. I pointed her in the direction of the Carolinian.
7. A patron needed a guest username and password.
8. (Chat) A student was looking for articles and books on Commedia dell'arte and masks used in production of it. She was having trouble accessing the databases from home. She said she'd come in later.
9. A student wanted to know where the closest water fountain was located.
10. A student needed a copy of Jane Eyre.
11. A student needed to know where Tower 2 was and where he could check out books.
12. A student wanted to know where to take overdue books.
13. A student wanted to know where Tower 6 is. They really need to change these things in the catalog. Just say 6th floor tech services! The tower thing confuses people.
14. A student wanted to know where the bathroom is.
15. A student wanted to know where 274B is.
16. A ref intern wanted to know where he could find his graded homework.
17. A student needed articles that were on a 7th grade level for a lesson plan she needed to create.
18. (Chat) Person said whaddup Minerva and then went away.
19. A student was looking for books on the Cuban military and North Korean military.
20. The student from #8 came in to look at the articles I had found for her.
21. A student wanted to know if she could access the R drive from the reference computers.
22. (Chat) A student had a question about how to access EndNote from home.

I'll be back Sunday. :)

Reference Questions, 9/26/09

I completely forgot that the Fall Fest was today. I had a little bit of trouble finding a parking space. I was not able to park in my normal area, and had to park further away. :( Any way I'm here on another Saturday missing football.

1. A student wanted to know if she could access our online journals from home.
2. A student was looking for a classical comedy by Plautus.
3. (Chat) A student was looking for students that give music lessons.
4. A history professor was looking for a Spanish/English Dictionary in the reference room.
5. (Chat) A student was looking for info on hospital policies and patients living wills. Of course this was a nursing student. They always come up with the hard questions. Thankfully Lea had created a guide for this assignment, so I steered them toward that.
6. A student wanted to know when the ILL office was open.
7. (Chat) A student needed to get a book that was at UNC CH. ILL to the rescue.
8. (Chat) A student needed to know if you could rent headphones at Jackson.
9. (Chat) An LIS student needed help finding when the last time RI voted for a Republican for president.
10. (Phone) A student had an APA citation question.
11. A student wanted to know where to return books.
12. A student wanted to know where the fiction books were located.
13. (Chat) A student was having trouble with the library website's security certificate.
14. A student was looking for a book, Political Behavior in Organizations by Andrew J. DuBrin.
    
15. A student needed help finding a book in the reference department.
16. (Chat) A student needed help finding transportation to PTI.

Ok a fairly painless shift. Now to go home and catch up on the football. ;)

Independent Study, 9/23/09

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.

Reference Questions, 9/22/2009

Life is grand, for now. I got approved for funding for both of the conferences I am attending this semester. Hopefully my good luck will continue on the reference desk this evening.

1. A student needed to know how to cite an electronic source in Turabian. I wish everyone would just switch to APA. It does so much better for websites and such. Plus it is one I am somewhat familiar with.
2. (Phone) They wanted to speak with someone about the ACS journals. I gave them the Chemistry librarian's info.
3. A student wanted me to find an article that she had found previously, but she didn't know the which database she had found it in. These are always fun questions. However I was able to find it for her.
4. A student had a question about printing.
5. A student wanted to know where to pick up ILL books.
6. A student wanted to know where the print jobs are going since the ref printer is down.
7. A student wanted to know the time.
8. A student needed help finding an article in journal finder. He then wanted to know where the nearest bathroom was located.
9. A student wanted to know what an abstract was.
10. A professor wanted to borrow the Chicago Style Manual for her class.
11. A student wanted to know where ENG 701 was meeting. She thought it was the CITI lab. I pointed her in that direction.
12. A student needed an industry report. Yay! I knew how to help thanks to LIS 613. :) S&P it is.
13. A Guilford College student needed a guest username and password.
14. A student wanted to know where LIBR 032 was located.
15. A student wanted to know where LIBR 032 was located.
16. A patron needed a guest username and password.
17. A student wanted to know where the nearest water fountain was located.
18. A student needed to know how to search the catalog for book by Tennyson.
19. A student wanted to know where LIBR 032 was located.
20. A student was looking for some PolySci reference books.
21. A student needed a stapler.
22. (Phone) A GTCC student was looking for some articles in 2 different sociology journals. I can be a really nice person when I want to be.
23. The student from #20 wanted to leave those PolySci books she had found at the ref desk while she ran to the ATM.
24. A student wanted to know where he could check out a reference book. Sorry, but you can't do that.

Yay, another shift completed. :)

Reference Questions, 9/20/2009

Sunday on the reference desk. I have lots of these this semester.

1. A student wanted to know where the new books are.
2. A student was looking a The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. It said it was in the New Book section, but it was not.
3. A patron wanted to see the collection of Woodstock photos that are on display in the library. They are upstairs outside of the Special Collections and Archives.
4. (Phone) A student was having trouble using the Multisearch option off-campus.
5. (Phone) A student need access to 2 entire journal that the university does not have access to. I told him to try ILL.
6. Two students wanted to know when the Caf is open today.
7. A student needed a color printer. There is one in the SuperLab.
8. A student was having trouble finding a book in the stacks. I sent him to the circulation. :)
9. (Chat) A student had a question about an APA annotated bibliography and about how to search for peer reviewed articles.
10. (Chat) A student wanted to know who or what was iMinerva.
11. A fellow LIS student had a question about a class I took last semester.
12. (Chat) A student wanted to know how to view articles in a database.
13. (Phone) A student had a question about an item on reserve.
14. A student wanted to know when the library closed tonight. Today begins the 24/5 so the library does not close tonight.
15. A student wanted to know how to get to the basement.
16. A student wanted to know if she could access UNCG databases from home.
17. (Chat) A student wanted to know from how far away the library could loan a book.
18. A student wanted to know how to search the library's catalog.
19. Two students were looking for the place where you can rent movies for free. They wanted the UTLC, so I told them all about it. :)
20. (Phone) A new resident of Greensboro wanted to know what she had to do in order to be able to borrow books from the library. She has to join the Friends of the Library.

I'll be back again Tuesday. :)

Independent Study, 9/16/09

Today I worked with an two separate Excel spreadsheets. One was on genre headings and authority work and the other spreadsheet was the 655 field report for the UTLC (University Teaching and Learning Center). We are going to use the genre headings and authority work spreadsheet to see which headings are correct and which ones are no longer valid.

While going through these headings, I found interesting patterns during this exercise. We did not have 155 authority records for most of these records. However, when I looked at the actual bibliographic records the 655 fields did not come up UNAUTHORIZED. Mary Jane is going to contact Marchive about this.

I was thinking that maybe they are seen as authorized, because they are cross-referenced in some authority records as 455 fields. I cannot think of any other explanation for this strange occurrence.