Dear GameRT colleagues,
We are looking at starting a circulating board game collection and a video game collection at our library. Laura, one of our catalogers for these projects, is the current president of OLAC (Online Audiovisual Catalogers) and she asked me to write on here on behalf of the OLAC Catalogers Network with a couple questions for GameRT's metadata community.
"At OLAC's annual summer Membership Meeting last week, while we were talking about what people had seen at ALA Annual, one of our members mentioned that GameRT has a group working on Best Practices for Board Games metadata & cataloging. It also came up in further discussion at that meeting that GameRT and OLAC have worked together in the past (on genre/form terms, for one).
Then at the OLAC Cataloging Policy Committee meeting today, this same OLAC member also raised questions about cataloging tabletop RPGs (more specifically it had to do with the system for the TTRPG -- is it a series, is it useful information for a catalog record, how & where to record it, etc.)
So, questions:
1. If you don't already have any OLAC people working with you on the Best Practices, would you like some? OLAC recently released our Best Practices for Cataloging DVD-Video and Blu-ray Discs, Objects, Streaming Media, and Video Games Using the Original RDA Toolkit and MARC 21; we would love to help avoid duplication of effort and/or working at cross-purposes.
2. Is there a resource you have on cataloging RPGs or something similar, to help Greta out with her questions?
Replies via email (
mcelf008@umn.edu) or on Connect (Laura McElfresh from Univ. of Minnesota) would both work. Thank you so much!"
I will also share responses sent to me with Laura. Though I'm not a cataloger, this is a topic I am also interested in, especially as we start our collections!
Laura and I thank you for your help with these questions!
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Rachael Clark
Architecture Library Coordinator
University of Minnesota Libraries
She/Her/Hers
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