The authority control interviews continue. My observations a Jackson Library thus far are that some catalogers deal with authority control a lot more than others. For the most part though the concerns and issues are the same. The main concern is to make sure that every field is authorized and contains the correct forms of the titles, names, subject headings, etc.
Katherine Nunnally
Katherine Nunnally is the Serials Cataloging Team Assistant at Jackson Library. Her primary job is to handle serials, electronic journals and Journal Finder. She is also working on the government document project that several other catalogers are also working on. Every month Katherine gets the list of the journals that W.T. Cox has added to Journal Finder. The list is available in the administrators view of Journal Finder. After she has this list, she then checks the catalog to make sure that Jackson does not have these titles. For the titles that are not in the catalog, she creates records and links for them so that they can be searched for in the catalog. She uses copy cataloging for this. before adding the record she always checks it over to make sure that the subject headings used would benefit the students searching for it. Occasionally she has to translate the records from another language if she is dealing with a foreign journal. She simply uses Babelfish for this. Katherine deals more hands on with the only print journals. She is in charge of making sure their records are correct and that all the fields have been controlled. W.T. Cox handles all of the electronic journals. They are responsible for making sure that the links are active and that all of their fields are controlled.
When dealing with the government document cataloging project, Katherine has run into many of the same problems as the other catalogers have. The available records are very poorly cataloged. The government documents that they are cataloging are old, so there may have been department or name changes. Many of them have no subject headings whatsoever. These both present problems and make these records more difficult to catalog properly.
Edward Waters
Edward Waters is Serials Cataloging Assistant at Jackson Library. One of his responsibilities is to handle the transfer of serials from on department to another. For example from the reference department to the Stacks. He also takes care of the books being withdrawn from the collection. He also handles the serials that are cataloged as monographs. These titles have their own separate records for each book, instead of only one record for an entire set of books. These include titles such as the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The DLB titles are classed together meaning that the entire set is kept together. There are also serials that are classed separate, this means that for whatever reason, the library has chosen to separate this collection. An example of this is the Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications. These books will all appear in the Q's, but they will not be together. Authority control issues very rarely come up in the work that he typically does.
Edward, like many of the catalogers in Jackson library, is also working on the Government Document cataloging project. He says the same things that the other catalogers are saying about this project. The records are messy. There are very few DLC records available for these items, so the records have to be throughly checked to make sure that they are controlled. OCLC is used for confirmation. Oftentimes when working on the government documents he just has to work out what is right.
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