Day 3 – Wednesday
Finally got to grips with the budget! Looked at it last night at home and made a plan of things to look into this morning. Made some decisions which I hope are right. Spent a welcome 30 mins or so discussing with the boss and making sure he agreed that it was now right, and the figures were as close as they could be!! Emailed my excel guru to let her know and thank her for her help.
Plans for today now include tidying my desk which is completely covered by budget printouts!
However, the best laid plans, as they say …
Had an extra meeting with boss to discuss way forward on a couple of projects. Spent a little while perusing MARC records that we had imported for a specific purpose. On closer scrutiny this leads me to believe I have misinterpreted some of the MARC rules – oooooops!
Had a quick look at the ordering figures to see if these might have had an impact on the size of the cataloguing backlog, which is now running out at about 18 shelves and is the most we’ve had for a couple of years. Sadly, we cannot blame the librarians ordering new books, as orders are actually a little bit down on last year.
Ohhhh, hang on I can hear someone shouting for help! …
Ah, shelf being loaded with new books has just collapsed, nearly on top of someone. Hmmmm, shelf and bracket seem to be bent. Off to search for new ones.
The understairs cupboard has yielded another couple of brackets, but one of those was also defective. With a bit of brute force and ignorance and a little help from my friends, I have now managed to put the shelving back together. These shelves are checked regularly as part of the health and safety inspection but obviously, as they are being continually emptied and re-filled they can be a bit more unreliable than the shelves in the library. How to cure this problem?
Anyway, it’s now time to go home and I still haven’t tidied my desk up. Ah well, Monday is another week! (I only work the beginning of the week.)
Post script
Waiting in car for child to finish band practice, I’ve been thinking about creating some notices to put up above the shelving. If I have different wording on different coloured notices and move them around regularly, there’s a possibility they might be read and that might help to prevent further near-misses or accidents. Will do this at home tonight.
That really is all from me this time round!
Showing posts with label MARC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MARC. Show all posts
Thursday, 2 February 2012
Monday, 14 March 2011
ALCTS-eforum
Towards the middle/end of last week I “attended” the ALCTS-eforum on the follow-up to "2010: The Year of Catalogue Research". For those of us in the UK who might not be familiar with the organisation, the Association for for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) is a part of the American Library Association (ALA). On its website the ALCTS says it is
"the premier resource for information specialists in collection development, preservation, and technical services. [and is] the leader in the development of principles, standards, and best practices for creating, collecting, organizing, delivering, and preserving information resources in all forms."
So, having picked up notification of the e-forum via Twitter, I subscribed and waited for things to happen - and, goodness, did they happen! The invitation to subscribe put forward the purpose of the group as to look at some of the following issues around catalogue research:
"How important is cataloging and classification research to your everyday technical services decision-making? Do you find the library literature useful in informing your policies and procedures? Are you producing statistical studies that might help others in the field? How do you disseminate your results? Do you find reviews of the literature helpful? Do you have suggestions for future directions in cataloging research? Is it time to develop formal dissemination forums for metadata research that are separate from MARC cataloging?"
This was followed by an introductory message suggesting that anyone contributing introduce themselves, and describe how they keep up-to-date, any suggestions for best practice, and what research they might be doing in the field of cataloguing.
As you might imagine, there were a variety of library staff contributing to the forum, all reporting many and varied ways of keeping up-to-date, including using RSS feeds, iGoogle, single blogs (like planet cataloguing), wikis, Twitter, some really whizzy personally created sites and a whole range of other things! There was interesting discussion around the value of differing information resources - the web 2.0-type resources compared to the traditional published journal resources.
Another area of discussion was the interest in research into cataloguing. Several suggestions came up, including the use of user tagging compared to the use of controlled vocabulary (like LCSH), and investigating catalogue usage statistics to inform bibliographic record creation.
It was also suggested that the community involved in the discussions seemed to be falling into three distinct camps: RDF / linked data; xml / metadata / digital; MARC / AACR cataloguing. There was concern that there was overlap in the areas of work, but that there perhaps wasn't enough communication and cross-pollination between the groups.
Discussion also focussed on the education of new information professionals and the sometimes woeful amount of time allocated to cover the whole area of cataloguing / metadata etc..
Overall, the e-forum proved to be an interesting sounding board for many thoughts and ideas, a few of which are mentioned above. The ALCTS will be producing a summary of the discussions so it you have an interest in this area, do check their website regularly for this report.
Apologies if this report sounds a bit disjointed: For some reason or other my original post got lost in the ether so I did a re-write - and these just never seem to be as coherent as the originals!
Lynne
"the premier resource for information specialists in collection development, preservation, and technical services. [and is] the leader in the development of principles, standards, and best practices for creating, collecting, organizing, delivering, and preserving information resources in all forms."
So, having picked up notification of the e-forum via Twitter, I subscribed and waited for things to happen - and, goodness, did they happen! The invitation to subscribe put forward the purpose of the group as to look at some of the following issues around catalogue research:
"How important is cataloging and classification research to your everyday technical services decision-making? Do you find the library literature useful in informing your policies and procedures? Are you producing statistical studies that might help others in the field? How do you disseminate your results? Do you find reviews of the literature helpful? Do you have suggestions for future directions in cataloging research? Is it time to develop formal dissemination forums for metadata research that are separate from MARC cataloging?"
This was followed by an introductory message suggesting that anyone contributing introduce themselves, and describe how they keep up-to-date, any suggestions for best practice, and what research they might be doing in the field of cataloguing.
As you might imagine, there were a variety of library staff contributing to the forum, all reporting many and varied ways of keeping up-to-date, including using RSS feeds, iGoogle, single blogs (like planet cataloguing), wikis, Twitter, some really whizzy personally created sites and a whole range of other things! There was interesting discussion around the value of differing information resources - the web 2.0-type resources compared to the traditional published journal resources.
Another area of discussion was the interest in research into cataloguing. Several suggestions came up, including the use of user tagging compared to the use of controlled vocabulary (like LCSH), and investigating catalogue usage statistics to inform bibliographic record creation.
It was also suggested that the community involved in the discussions seemed to be falling into three distinct camps: RDF / linked data; xml / metadata / digital; MARC / AACR cataloguing. There was concern that there was overlap in the areas of work, but that there perhaps wasn't enough communication and cross-pollination between the groups.
Discussion also focussed on the education of new information professionals and the sometimes woeful amount of time allocated to cover the whole area of cataloguing / metadata etc..
Overall, the e-forum proved to be an interesting sounding board for many thoughts and ideas, a few of which are mentioned above. The ALCTS will be producing a summary of the discussions so it you have an interest in this area, do check their website regularly for this report.
Apologies if this report sounds a bit disjointed: For some reason or other my original post got lost in the ether so I did a re-write - and these just never seem to be as coherent as the originals!
Lynne
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