 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event or a webinar, a webcast, an online show. Call us what you will. Whatever we are, we are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. However, if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays that's fine. We do record the show every week and it will be available on our website later for you to watch. All of our shows and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So if you see anything, I've attended anything that you want to share with your colleagues or friends, please do. And definitely take a look at our archives. I will show you at the end of today's show where those archives are on our website where you can see all of our recordings going back to the very beginning. We post our recordings on YouTube for everyone to watch. If any of our presenters have handouts, slides, documents, anything related to their show, that will be included as well in the recording. And if there are any websites that anybody mentions during the show, I grab those as we're going along and add them to our collective and our delicious accounts so you can have all the links to our websites there. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos. Basically our criteria is is it library related? Then we'll put it on the show. So pretty broad. If you look at our schedule of sessions coming up later on, you'll see we have quite a range of things for all types of libraries and doing all sorts of different services and programs and resources for them. We do have sometimes Nebraska as we are hosted here at the Nebraska Library Commission. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations, but we also bring in guest speakers. And that's what we have this morning on the line from us just elsewhere in Lincoln, where I'm based, is Emily Nemsekant, who is the head of cataloging and resource management at the Schmidt Law Library, which is part of our University of Nebraska College of Law right here in Lincoln. Hi, Emily. Hello. So she's just in a different area of town here this morning. Logistically wise, sometimes it's easier for us to do this all remotely. People are busy. And Emily's going to do, as for us today, she's one of our regular presenters a few times a year doing cataloging related topics. Something new we've got to do today is local cataloging standards. This is something that's specific to each library out there, but it's definitely something you need to look into if you're trying to get things as useful as possible, I guess, is the way I could say it. I'm not a cataloger, so I'm not going to even attempt to explain. But I'll just hand over to you, Emily, to go ahead and tell us all about how to do it. All right. Thank you, Krista. I'm really glad to be back on Encompass Live. I used to be a staff member at the Library Commission, and so it's always fun to come back. But you're exactly right. The goal is to get our catalogs as useful as possible. I like that phrase a lot. And so I am here to talk about local cataloging standards. Standards are important in cataloging, as I'll talk about in a bit. Consistency is really important in order to help your patrons find what they're looking for. And so national standards exist to sort of provide a framework for that consistency. But you don't need to feel like you need to be a slave to the national standards. You can tweak things and change things and bend the rules a little bit in order to make your catalog work for your particular community and your particular patrons. Your catalog is no good if it's not useful to your particular users. And so that is what I want to get across in this presentation is that you need to make your catalog work with your particular community in mind. And as we're going along, as Krista said, please feel free to ask questions. I also want to encourage just comments. Obviously, this is a topic where lots of different people can do things differently. And so if you have any stories to share about how you have tweaked cataloging standards or done something innovative in your library to make things better for your users, I would love to hear about it. And I'm sure a lot of other people also tuning in would love to hear about it as well. So keep that in mind as we go along. But to start out with, I just kind of want to touch on why do we need standards and why some kind of standard standardization important for cataloging. A lot of people, you know, the stereotypical cataloger or somebody who's just a nitpicker for the rules and a stickler for the rules without really necessarily explaining why. But there are good reasons to kind of stick to the rules and do things consistently when you're cataloging. And that word basically is what I want to focus on, consistency. Consistency is important. If you don't apply some kind of cataloging standard consistently, whether it's a national standard or something you've developed in-house, it will be really, really hard for your patrons to find what they want. If you have books about dogs and some of them have the subject-heading dogs and some of them have the subject-heading canines, when a patron comes and does a subject search in your catalog, and if they search for either one of the other of those, they're not going to find everything you have on a topic if it's not done consistently. And you may think, well, with dogs or something, it's not such a big deal, but something like cancer. If somebody's coming because their parent was just diagnosed with cancer and they want to find every single resource you have and they're not cataloged consistently, then it will be really hard for a patron to do a comprehensive search of your catalog and make sure they're getting the best resources for their needs. Consistency equals findability is kind of my quick talking point on that. And so we do have national cataloging standards that exist here in the United States. Anselm are even used internationally. And so I do kind of want to touch on what I'm talking about when I say national standards, when I say these are things that have been promulgated by the Library of Congress, National Library, and are kind of used universally throughout libraries in the country here. When I'm talking about national cataloging standards, one thing I will talk about is standards for descriptive cataloging. And descriptive cataloging is just what it sounds like, basically. You're describing whatever the item is that you're cataloging in such a way that a patron can look at the catalog record and at least have a basic idea of what they're looking for before they even have to go to the shelf and look at that item. The goal of descriptive cataloging is to create what's called a surrogate for