 Welcome to Encompass Live. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly free online event. It covers library commission activities and other Nebraska library-related topics presented by either NLC staff or guest hosts. The one-hour sessions are free and are offered every Wednesday at 10 a.m. Central Time, and they include a mixture of presentations, interviews, book reviews, web tours, mini-training sessions, and Q&A sessions. Okay, I see that Jan has typed in that Dina Cruz is also listening, so I will go ahead and make sure that Dina's name is recorded. Okay, today's session is entitled, Cataloging on a Shoe String, Sources of Free Mark Records. I am Emily Nimsikant, the cataloging librarian here at the commission, and I'll be your host and presenter today. Just as a quick introduction, I just briefly want to cover what mark format is. Mark stands for Machine Readable Cataloging, and basically what that means is that it makes bibliographic information available so that computers can read it. For example, here is a bibliographic record information about a book, and here is how it appears in raw mark formats. This is what the computer understands. Why is mark important? Well, basically because it allows for exchange of information. Records that are created by one library are created in a uniform format so that it can be used by other libraries. Why would you want to use records created by other libraries? Well, basically it saves you time and resources. If you had to create a new record for everything you cataloged, your staff would be swamped. So it is advantageous to be able to use other libraries' records. However, there can also be an expense associated with this. Services like OCLC's Connection and Cat Express, they do cost money, and so it can be kind of a stretch for small libraries to use these records. But there are free resources that we're going to talk about today. Basically, the main resource for free records is the Library of Congress. All of their records that they create are in the public domain because they're created by a government agency, so they are free for use. And they do make them available online through their catalog. And that is the website address there, catalog.loc.gov. And I will see if the website is working. It has been having some issues this morning, which actually causes me to jump ahead to one of the disadvantages of using the Library of Congress website, and that is that due to the high traffic of libraries and people using it, it sometimes is unavailable. So we'll go ahead and cross our fingers and see if this works. If not, I do have a screenshot so we can still talk about it, but I was hoping to do a live demonstration. And it looks like it's still being a little slow, so we'll go ahead with my screenshots for now. We can eventually get that to work for us. Okay, I just lost my place. Okay, this is the home screen. When you go to catalog.loc.gov, this is what it looks like. You can see there are a couple different options for searching. There's the basic search and the guided search. Basic search allows you to search a few different types of fields. Keyword, title keyword, you can see at the top, all the keyword options are listed. And then there are also browsing options down at the bottom of the screen. The guided search gives you a little more detail. You can construct searches using Boolean operators. You can search more than one field at once. There's also, let's see if you saw on the previous screen, there was a button that said, set search limits. And if you click that, you'll get this screen. You can limit by languages, type of materials, place of publications, things like that. So you can get a fairly specific search. We'll go back to the guided search screen and say we were searching for the book Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. We'll go ahead and do a guided search which is highlighted in the title field and Meyer for personal name for the author. And when you do this search, you'll get a search screen that has a list of results. We can see that number three, it looks like the one that we want. If you click on the title, they'll be taken through to a screen that has the record. The first screen that will come up is the brief record. You can see the tab is highlighted there at the top. You can also click on the tab that says full record. And you'll be taken to a screen with a little bit more detail. And then on the far right, you'll also see a tab that says mark tags. And if you click on that, you'll be taken to a screen that shows the mark record with all the fields. And if you'll, on any of these screens, if you scroll down all the way to the bottom, you'll see the option for save, print or email records. And this is what you need to do in order to download the records and make them available through your own catalog. You'll see that box that has the select download format and then the press to save or print button after it. And you want to choose mark format, and then click that press to save or print button. And you'll get a screen with the raw mark code. It will look like nothing you can understand, but it's what the computer understands. And what you'll want to do is use the buttons on your browser. This is how it looks in the version of Internet Explorer that we're using here at the commission. And we want to choose save as. As you can see, for us, it'll be here on the menu. It might look a little bit different depending on what version or what browser you're using, but basically you want to save the file. And you want to remember to save it as a text file. A box will pop up and I think it will default to an HTML file. That's not what you want. You want to be able to save it as a text file. And then this text file, you'll be able to export into your catalog. I'll just show you. This will look different for everybody's system, but I'll show you how it works with our