Sage Catalog Committee Meeting August 3rd , 2020
Attendees: John Brockman (Baker), Beth Ross (Sage), Jon Georg (Sage), Heather Spry (Baker), Heather Estrada (BMCC), Lisa Hauner (OTLD), Leslie Carlock (Lake), BoDean Warnock (Baker)
Minutes: John asked if anyone had questions, or corrections. John called for someone to approve the minutes. Heather Spry motioned to approve, Beth seconded. John asked for anyone to disapprove, no one did. Minutes passed.
Authorities
The authority batch from the past year was returned and Beth worked through all the near matches with some help. On July 15th, she sent out the next batch of records for review by Marcive. She’s hoping to do it on a monthly basis so our authorities are up to date on a continual basis. A lot of authority work has been done in the past month. Some of the $0 tags say Sage and some say DLC, Beth is working on making them all Sage. They do all refer to the same authority so don’t worry. More on authorities later.
CAT Levels subcommittee
We’ve updated the CAT1 Requirements, CAT1 Application, Sage Cataloging Policy, and the Core Competency Requirements. The tests are being completed still but should all be done by the next Catalog Committee meeting. The documents are ready for review by the Sage User Counsel in hopes that they will be approved. John clarified the purpose of the CAT levels subcommittee and that is to create a standardized process to move up through the CAT levels that is objective. Anyone who has previously submitted CAT1 applications will need to do this again starting in October, but it will be a faster, streamlined process in an attempt to make wait times shorter.
RDA subcommittee
We’ve postponed the RDA subcommittee until next year. It’s not the right time for personal workloads so the plan to create the new RDA manual is set for the beginning of next year.
Next Catalog Committee Chair
John’s term is up in October and at the next meeting we will nominate and select a new chair. John encourages people to talk to other catalogers and email him with nominations. It’s been a long two years but it’s been rewarding, paraphrased from John’s babbling. No public nominations are necessary, consult the person you’re nominating first and email John.
Parts
Be consistent, use available tags unless it does not fit what you have in hand. If everyone is circulating the item, the same way (all complete sets) there’s no need to put any parts. Parts are needed if a library is circulating a TV series by individual discs or have separated them to circulate, that is when it’s necessary to add parts to all items. Consistency with terms is really important for patrons. Use what is available in the parts menu if you’re adding to a record that has them. If it’s incorrect, please contact your mentor.
700 in digital media
Make sure all the authorities are the correct authorities. Don’t assume that single names with no further defined characteristics are correct because you have imported the record. These do need to be checked to make sure they’re proper authorities. Look for clues in the record if there are middle names or initials, also take note of how they contribute to the film. This can help you find the proper authority. If you’re looking for actors and there are a lot of similar names, it helps to look them up on IMDB to get their birth year and that can also be helpful in determining the correct name authority.
Authority reports (35:35)
Marcive sends a processing report with multiple matches or high probability matches. When there is more than one likely match for an entry in a record it puts it on this list. After it’s compiled from the records that Beth sends them, they return this list.
Beth takes the control number, which is the Database ID, goes to the catalog and searches by that number. It brings up the item (it’s a movie), she goes to marc edit and looks at the 700 fields. All the entries that have authorities have a $0 with the Sage tag in it, if it couldn’t identify it correctly it doesn’t have one. On the match list Marcive suggests possible LOC authorities that are potential matches. Beth then goes to the International Movie Database, www.imdb.com , and looks up the birthdate for the actor to see if there are potential matches (he was born in 1957). She then goes to the LOC authorities search and sees if there is a match. She also checks if the movie the actor is in is listed in the LOC authorities and IMDB. She has the right one! She then adds the correct authority to the record. Hooray!
For every entry she tries to find information about what kind of entry it is. If it’s a person, she tries to find more out about the actor, author, illustrator, etc. so she can find the accurate authority record to put in the item record. If she can’t find anything out about the person, she leaves it as is. Hopefully, one day they will have an authority.
If it is a subject heading (e.g. $aBehavior $vJuvenile fiction was flagged), she brings up the record and then brings up the LOC authorities page. She searches the authorities for the subject heading in question. When looking up Behavior, it showed that it was only in the LC Annotated Children’s catalog subject headings. It is not accurate as an adult heading. If you want to keep an adult subject heading with $Juvenile fiction, you need to find another heading that is authorized.
Everyone should be checking the authorities when they’re importing records from anywhere. A quick way to do this is click validate up by the save button. It will put check marks by valid headings and mark the unsure ones in red with question marks. Sometimes they are accurate even if they’re red, the authority checker isn’t always able to check the $v correctly with the subject heading. If you look them up in the LOC authorities and they exist, you’re good to go. Especially with juvenile works, you need to make sure that the correct subject headings are being used, doubly so if you are trying to use 650 /1, and using the children’s thesaurus.
LOC authorities:
https://authorities.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First
Specifically, the LOC children’s authorities:
https://id.loc.gov/search/?q=&q=cs%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fid.loc.gov%2Fauthorities%2FchildrensSubjects
Meeting Recording link –>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moqifo27GjA