the item so that somebody can look at a catalog record and see the title of a book, how many pages it has, if it's a CD, how long it is, maybe what the track listing is. We're just trying to describe what exactly is on the item. And the current standard for that is called resource description and access. RDA is the abbreviation for that. This is a fairly recent change in the cataloging world. Prior to this, the standard was called AACR II, which stands for Anglo-American Cataloging Rules Second Edition. And it's been kind of a major shift in the cataloging world. RDA was implemented by the National Libraries, and by that I mean the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agricultural Library in 2013. And a lot of libraries have followed suit. Even if you don't necessarily think that your library is doing RDA cataloging, most libraries these days do probably 90% copy cataloging, meaning that you get records from somewhere else. If you are copy cataloging records that were created by the Library of Congress, since 2013, you have RDA records in your library catalog. So you are using the newest and up-to-date descriptive cataloging standard. So like I said, descriptive cataloging is using the information on an item to create a description for it so people can evaluate using your catalog whether or not this is something that they want. Another area where standards are used is classification, which is assigning a call number to an item so that items that are about related subjects end up close to each other on your shelf. This can apply to mostly the physical items, obviously, shelf location is important, but people do apply classification numbers to e-books and things like that just because it allows kind of for browsing in your catalog. If somebody wants to do a call number browse, they can still see items that are on related subjects whether or not they're physical or electronic. And the two main classification schemes that are used today in this country are the Dewey Decimal classification system and the Library of Congress classification system. Dewey Decimal is largely used by school and public libraries and some smaller academics, I would say. You are probably familiar with it. It's totally numeric based. There are a number of large classes of topics and then they're broken down more specifically by number. The Library of Congress classification, on the other hand, is used more for larger collections, larger academic libraries. The Library of Congress itself, of course, uses it. It is alphanumeric, meaning they use both letters and numbers in the classification system. And the final area of national standards that we'll be kind of talking about is subject headings. These are control vocabularies of terms used to describe the subject of a work or what something is about. Anything that you have in your library, if you want to assign a term so that you know what it's about, you would use subject headings. And probably the two most widely used systems are the Library of Congress subject headings and Sears subject headings. Library of Congress LCSH are used more for larger collections. Sears is really meant for smaller libraries, school libraries at least used to use Sears. I think these days probably Sears are not used as much because, again, a lot of people copy catalog and they get what comes out of the Library of Congress, which usually uses LCSH, may have Sears headings on it sometimes, but so I would say Sears is maybe fading in popularity a little bit, but it is kind of a less complex subject heading scheme, I would say. So again, we're talking about local standards. If you want to make the local decision to use Sears, because you take a look at it and see that it might be more useful for your patrons, that's something else to keep in mind. A choice of which national standard to use can also be a local cataloging decision. So that's kind of the framework that we're working in. These national standards exist, and like I said, consistency equals findability. So one way to easily ensure consistency is to use these national standards completely rigidly, exactly as they're written, however, sometimes perhaps these consistent national standards just have areas that don't necessarily work for your library. And so I'm here to say that it is okay and it is more than okay, maybe even really good in cases. If you have the time and the resources to do it, you can create local standards to work better for your community. And so I'm going to touch on a few areas in which this is something you might want to consider. One area in which you could consider tweaking the rules, yes, bending the rules, however you want to say it, is classification. Like we said, classification is the process of assigning call numbers, because a call number determines physically where something is located in your library. And a lot of times that's really what helps your patrons find the items. They may not care too much about exactly what item or information is included in the descriptive cataloging in the record. They won't care if it says how many pages are in the book or even it's subject to heading necessarily, but they want to be able to find items based on the call number. And so you want to be able to put things on the shelves where your patrons will find them, especially if you have, you know that your patron base is largely a browsing base, patron base, they don't necessarily go to the catalog and look things up, they just have a rough idea of what they want and then go and wander the shelves. The classification system and the particular number you choose for each book could have a huge impact on what your users find. So here I have a few suggestions for tinkering with classification if you find that standard, national standards are not working that well. The first suggestion I have is simply to remember that Melville Dewey was not God. You do not have to take everything in the Dewey decimal classification exactly as written. That's a good point. Yes. Yes, exactly. I mean, Melville Dewey created his system in the 1800s and our society has changed a little bit since then. The classification scheme maybe does not, you know, a lot of things have been kind of shoehorned into Dewey like, you know, technology and the internet that didn't exist when he was creating the system. And so, you know, you feel free to mess around with it for lack of a better word. You know, if you find that it would really serve your patrons needs best to have your French cooking books along with the French tourism books rather than having a separate cookbook aisle then go ahead and do that. You know, the Dewey decimal classification doesn't say to put French cookbooks in with your tourism