Excerpts from co-chair Amber Seely's report summarizing the two presentations are below. Slides accompanying the presentations will be attached to this message as they become available.
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The 2017-2019 co-chair of the Catalog Management Group, Amber Seely, Division Manager, Collections & Technical Services, Harris County Public Library welcomed the 98 meeting attendees and introduce the two meeting speakers: Cecilia Williams, Librarian at Harris County Public Library, Texas and Lucas Mak, Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries.
The title of Cecilia Williams's presentation was "Better customer service through cataloging." She shared her experience working with the rest of the Technical Services staff, including Acquisitions and Cataloging at Harris County Public Library on catalog clean-up projects after library integrated system migration, changes in collection physical locations, new floating collections policy and the damages in four library branches brought by Hurricane Harvey. The first phase of this project started in January 2017 and ended in April 2018. The goal was to establish a baseline, to determine what is to be cleaned up and to determine the workflow. The magnitude of the project required very good planning, project management and communication skills. The project was completed successfully by using shared spreadsheets to keep communication open and by making daily and weekly data cleaning a regular part of the workflow for multiple staff members. The triage of daily issues, the identification of patterns, the revising of existing policies as needed proved to be very helpful for developing of a culture of finding long term solutions. The second phase of this project started in April 2018 and is ongoing. It is aiming to enhance customer service through quality catalog records.
The title of Lucas Mak's presentation was "Where is the 043?: Retrospective assignment of MARC geographic area codes in batch." Lucas Mak shared his experience working on adding MARC 043 field with the Geographic Area Codes (GACs) to multiple bibliographic records to help area studies librarians analyze collections in their respective areas by GACs in catalog records. The library staff used the XSLT process to scan the Library of Congress Subject Headings and to assign appropriate geographic area codes (GACs) according to a conversion table created from the GAC dataset available at the Library of Congress Linked Data Service website for bulk download in RDFXML, n-triple, and Turtle. The RDFXML file was converted to XML tables. Special handling was required due to the structure of GACs and geographic headings. During this project nine million bibliographic records were processed and 1.4 million records have the 043 fields updated/added.
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Dan Tam Do
Cataloging and Metadata Librarian
The University of Vermont
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