Sage Catalog Committee Meeting June 1st , 2020
Attendees: John Brockman (Baker), Beth Ross (Sage), Jon Georg (Sage), Ann Zuehlke (HRVHS), Celine Vandervlugt (Cook Memorial), Dea Nowell (USCLD), Heather Estrada (BMCC), Heather Spry (Baker), Jenny Simpson (Nyssa), Laurie O’Connor (Harney), Leeann Baldwin (Pendleton), Leslie Carlock (Lake), Lisa Hauner (OTLD), Marsha Richmond (Klamath CC), Perry Stokes (Baker), Tracy Hayes (Lake), Valeria Gardner (Ontario), BoDean Warnock (Baker).
Minutes: John asked if there were questions or corrections and there were none. Heather motioned to approve minutes, Ann seconded. John asked for any opposition, there was no opposition and the minutes were approved.
Re-opening
John opened up the discussion with reminding everyone that Beth has a GoTo meeting scheduled at 2:00pm today (June 1st). He talked a little about how the Baker County Library is doing with re-opening. It was mentioned that it easy to overburden folks with too much signage. Dea said that there are way too many signs, sometimes having fewer signs is better. She also mentioned that some of the Umatilla Libraries are open in various stages, and with things happening all the time it changes minute by minute. Leeann said that Pendleton restarted curbside service. Luckily, some of the catalog work can be done from home and it doesn’t always have to be done in the library.
Authority Records
The old vendor went out of business and the new vendor (Marcive) asked us to delete all the old authorities and import the new ones. She submitted all the new bib records from the past year to Marcive and is waiting for them to come back to make the changes in the system. Beth is updating the subfield $0 to reflect the new authorities. Beth asked if there were any questions. Laurie asked if there was a way to limit the impact on the =800 field with the subfield $v, it tries to strip the leader zero from the numeration.
The =490 field being changed during the authority changes was also a concern, it was changing the wording or stripping the brackets. Beth said that she could probably make them be skipped in the update. Heather mentioned that since =490 field was supposed to be from the resource there wasn’t any reason to do any authority work with that field. Beth agreed and said the authority was tied to the 800 and 830 so she can skip the 490 and said she would make a note of that.
Laurie mentioned that she sometimes still finds the $0. It is rare, but it still happens, and Beth said the work she’s doing on the back end of the system should solve that problem.
John asked if the updating of authorities has already started, Beth said she’s been working through the list and doing batches of 10,000 at a time. If too many are ran at once it taxes the system and makes it harder on everyone else using the system, so she has kindly been doing it in the evening. It’s taking longer because there are 1.5 million bibs and doing 10,000 at a time takes a while. It might take another week to a week and a half to get through all the records. Beth can set it up so authorities update everyday on new records created and imported, but we just have to catch up first.
Laurie asked how frequently authority work will be done. Beth said we can send them as often as we want since it’s a per record charge, and she was thinking about sending a file out every month. Laurie asked if it also catches duplicates, Beth replied that she actually has a separate script for it and her and Jon Georg work through the list and have tackled at least 1,000 duplicates. They’re addressing the backlog of duplicates, and she targets the newest ones first and works backwards. Cleanup is happening in the background!
CAT Subcommittee
Heather said that the CAT subcommittee is currently tackling the older documentation. All of the ones pertaining to CAT levels and Cataloging policy are being revised, e.g. Core Competencies, the Sage Cataloging standards. The subcommittee is also working on tests for all three levels and are meeting again next week, it’s chugging along.
RDA adoption Subcommittee
The subcommittee collected the existing policy on RDA. One of the goals of the subcommittee is to put together procedures on how to transition to an RDA only catalog, as we are currently working in a hybrid system of RDA and AACR2. This might not happen this year, but the goal is to have the documentation and the procedures in place. The committee is formulating what the new RDA manual is going to look like, (i.e. table of contents). They are also looking at training opportunities, and the best forums for those. John thanked all the subcommittee members for their involvement and the time dedicated to it.