section, but you can do that just because your book comes with a 300 number on your copy cataloging and I'm just pulling that number out of the air. I don't think it's actually a cookbook number, but you can put it in, you know, the 900s for tourism. You can change things. Copy catalog records do not have to stay the way they can't. I would say, and you know, I'll begin to be a broken record on this, be consistent. Make sure you're putting all your French cookbooks in the same place and document. Make sure that somewhere there is a local policy that says we choose to put our French cookbooks over here by our French tourism items. You know, but as long as you do those two things, be consistent and document, you don't have to take Dewey decimal classification or Library of Congress classification. I use Dewey just because it has one central figure, Melville Dewey associated with it as an example here, but the people who wrote the Library of Congress classification are not God either, so feel free to work within an existing framework to, in order to locate the items where they will get the most use in your library. If you see a consistent problem where people are going to one area, expecting to find a certain type of items, and those items just aren't there because of where they're classed when you get your copy catalog records, feel free to make a change. Feel free to say that, oh, all these books, they come with 328, but really we want to put them in 348. Again, totally random numbers. I have no idea what those Dewey numbers stand for, but again, Melville Dewey is not God. You can do what you want within the Dewey decimal classification or Library of Congress classification without completely scrapping the whole classification system. However, with that said, you can completely scrap the whole classification system if you really think it'll work better for your patrons. There are some other options out there. Some libraries, you know, if you search, you know, it's a catchy title, so a lot of people have used the phrase ditching Dewey when they talk about moving away from a national standard classification system. And so there are a couple of options that have been explored. One is, some libraries go with BISAC, which is the book industry classification system. I'm going to see, pull up my browser here and drag it over. There we go. And just like I said, this is based on the book industry. So this is, these are bookstore subject headings, basically. They have a number of large categories, antiques and collectibles. Let me see if I can make that a little bit bigger. There we go. Antiques and collectibles, architecture, all the way down to humor, young adult fiction, things like that. They're large categories. And then if you click on one like science, and you can see there are more specific headings in there. Science slash chemistry, slash generals, science slash chemistry, slash analytic, things like that. I have seen records that have these as subject headings. Most a lot of libraries, I know, stripped them out. But if you ever decide that you want to leave them in, that's a possibility. And it also could be used as a basis for a classification system called numbers. If you thought that words like this would be more useful for your patrons, you could use this as a basis for classification. Now some of these are quite long strings. You may not want to necessarily get all the way down to three different levels of classification. But you could. I mean there are different levels of specificity. And if you feel that this would work better for your patrons, that is always an option. I feel like a lot of times the libraries that I see contemplating moving away from Dewey or other national standard classification systems are school libraries. I think because they serve a smaller patron base and a younger patron base and people who may be more predisposed towards browsing rather than searching for one specific, you know, research treatise like a university library might, users might do. And so another standardized but not, you know, known at the level of Dewey is that classification scheme that has risen up recently is called Metis. And here's the link for that. Again, Crystal will have all these links afterwards. So don't try and worry about scrambling to write everything down. Yes, I'm doing that as we go. I'm doing that for you. I'm typing fiercely as each of these is. And I think, as I was thinking, also you're right about that these kind of changes stemming from children's potentially teens to start with. There's a library here in Nebraska who actually they started testing out the, as you described, ditching Dewey with their children's and teen collection first. Yeah, I think that's a good place for public awareness to start. Yeah. And then for the teens, they had them help, you know, just help them decide these kind of things, too. What was the, you know, what would they think should be the heading. So they started out there first as kind of like a smaller subset of the library to see how it goes. Cool. And that's really cool to get the teens involved in creating it. I mean, if you're doing this for, you know, to make the catalog easier for your users, then you definitely want to know what your users are thinking and where they would go to look for things. So yeah, that's really cool. Yeah. So Metis also kind of like BISEC has main categories. And then this was based, created by school librarians. So it's based on what they think that users, students, users of school libraries would want. Vaccine concepts, machines, science, pets. So again, you sort of have, let's say they use, they use the letters of the alphabet to designate their main classes. And then they have a whole schedule, which I believe is like a PDF document. Yes, it is a PDF document. So this is their whole thing. Let's see, it's 78 pages long. So it's quite detailed. And again, if you think that this is something that would appeal to your users more than Dewey or whatever your library is currently using, let me skip down here so we can see kind of a bit of the schedules. So yeah, again, it uses the alphabet classes. So B is for machines and then it has machines building, machines, computers, et cetera again. So it gets kind of, you know, sort of like BISEC with the levels of specificity. And in this system, I guess these would be what would appear on your call numbers, your spine labels, this hierarchy of terms basically. So that's another option to keep in mind if you are looking for moving away from Dewey or LC or whatever national standard for classification currently exists in your library. We do a question about that, actually about these. Someone wants to know, can you use, for example, BISEC and Metis at the same time or do you have to pick, choose between them? Like can you mix and match things? That is a good question. I would say, I mean, it would probably really depend on your situation. If you, you know, it would be kind of a trial and error type of thing, I would think, but I would say, you know, if you found something in each of those systems that really appealed to you, there's probably nothing to say you absolutely have to stick to, you know, exactly 26 categories in Metis or, you know, exactly how many categories are in BISEC. If you found something that covered an area in BISEC that really speaks to your community, it would seem to me, I mean, this is a non-expert answer and I don't know for sure, but it would seem to me that you could probably add and subtract things as they work for your library. