 Welcome back for week two of the Basic Serials Catalogging class. In this video we are going to talk about the sources of information for serials cataloging, meaning where do you look to get the information that you're going to include in your catalog record. First of all, we'll talk about the basis of the description. Which issue are you going to base your description on? Since a serial record is meant to describe the whole publication and not any one individual record, you don't necessarily treat it as if you're describing one issue in its entirety, but you do have to give indication of what you're using to create the description so that other people can verify that they have the same item. If possible, you should base your description off of the first issue. But sometimes you don't have the first issue if your library starts describing during a later year, for example. And so in that case, you should work off of the earliest available issue. And you'll have a note saying description based on and then the enumeration of that issue. If you're cataloging from the first issue, you would include a 362 field which would have a formatted numbering statement. And on the next slide we'll look at differences between formatted and unformatted numbering statements. You will not need a description based on notes because it is understood that you are working from the first issue. If you're not cataloging from the first issue, you will not include that 362 field because you don't know for sure when it started and then you have that 588 field with a description based on note. If you're not cataloging from the first issue but you have information about it, you do know when it started. You will have both a 362 field with an unformatted numbering statement and your 588 description based on note. For example, if you have the first issue, you'll have a 362 field. The first indicator is zero. That means it's formatted. And what I mean by formatted is that the information is given in whatever formatted appears on the item and then you have an open date range so that at some point you can come back and close this date range when the serial ends. If you don't have the first issue, you don't have a 362 field, you just put your 588 note in and you say description based on and then give the enumeration of whatever item you are working with. And in that third scenario, if you don't have the first issue but you know when it was published, you need both your 362 field. This case will have an unformatted note which means that the phrase began with appears in front of the volume number and then you don't leave the date range open. You're just adding a note about when it began. And then you have a 588 field with your same description based on. You want to let people know what you were working from when you created this description. So once you determined which issue you're working from and figured out how to get that in the catalog record, you also need to decide where on a particular item are you going to get the title and other information from. These next few slides show you that the title and enumeration and other information can vary depending on where you look on the item. For example, this is the cover of the item. This is the table of contents which has a slightly different subtitle and the enumeration is handled a little bit differently. This is the back of the title page which provides some different information about the publication. So we need to determine what's the preferred source of information. That's the terminology used in RDA. The preferred source is the title page. Indivisible serial issues don't necessarily always have title pages. Title pages by definition don't have any other content on them and a lot of times serials will give their title on a page that has a table of contents or something like that. So if you don't have a title page, the substitutes in preferred order are the cover. And if you don't have anything on the cover, then go over the caption which is the first page with content on it. The next option is a MAS 10 which is information about the publication that appears in every issue. And the last option is the colophon which is a brief description of the publication usually found on the back of the title page. If you do not get the title from the title page you need to add a note usually in a 500 field indicating where the title came from. So if you got the title from the cover you would add a note saying so. So those are some things to remember about sources of information when you're working with serial records.