Mandarin system here at the commission really quick. For us, we choose import. And you'll have to remember what name you saved under and where you saved it to navigate to that location. And now it's in our catalog. There are some disadvantages to the Library of Congress website. As I mentioned before, one of them is that it is very high traffic. A lot of people are trying to get these records. And so you may not always be able to access it, as we are obviously currently experiencing here. Another disadvantage is that you won't be able to find all of the records that you were looking for. There are basically only records for print items in the Library of Congress catalog. They don't have audio-visual items. So you won't be able to find records for DVDs, for example, if you're cataloging DVDs. Let's see. I'm seeing a couple questions come through the question box. So I'll hang on a second. I see that Laura, let us know she's here, and Carol is here with her. I'll mark that down. And Jan, let's know if I can go through the steps again. Certainly. Scroll all the way back to the beginning of the search. Basically, you type in your search term for whatever you want. And you can also, if you have the item in front of you, you can search by things like ISBN number also. I don't have the book with me right now, so I'm not doing that. That's also an option. I just did title and author. And you'll get your results. And you click on any one of those. When you find the title that you want, or one that you think is the title that you want, you can click through on the title link. And it'll take you to the record. And when you make sure that's the one that you want, you scroll down to the bottom of the page. There'll be a box that says save print or email records. And you choose mark format. And click that button that says press to save or print. And you'll get this screen that has the mark record in the machine readable format. And you want to save it on however that works best in your browser. And I don't have a screenshot of the box that will pop up, but you do want to make sure you save it as a text file. And from that point on, you remember the location where you saved it, or what you called it, and then you can import it into your catalog. And that'll vary depending on your own local system. Does that answer your question, Jan? Okay, so now that was covering bibliographic records, records for the actual books that you're wanting to catalog. The Library of Congress also makes available authority records. Authority records are records that show the authorized terms used for names and subjects in your bibliographic records. If you do authority control in your catalog, then you'll be able to link all the items that are by the same author, all the items that have the same subject headings, things like that. So I'm going to go ahead and try this website. It was working a little bit better this morning, so we'll see. This is the Library of Congress Authorities website, and the address is authorities.loc.gov. And all of these links are available on the commission's delicious page, and I'll give you a link to that at the end. So if you miss one of these links, you can definitely go back and find them after the presentation. So to get started here, you click on the search authorities link, and there are a couple different options, name authorities, subject authorities, title authorities, based on what you're searching for. You'll choose different ones. For example, if we had cataloged the Twilight Book, like I was talking about before, and we wanted to find a name authority for the author, you can see you'll get a pretty similar result screen to what you saw in the catalog. One thing to notice is these red buttons next to the names. For ones that say authorized heading, this means this is the correct form that you should be using in your catalog. This is the record that you want. I'm seeing another question coming in, so let me check this really quick. Cindy and Susan from the Historical Society asked if a record is an OCLC, and we use those via Cat Express. Are all LC records in OCLC? Yes, the Library of Congress records are available through OCLC. So if you do have Cat Express, then these will not be different records than the ones you can access through Cat Express. Okay, so going back to the authority search, when you click through on the link from the original result screen, you'll get a link to view the authority record, and you'll see it originally shows up in mark format. If you prefer to look at it in a label display, you can do that, too. But this is the information about the record for Stephanie Meyer. You can see that we can verify down where it says found in that Twilight. This is the author we're looking for because she's the author of Twilight. And the downloading process is very similar. You want to select mark, and press to save or print. And since I didn't have a screenshot of that last time, I'll go through the process of saving it, and you want to make sure it's a text file, and you can name it whatever you want, something that you'll recognize when you're done. And so that's how you go through the process of saving it, and then you would import it to your catalog, similar to how I showed you with the bibliographic records. One thing to know about the authority records is you'll remember in the results list there was a red button next to Stephanie Meyer's name that said authorized heading, but that's not always the case. You might be searching on a version that's not the correct heading, and so the button will look different. I'll show you a search with that. For example, say that you were cataloging in the number one ladies detective agency by Alexander McCall Smith, and you thought you knew the authorized form for his name. If you do that search, you will see that the first one that comes up, the red button says references. This means that this is