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, I mean, it's not like there's anybody out there who's going to be coming and checking up on what you're doing and saying you did it wrong. So you could try and, you know, mash them up together, but you would have to, you'd be doing this basically, like what they did with Metis, creating your own local classification system that is a mash-up of these two and that's something you would have to do is figure out and sit down, what are we categorizing everything in our library as and what are we using for BISEC, what are we using for Metis, whatever, and basically create your whole whole new system. Here at the time in an inclination to do that, go for it. Exactly. Might be easier just to pick one that's already been created though too. Right, exactly. I worked in a university back in New York that actually used, and this was a while ago, before these new things were created, they had, there was an education school at the university, so most of the library collection was Library of Congress, but just the children's books because it worked best was Dewey. Oh, cool. So they, because the children's books were there for the education people to use them as part of their classes and you learn from this stuff, so they did something like that, so not mixing them up together, but here's the LC collection, here's the Dewey collection. That's true. You know, that's entirely possible. I have heard of other libraries doing that as well. When I first started, I used to work at the main library here at UNL, and they were in the middle of converting their Dewey collection, but they used to have a small Dewey collection for the same reason. So yeah, it is possible to have more than one classification scheme for different areas of the collection. That's true. But this actually is like ways really well into what I was going to talk about next because, you know, if either of those schemes don't work for you or you want to use them as a jumping off point to kind of create something new, you are always welcome to create your own classification entirely from scratch. The picture image that I showed here came from a blog post I found called mightylittlelibrarian.com is the website. And again, I think she's a school librarian. Like I said, a lot of experimentation I've seen done with this comes from school libraries, although not entirely. I know the Seward Public Library here in Nebraska, they have their public library and they have created their own classification system, I believe, from scratch. And so that is possible, but for more information on how this woman did it, she details it in her blog post on mightylittlelibrarian.com. And again, she has, you know, these actually these nice graphic signs are available for download. She, you know, has also found that her users respond to having a graphic sign that, you know, kind of shows in the picture of what they're going to be looking for again, because many of them are elementary students who may not necessarily be reading at a level to interpret the words on the sign. So, you know, it is possible to create your own classification. And I, you know, the extent to which you want to just sit down and group all the books in your library or whether or not you want to start with bisect or metis for a jumping off point is, you know, up to you and how many staff members you have and how much time you have to deal with this and versus how useful you think it will be to your patrons. You know, there are a lot of really local decisions that come into deciding to do a non-standard classification scheme. But, you know, that's something that nobody else can really determine for you. You just need to make the call on the amount of work you want to put into it. And again, like I said, with tweaking Dewey, just make sure that you're consistent, you apply your classification schemes consistently, and that you document everything so that when you leave the library in 10 years, the person who comes in after you can keep doing the same thing you were doing or at least understand why you were doing it and then make changes if they want to. So moving on from classification, another area in which you might want to tweak national standards are subject headings. Again, the terms that describe what your item is about. So if somebody comes to your library not looking for a particular title or a particular author, but they just know that they want books about dogs or cancer or whatever it is, they can come and do a subject search. And I know these days a lot of people don't necessarily go as far as doing a subject search, but subject heading terms can still be useful in a keyword search. And so I personally still think that assigning subject headings is a very important part of cataloging. One way in which you can kind of tweak how a subject search works again, this is with the caveat that your system has to be able to do this. It frustrates me to no end that a lot of or some local cataloging systems don't really make use of cross-reference information found in authority records to help people do subject searches. But if your system can do this, it can be really useful. And here is a screenshot that I've used from my catalog here. So it's a legal term that necessarily be applicable to your community. But if you do a search in our catalog for the subject search for diplomatic immunity, what you'll find out is that you get this lovely message saying diplomatic immunity is not used in this library's catalog. diplomatic privileges and immunities, this is the official Library of Congress subject heading is used instead. And then where it says try a search for diplomatic privileges and immunities, you can click on that and get directed to the books or items with subject you were looking for originally. So it's kind of nice. You don't have, you can still do a subject