Bibliographic Services — McMaster University Libraries

We’ve had our new cataloguing procedure in place for a couple of weeks now (I was a little slow in blogging it).

In that time, Ros, Marcia, and Kim have done a terrific job of testing and asking lots of good questions. The cataloguers have met to discuss the process and have done some review of the books being sent over to cataloguing. Based on what we’ve seen and talked about, the procedures have been revised.

The most significant change is the handling of series, which made up the bulk of items received in cataloguing. With the first draft of the procedure, we asked for all series to be sent to cataloguing. This proved to be too broad a net, which would quickly outstrip our remaining cataloguing time. We’ve revised the procedure so that only those series lacking an authority record in Horizon (meaning we’ve not seen them before and don’t know how they’re handled) and straight series are sent to cataloguing. If an authority record for the series has already been imported, the series is classed separately (‡a=s in field 646 of the authority record), and the bibliographic record meets the completeness requirements (based on ELvl), the record will be accepted without further review and the book sent on for labeling. Hopefully that was clearer in bullet form in the procedure than it looks here…