not the authorized form, but the references can tell you what is the authorized form that you should be using. So you want to make sure when you're doing a search in the authority file that you pay attention to those buttons and whether or not you're actually finding an authorized heading or not. In this case, it tells you that you need to see McCall Smith from Alexander and his birth dates. So then when you click through to that, you do get the authorized heading, and then it's the same process. You have the actual record, and you would download it to your catalog, export it, and then import it the same way we've been doing. You can also do a subject search. Author's names are not the only type of headings that need to be authorized. There are also subject headings that you need an authorized form for. So for example, if you were still working on the number one ladies detective agency, one of the subject headings is women private investigators, you can search like that. In the same thing, these buttons will tell you, this one is an authorized heading, but it also has references. There are other subject headings that are related to this one, and this one, for example, it has an error return. But if you click through, you get to the authority record, and then you can download it in the same way that you would do the other ones. Okay, and so that is the basics of the authority's website. Anybody doesn't have any questions about that, we will move on to the next subject. Let's see, and we can skip past all my screenshots since we actually were able to do a live demo of that one. Okay, as I mentioned, there were some disadvantages to getting bibliographic records from the Library of Congress website itself. Number one, it's not available all the time, and number two, or actually one I didn't mention was that you can really only export one record at a time. There's no way to save records in a marked search or anything like that and come back and then export a whole batch of them. So it's a little bit time-consuming to go through and look for records one by one. It can be done, but it's not the most convenient thing in the world. There is a new arrival on the cataloging scene called Biblios.net, and basically it's a web-based cataloging utility, and when they created the database, they did import records from the Library of Congress, so it is possible to find Library of Congress records in the Biblios.net database as well. I'll go ahead and get this website pulled up. Okay, to use Biblios, you are required, it's completely free, but you are required to set up a profile. I've already set up a profile, so I'm just going to go ahead and log in. And once you're in it, you can launch the application, and it does run right within your web browser. There's a plugin that needs to be installed called Google Gears, and it will prompt you to download that if you haven't done that before, other than that, there's no software that needs to be installed. I should mention, I don't think I did, this is a web-based utility, it's created by LibLime, the company behind the open source library system, COHA, so they're kind of a recognized name in open source library software. And basically it accesses a database of bibliographic records uploaded by members and the developers, and as I mentioned, the developers did populate the database with Library of Congress records when they started, so it is a good place to go for Library of Congress records. And you do your search in the search menu up here. I'm going to look for our Twilight Book again, and it will bring up a list of records. If you wanted to over here, you could limit searches by authors, publication dates. They do have some faceted searching over here. Close, that's Christian. There is a preview pane down at the bottom, as you're scrolling through, you can see what you're looking at. And so we can see with this one that this is a Library of Congress record, we can tell by the DLC symbol in this field. Once that you have determined which one it is that you want to work on, you can click the box next to it and press the edit button, and it will bring up the record for editing. That is also another advantage of bibliose.net over the Library of Congress website, is that you can make changes to the records if you need to. They do even have the fixed fields up here, which in the Library of Congress records, they just appear as one long screen. You can't tell what they refer to, but it is nice to be able to pop them out and see what the different fields are. You can also add fields if you need to. If you want to do your editing here, rather than waiting when you import it into your catalog. For example, at the Commission, we add new fields for our local fields for the location and type of item. You can just add a field like that. Whenever you have done all the editing you want to do, you go to tools and click save. If you weren't quite done with it, you could save it in your graphs folder, but if you are done, save it in completed. As I mentioned, one of the nice things about bibliose is that you can save things as you go along. Even if you are just importing Library of Congress records, you can do a batch import, which you can't do from the Library of Congress website. Let me do that search again. Let's say we also wanted to download Eclipse, and we could save it in our completed file, assuming we had made all the changes we wanted. When you go to your completed file, you can click on both of these. This might do what it did to me and prompt a security warning in your browser, but you should be fine as long as you allow that. I should mention this is fairly new, and they don't quite have all the bugs worked out yet, so this may not be something you want to rely primarily on for now, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on. I think they are working to make it something pretty interesting and possibly useful, so