search without knowing exactly what the Library of Congress librarians call the topic that you're looking for. Again, not all systems do cross-references which is frustrating but if it does, the reason this works is because in an authority record which is a record that contains all the information about a particular subject heading. And I'm going to delve into speaking mark here, catalog or ease for a second. I promise you there's not too much of this in this presentation but in the 150 field in your catalog, your authority record is the actual authorized term diplomatic privileges and immunities. Everything in the 450 fields are cross-references. They are things that the people who created this subject heading term think that people might search for instead and so they want there to be a redirect. So the reason that that redirect in your catalog works is because that 450 field with diplomatic immunity redirects to diplomatic privileges and immunities in the 150 field. So again, this is how the standard national cataloging standards work. If you want to tweak the system and if your system both uses cross-references and allows you to edit your authority records, you can add whatever the heck you want into a 450 field to create a redirect to the actual authorized term. So, you know, dogs versus canines, anything that we're talking about, anything that has particular, anything that's a misspelled term. If you think that people are going to type in the wrong spelling of a subject heading, you can add a 450 field in your authority record to redirect people to the correct spelling. So, if your system handles cross-references, I would urge you to be aware of this whole concept of authority records and that you can add stuff in the 450 field in order to direct people to the correct term and get the subject that they want. If your system doesn't allow for cross-references like that, or if, you know, there's just a need in your community that would be better served by actually creating a local heading, meaning a term that is not used by the Library of Congress or SEERS or whatever system of subject headings you're using, you can go ahead and create a completely local heading. There are two different ways this can be done in terms of the mark field where you would use it in your record. You can either put it in a 6-9x field or a 6-5x field and you want to include a subfield too that says it's local. That will let people know that it's a local subject heading that you created. Now, if you need information on what I mean when I say 6-9x field or 6-5x fields, the OCLC bibliographic formats and standards is a really useful resource. I don't know why that password screen came up because it actually is letting me through, but that's weird. So 6-9x or anything that starts with 6-9 and ends with x is a completely local subject term. If you're this, I would probably recommend using this if you want to kind of keep it separate from your other subject headings. It may kind of change how people search it. They probably won't be able to search it together with your other headings if you put it things in a 6-9x field. If you want people to do kind of one subject search and be able to see everything, then I would recommend doing a 6-50 field. In that case, you would want your second indicator to be 7, which says that the source of this term is specified in subfield 2. And then that's where what I was talking about where you want to put a subfield 2 that says local in there to let people know that this is a local subject heading. So there are a couple different ways in Mark that you can handle doing local headings. Oops, let me go back for a second there. My last sentence there is kind of my caveat for doing local headings. You'll want to be aware of how your catalog system both displays and searches these fields. If you start putting local headings in 6-90 fields, for example, and then you find out that when somebody searches for a record that they can't see these fields, then you have some setting in your catalog system that is telling it not to display 6-90 fields. And so you'd probably need to get on customer service with your ILS system and say, hey, is there a way to display this? Or if people are doing searches and these search terms are not coming up, then maybe your system's default setting is not to index 6-90 fields or 6-50 fields with the subfield 2 that says local. And so you might again want to place a call to the customer service folks at your ILS company and say, hey, can we include these fields in our search indexes? So just because you put the information in your records don't just blindly assume that it's showing up in your records and it's being included in searches. You want to do some tests and make sure that it's actually working out the way you want it to because if you go through the trouble of including them in your records, you really want to actually have it help your patrons find what they are looking for. So definitely make sure you're following up on whether or not this is actually working the way you want in terms of display and in terms of search results. And my other kind of things to be aware of when you're creating local headings is keep a vocabulary list. You know, when you use CIRS or LCSH, they have their list published in books and online and you can have access to what is and what isn't an authorized term. When you create local headings do the same, even if it's just an Excel spreadsheet somewhere, make sure that people know that there is a list they need to check when they're considering adding a local headening they need to check and see if either that exact term or something similar, something that means the same thing has already been added and so they should keep using the same consistent term. Again, remember my two caveats be consistent and document everything this kind of is both of them rolled together into one creates a vocabulary list in which you document your decision so that you can be consistent. And if possible in your system create authority records. You know what I was showing you before with the the Markfields, the 150 versus 450 create an authority record so that every item you catalog that has the same subject can be linked to this authority record and then when someone does a subject search they can draw up all the items about that particular that particular topic. Kind of veering away from classification and subject headings and going into the realm of descriptive cataloging the things you put in your record to describe what an item is when it comes to kind of tweaking the system or working within the system the standards to do make them do what you want I am a huge huge huge fan of variant titles. And what a