Cataloging Committee meeting – 12/4/2017 @ 11am (PDT) via GoToMeeting
Attending: Dea Nowell—Chairperson (Umatilla Co. SLD); Laurie O’Connor—Recorder (Harney Co. Library); Beth Longwell, Jon Georg (Sage System); Catherine Wick (Pendleton Library); Jenny Simpson (Nyssa PL); Lisa Hauner (Oregon Trail LD); Tracy Hayes (Lake Co. LD); Anna Lim (Hood River); Valeria Gardner (Ontario Community Library); Meg Buchanan (Klamath CC); Carmen Wickam (Baker LD); Ann Zuehlke (Hood River Valley HS).
Dea Nowell called the meeting to order, pointed out she had one additional item to add to the agenda related to searching the Sage web page.
April 3, 2017 meeting minutes: Beth made a motion to approve; Carmen seconded; unanimous.
October 2, 2017 meeting minutes: Beth made a motion to approve; Carmen seconded; unanimous.
Authorities overview
On November 20, Beth presented to the cataloging mentors a review of authorities on Sage, including how she works with LTI to update our authority records, some of our ongoing issues with authorities, and introduced mentors to basic tools on Evergreen to help trained catalogers to help manage and enhance Sage authorities. The meeting was recorded, and will be made available for catalogers on the Sage web page in the near future.
Beth is planning on running authorities updates with LTI this week.
Current projects Cataloging Mentors are working on
Kits vs “Read Alongs”—fixing past cataloging practices related
Ongoing clarification of series issues, including how to properly trace series by “dead authors”
245 variations, especially those that should or should not include series titles
Jon suggested mentors should review which fields should include language information (specifically 8XX fields)
New bib reports and reviews
Dea explained Beth is running monthly “new bib reports” to give catalogers a way to watch for ongoing cataloging issues: monitoring duplicate records, looking for training issues, correcting repeating errors in cataloging on the system. Finding time on the part of mentors is a problem, as the monthly lists include hundreds (a few thousand) of new records.
MARC cheat sheet: Books
Carmen and the team at BCLD shared a resource they use for checking key fields as catalogers work. It is available on the Sage web page. https://sagelib.org/cataloging Discussion in this meeting pointed out that on Sage 3XX fields (RDA input) is not yet “required”, so untrained catalogers should not attempt to make RDA updates. All catalogers are strongly encouraged to locate the highest quality bibs available for import, including, when available, full RDA bibs. Catalogers should never remove RDA elements from a record that they have imported.
Sage Web “Cataloging Tips and Information” section
“Not all records are created equal.” Beth is planning on renaming the “Cataloging Tips” section to include more current information on cataloging practices on Sage. She also pointed out that the Sage web page is searchable, though some of the topics do not show up on searches, based on how they have been titled, or whether they are hidden as appendices or additions to other topics. Catalogers should experiment with this function. Go to https://sagelib.org/cataloging and then put your query in the “Search sagelib.org” box on the top right hand corner . The mentors will be working to increase searchable terms and tools on this resource. Catalogers should let mentors know what they would like to find with this tool.
GMD and 999 reminder:
Many new records are being imported without having the Sage required additions of GMD terminology being added in the 245 and without the Sage required scoping field 999 being added. These are both fixed terminology additions, so catalogers should refer to the lists of terms for each.
GMD terminology
999 terminology
Reminder: Catalogers should get, stay familiar with the Sage Web Page
https://sagelib.org/cataloging
Other discussion
Laurie mentioned that she has again been noticing problems with searching on Sage, and asked Beth about a similar comment from circulation about a month ago. Multiple searches, using various inputs, will sometimes simply not return items already held on Sage. Beth said she has not been able to detect a consistent pattern related to these reports. But she said she is hearing enough on this to look into server performance and space. Anna said searches at Hood River do not always return proper results when the search is limited to Hood River, but their items can then be found by searching all of Sage. Harney County Library is continuing to have problems when checking in large batches of items, and having many “check ins” not actually registering as returned. Another possible cause could lie in Internet performance on the various sites, but Laurie pointed out that is no longer an issue at HCL. Beth and Jon will look into possible causes and solutions from the server side of this.
Meeting adjourned at 11:55 PST.
The next Cataloging Committee meeting will be February 5, 2018 @ 11 a.m. PST, via GoToMeeting.