definitely keep your eye on this. I did not help somebody do the exact same search I did before. Like I said, it does still have some bugs, and it seems like it's stuck on the search for some reason, but we'll go ahead just for the review. Let's say we'll go back to our completed folder and see if it lets me export now, and there it goes. It's creating a mark file for you, and again, you choose where you want to save it and then import it into your local catalog. I do also just want to touch on some of the other features of Biblio, so they're kind of envisioning it in addition to being a place where you can download and edit your records. It's kind of being a social networking community for catalogers. They do have forums that you can go to and ask cataloging questions. They are planning on a chat feature apparently that's not quite ready yet, but they are envisioning eventually that if multiple people were using this at once they could get on and kind of I am each other with questions about cataloging. They do have an inbox, so if you had other people you knew who were using this you could send each other messages. So that is Biblio's in a nutshell. It's just another kind of development in the cataloging community to keep your eyes on. Other than the records from the Library of Congress it's kind of hard to find absolutely free mark records. Another option you might want to pursue as far as low-cost mark records go would be getting them from the vendors where you buy your books and your other items. The NLC does have a website with vendor discounts, so that's something to pursue. So this is definitely something you should ask your vendors about. It may possibly, it may not be well advertised but they may provide you with mark records for the items that you buy from them. One other thing that I did want to touch on really quickly is the Library of Congress mark resources available on their websites. This is not a source of records but it is a source of free information about working with mark that comes in very handy when you're editing your records. And the address for that is www.loc.gov.mark. And this website is useful because it contains information and announcements relating to mark format. For example, at the top you can see right now they have an announcement about mark format changes to accommodate RDA, the new set of cataloging rules that should be coming out sometime soon. So it's important to keep an eye on this for announcements about mark. But one of the more useful aspects that I use regularly is the mark formats over here on the side. It has information about all of the data elements for the different kinds of mark formats. For example, let's look at the bibliographic data. As you will see, it has the tags grouped in tag order by hundreds, the 1XX fields together, the 5XX fields together, things like that. If you click on one of these, it will take you through to all the tags listed individually. There are both full and concise documentation for each tag. The concise ones are pretty short descriptions of what each indicator is used for and what the subfields are used for. The full ones go into a little bit more detail. They have guidelines for applying each of these. They tell you a little bit more about when you would use certain indicators or certain subfields. One thing I should mention is there are also a number of examples under each tag. Sometimes, even when you read the descriptions of how each one is used, it doesn't completely make sense. It's always a good idea to maybe scroll down and you'll see an example used in a way that you didn't think of before. These type of information are available for the tags for authority records as well. That is the Library of Congress Mark website, which is an important resource to remember when you are working with Mark Records. That is basically the resources that I've planned on covering today. All of the links that I covered are listed on the Commission's delicious website under Encompass Live. You can find them all there if you want to go back and explore these resources on your own. If you have any questions about any of these resources or any cataloging questions in general, you can definitely contact me. There's my contact information. Does anybody have any more questions about these resources? Let's see. Oh, I'm seeing some more questions coming through here. I missed before talking about Biblios. There's a question wondering if Biblios has DVD records. I believe so. I mean, they're trying to promote their database so that people can create their own original records and upload them. If there are people who have created records for DVDs and upload them, the ones that are originally uploaded to Biblios are available through a free open data license without copyright restrictions. I would say it's worthwhile to search for DVD records in Biblios. Cindy asked a related question of where does Biblios require their records? And like I said, the original dump of data was made from a lot of Library of Congress records. They took the data from the Library of Congress and they also had to promote it as people to... They want people, like I said, to upload records and create the database from Biblios users. So those are basically the two sources of records through Biblios to the database. Let's see. Laura had a question. Where do you save the records to? A file on your desktop or a flash drive? Let's see. I personally was saving them to a file on my computer. I guess it would be up to you and your local practices at your library. But I was just saving them to my Documents folder because that's where I normally save records when I export them from OCLC as well. Does that answer your question? Great. Sounds good. Any other questions? Okay. Well, thank you all for coming. Feel free to contact me at any time with questions and hopefully we'll see a lot of you back next week for the next Encompass Live.