variant title is is basically anything that could be considered a title of this item that is not what appears on the title page. According to RDA resource and description access the standard for descriptive cataloging the chief source of information for each type of item is specified and it varies depending on what the item is but let's focus mainly on books here for books the preferred source of information is the title page and so that goes in your main your actual title field but the 246 field is where the variant title goes and this can be pretty much anything else that could be considered a title of the item. So if there is anything else on your item that you think people might search for whether it's a cover title or the title on the spine or something like that but according to the rules it's not allowed into the main title field the 245 field you can add a 246 field in order to get that in there and get it included in a title search and a keyword search so that your patrons will still find it and you can use as many 246 fields as you want so it's really a very very flexible area of the catalog record. You know I belong to a couple of groups of catalogers on Twitter and Facebook and you'd be surprised that every so often the conversation comes up but what's your favorite mark tag? Yes, I know we're huge nerds but mine is always 246 because it's for me it's the area where cataloging can be kind of more of an arch than a science and where you can really take your patrons needs into account. So here are a few examples of how you use the 246 field. One way in which you might want to use it is if you have a cover title that is different than what appears on the title page. Again, sticking strictly to the rules the national standards in your 245 field which is the actual title field what you want to use is what's on the title page. So in this case it's called Nebraska Speak how to talk like a true Nebraska. However, if you know a patron happens to have seen the cover of the book on Amazon or in their local bookstore you can probably you know feel pretty safe that they might come to your catalog and search for what they saw on the title on the cover and so in this case the cover title was different. It was your guide to Nebraska Speak and so that might be something that you want to include in a 246 field with foreign variant title. This will if you I set the indicators the right way this will come up in a title search this will show on the catalog record when somebody's looking for it you know it will be included in a keyword search of course because everything in a in a record is included in a keyword search so it really adds a lot of access. Here's another example again drawing on the legal materials available at my library what actually appears on the title page of this really really long title a treatise on the law of property and intellectual productions in Great Britain blah blah blah but what everybody calls it and what these really stressed out law students who are looking for it during finals are going to call it is Drone on Copyright which actually appears on the spine of the book not on the title page so you can be sure that you want to have Drone on Copyright in that catalog record somewhere and the 246 field is a good place for that. Another way that variant titles are used are to either spell out things that are abbreviated on the title page or vice versa abbreviate things that are spelled out on the title page but that you think people might search for one example of this is the ampersand instead of the word and as shown in this title the actual title on the title page the 245 field at the top has an ampersand between Greek and Roman but you know somebody who just happened to hear the title of the book on NPR or something would not necessarily know that it was an ampersand rather than spelled out and so it's a good idea to have the word A-N-D spelled out in your 246 field so then when somebody comes another title search for that they can find it that way and you also might want to consider this with numbers if you have something that says third and on the title page it says T-H-I-R-D but people might come and search for it with 3D you could put that in a variant title field so anything it doesn't have to be something that actually appears on the item basically is what I'm saying if you think that there is some way that somebody else could have interpreted that whether it's spelling out an abbreviation or a contraction or something like that the 246 field is a place where you can make up for that you can kind of try to think like your patrons and add information that they would search for I mean you can even take this you know as far as you want to the 246 field like I said in on the last slide is it doesn't have to be something that actually appears on the item and you know and that could be kind of a minor thing ampersand versus and or it also could be you know just something that all your patrons ask for I teach a cataloging class for the University of Nebraska Omaha and a lot of my students are school librarians and they have said to me several times that when people come in looking for the magic treehouse series they don't know what it's called magic treehouse they certainly don't know the title of the individual books they're looking for they're looking for the Jack and Annie books and so 246 would be an area where you could put that in there if you want to kind of empower them to use the catalog themselves to type in the titles that they're looking for you know the more information you can add in your description cataloging the better and a 246 field is a really really good way to do that and a lot of this Emily I think is don't necessarily need to know like sitting there when you're first cataloging a book okay what are all the possible things I need to think of because this is a lot of different things like the third and the end and the thing I'm actually kind of surprised at things like that Nebraska speak book something that's on the title on the cover isn't actually by default already in the record but this is the kind of thing that you might not do right when you're first cataloging something but as this situation has come up and you realize everybody keeps typing this in let me go back and find that record and add this so it's going to be like an ongoing process a lot of this absolutely whole thing about local standards is that you know what works in theory when you get a copy catalog record from the Library of Congress may not actually work for your patrons and so yeah keep it up in mind be open to evaluating things know that you know the catalog record is not something set in stone once you get in your catalog that's