Beth mentioned that the RDA toolkit subscription we have is coming up due. She asked if the subscription seat amount (currently 2) needs to be updated to more. John asked if it had to be done in the moment of renewal or if it can be done at a later time, he does think that there will probably be an increasing need for Sage. Beth will renew at the current rate and will look into updating it when we need it. Laurie said she has used the Sage login for the RDA toolkit and has not ran into any log-in issues, however that will probably change in the future, and we might need to add more seats to the subscription. Laurie asked Beth how much it costs per seat, it’s $185 dollars.
Spanish Template
John talked about some of the necessary fields when cataloging a Spanish item properly. There is a language fixed field (Lang) that would be “spa”, because the material is in Spanish but in the 040 $b is where you designate the language of the record, which should be “eng”. This is different, since our catalog is in English. If you need a starting point with Spanish materials, Baker County Library has put together a Spanish template after much research into not creating hybrid records in the system. If you’d like a copy that you can tailor to your library please email John Brockman (cataloger@bakerlib.org). It is for books but can be adapted to different formats.
Laurie asked if there was any questions on a Spanish record if Baker catalogers can be contacted, John said yes and that Lisa Hauner has also been doing a lot of Spanish cataloging. Please reach out to Lisa or John Brockman if you’d like a copy of their Spanish genre terms.
Questions from Committee
Laurie wanted to make sure everyone saw the email that she sent out about Oregon Battle of the Books (OBOB). It should be put in a =500 note and not =856 award note. OBOB is not an award, it’s a selection list. The fields should be formatted as:
=500//$aOregon Battle of the Books, 2020-2021, Grades 3-5.
=500//$aOregon Battle of the Books, 2020-2021, Grades 6-8.
=500//$aOregon Battle of the Books, 2020-2021, Grades 9-12.
Do put actual awards in the 586 field because we do want those.
Diacritics
John put in a hyperlink in the agenda to the training video Beth did for diacritics last year. John told a very lame joke in which there was much laughter and groaning.
When importing records from Z.39 sometimes the diacritics don’t translate well to our system, this most frequently happens in the 264 /4 $c with the copyright symbol. If there are any special characters from other languages such as umlats and accent marks, everyone should check them and change them to the appropriate characters. You can find the character map on your computer by going to the start menu and type character map, it’s also in accessories. You can also copy and paste the correct letters from other sources, character map is just as easy.
Batch Importing
Batch importing is usually done by libraries who receive batch files from a vendor or more often CatXpress subscription. If libraries are using this feature for CatXpress what they put in this screen will look different than if the library is batch importing from a vendor. The screen changed quite a bit with the Web client upgrade. Some features need to be explored still.
For CatXpress users, libraries will use the Record Type, Bibliographic Records from the drop down menu. Beside “Select” or “Create a Queue”, you can type whatever you want, Beth usually uses the date but it’s just want you want to describe your file as. To eliminate duplicates as much as possible besides the Record Match Set you want to choose ISBN. On the right hand side you need to tick the boxes for Import Non-Matching Records. All the other boxes are unnecessary and then you click the green Upload button.
If the system finds a match, it will not import the record, which is exactly what should happen to avoid creating duplicates. Import Queue will show you a table of the imported records. Under “imported as” you can click on the blue hyperlink numbers and it will take you to the record and allow you to add some information and items. Use the back button to get back to the table.
Work from home
For those catalogers who are still doing work from home there are some webinars and interactive courses through Web Junction that are only about an hour long. Several catalogers have also taken the free RDA course offered through Library Juice academy. Laurie said if she follows all their links, breakouts and discussions she learned a lot about it and the toolkit. She missed the part where you can interact with an instructor and would look forward to taking a course where the questions she still has could be answered. She said it challenged her, getting used to the terminology, getting used to the toolkit and having a different thought process. Laurie recommends it and you get as much into as you put into it. Celine says the exercises are very useful for cementing the ideas.
John says to remember that the RDA 2013 when it was first adopted is different than the RDA of today. The RDA subcommittee is looking to adopt the earlier generation of RDA to make the transition easier. RDA is constantly becoming more complex. There are good beginning RDA courses that interested people should look into, there is an excellent video on youtube by Vicky Sipe, provided by ALCTS. Laurie said she would send an email out to everyone a video link about the more updated version of RDA: Understanding WEMI by Pamela Thomas.
Link to recording –> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLFdIEY9tiE