a very good point on the last area I kind of want to talk about another area that can really make or break whether people find especially in public libraries and in school libraries where you know kids especially have a series of books that they just love when they want to come and read the next one and the next one and the next one series information is a place where you can have some flexibility for determining how your items are cataloged and again once you see how your patrons use them you can kind of tweak the information found in there to be used to your benefit to your patrons benefit and so strictly speaking in Mark Fields there are two places where series information appears the 490 field is used for the series title as it appears on the actual book and this is one where it's a good idea to pretty much play it by the book the 490 field is meant to represent exactly what appears on the item it is a descriptive cataloging field which means that again it's going towards creating that surrogate so that if somebody when they're looking at the record they can definitely tell that that's what they are looking for and they can go to the shelf and find it the descriptive information the transcribed information exactly as it appears on the piece is also useful for other catalogers if you're creating something and you use the 490 field to kind of create that snapshot of what actually appears on the piece when somebody comes along doing copy cataloging they can say oh yes this record is for what I'm actually looking for and so they can compare it to the item they have in their hand so that's why having the series title exactly as it appears on the item whether it's Magic Treehouse series or just Magic Treehouse without the word series regardless of how it may appear on other books in the same series even if it varies from item to item that 490 field is where you want to actually write it down exactly as it appears on the piece however the 830 field is where you can get a little bit more creative the 830 field is an access point that is included in title searches it is what's called the authorized form of the series title and it doesn't have to be exactly what's on the item what its purpose is is to have again an authorized form so that every single item in the Magic Treehouse series or the Harry Potter series or whatever has something uniform that brings it all together so that when a person does a title search for Harry Potter series or something like that they can be sure that they are finding each and every item in that series regardless of what it says in the 490 field regardless of whether each item even has a series of exclamation on its actual pages if you know that items are part of the same series you can bring them together in an 830 field authorized series headings do exist for some of the more well-established headings you can look them up in the Library of Congress authorities however one thing I will say is that the Library of Congress itself if you are getting copy catalog records that the Library of Congress created they have cut back in recent years on their series works their catalogers since I think about 2008 have been told to transcribe what appears on the item in the 490 field but they don't do the second step in creating the authorized heading in the 830 field so even if you get a copy catalog record that doesn't have an 830 field to bring together all the items in a series feel free to go ahead and add one you can look up in the Library of Congress to see if they have an authority record and if they haven't created one then you can go ahead and create your own authority record and your own term for the series title whatever you want to call it again if you again go back to the Magic Treehouse series this is another place where you could call them the Jack and Annie books if you want to whatever you think your patrons are going to search for and whatever is useful to bring them together in the same search you can use an 830 field to your benefit so just kind of some final notes I see we got some time yet so good there'll be a time for questions or comments if anybody has them at the end but my final note is remember as I think Christopher references before nobody's going to come into your library and check what you're doing there are no cataloging police you can take liberties with things you can change you know try things out try one thing and if it isn't working switch and try another thing the main thing reason we're doing this is that we're not just you know changing rules for no reason we're still trying to stick mainly within the framework of the national cataloging standards but try out different things that work for your patron if they don't work feel free to try it again there are no cataloging police you know don't be afraid to just experiment but keep in mind you know I've been saying this all along I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record here my rules to live by or as I say on the internet the too long didn't read version of it be consistent and document document document whatever decision you make make sure that it's something you're going to apply to every single example of this whether it's putting your french cookbooks in a different the area for french tourism or creating a local subject heading because the terminology that comes from the Library of Congress doesn't work for your patrons or you know adding variant titles for certain things do it consistently don't just kind of you know make it up on the fly make sure that you're thinking about long-term are these decisions going to be something that's good for your patrons and do you know make sure it's something you want to do consistently for every single example of this situation and to create that consistency document document document have a local cataloging policy if you're creating local subject headings have a vocabulary list of those just make it easy for all current staff to do it the same way if you have three catalogers or three reference librarians who sometimes do cataloging you know 10 hours a week make it documented so that everybody who touches catalog records can do it the same way and so that the people who come after you can continue to do it the same way or can at least understand why you did it that way and then they can decide if they want to keep doing it or if they want to do something differently so those are my two rules beyond all else if you remember nothing else from this presentation remember those two things and that is basically all that I have did we have any other questions come in does that mean you have any comments about ways that they've used local standards successfully in their library great thank you Emily um nothing is on right now but this if anybody has any questions um you want to know anything about any of these other the different standards that Emily mentioned or have any questions about it or any any um comments about what you've done at your library if this is something you've already got it into some tips or tricks that you might have for other people go ahead and type into your question section if you have your own microphone however and I don't think I forgot to mention this earlier um that you can also use your microphone just like we are to ask a question just let me know in the questions please unmute me I have a mic and I can do that um noticing going through the as you're going through this session Emily I as I said I am not a cataloger I've done some minor you know fixing up of records in my career of course as you just said reference staff that sometimes jump in and do those little things I was allowed to do that after a while um but it I always catalogers I think are are very are seen as very strict and rigid and these are the rules and this is where it has to go and how it has to be done and you got to put the space here and the and the semicolon here but and you do in some cases for those things to work and it's kind of as a cataloger you have to use this this dual personality where you've got to be that specific for the computer to understand it but you also have to think about humans are going to use it and be more free form exactly and I want that's a little difficult for some of them yeah it's tough I mean and it is I always say and you know you need to know the rules well enough so that you can know where you can bend them and it won't totally screw things up for the computer or anything like that yeah and that's why it's good you've got all the specific fields for the for this particular this exact purpose yeah use these fields to be creative and get what you need in there so that all of your users can find what they need but use these other ones to make sure that this compute the you know the catalog works behind the scenes exactly and everything yeah absolutely all right well it doesn't look like any urgent questions are coming in nobody wants to ask anything somebody did just share something that they found so earlier today and if anybody follows or knows about library thing the library names they apparently got into a discussion about Dewey and emojis a joke about finding emojis for every top level Dewey decimal class and apparently it spun out of control and now they actually have set up a thing on their website of they call them do mojies that's awesome mojies for the entire Dewey decimal system that they have come up with on their site so I may include that in the link just as a fun yeah that's fun so people just sat down and figured out which which emojis would work for which which category in all of Dewey so that would be a a local way of maybe do any because you know that the one library on there you know putting in the the visual the graphics for the different things you know the catalog you're into if you want to get really crazy catalog all your books by emoji I like that go for it well it doesn't look like anybody says any questions for you right now if you so I guess we will wrap it up for today then okay but yeah my email address is there if anybody has any questions later I'm open to answering questions later for sure yeah definitely as Emily says she does teach for our UNO a library program and she's open for anyone who has any questions anything you want to ask her about this or anything else kettle thing wise as we've mentioned she does do other has done other shows for us and I'm sure we'll be on in the future on other topics that come up cataloging related cool all right just double check where the questions okay all right just some great thank yous thanks for a great session have a good day things come through all right so that will wrap it up for this week's edition of encompass live I'm gonna pull back presenter control to my screen and here's what I was just talking about here the is the doom Moji's that's awesome library things site it's hard to see some of this here but if we zoom in a little bit there yeah arts and leisure music sacred music Christmas carols sense all right so there's a little fun thing you can look at later so that will wrap it up for this week's show it has been recorded as I said and will be available here on our encompass live website if you scroll down right beneath all of our upcoming shows we've got our archive sessions should be available later this afternoon if everything processes quickly for me if youtube cooperates and it'll be similar to this one this is last week's show recording link to the youtube presentation the youtube recording video a presentation link to our slideshare account where my slides will be which sends them to me and then link to all the links that I've put together in our delicious account for the library commission as soon as that's ready and available out there I will send everybody an email so you will know that you can go ahead and watch it again if you want to or if there's anybody who you thought might be interested in this you can pass on the link to them so wrap it up for this week's show he'll be joining us for next week's topic which is here we go libraries on the edge technology assessment tool kit next week Scott Childers who is the director of our southeast library system based here and again here in Lincoln is going to talk about edge which is a website where it has tools that you can use to evaluate your library for technology and services and programming that you do and see how you compare to other libraries and see what you might need to improve or anything so really good assessment tool it's here so he's going to demo and talk about that next week so definitely sign up for that show and any of our other topics we have coming up here we've got the next two months full and scheduled so you can see all of our topics we have coming up also Leslie if you are a big Facebook user and Compass Live is on Facebook so you can if you want to please do pop over there and give us a like I post messages here about is your reminder for today's show login right now when recordings for previous shows are available I put a reminder and notice up on here so if you are big on Facebook give on Compass Live a like over there and that'll be a way that you can keep up to speed on what we're doing here other than that that wraps it up for this week's show thank you very much for attending thank you very much for being with us Emily this morning you're welcome thanks for having me great and we'll see you next time on Compass Live bye bye