There are numberous ways of finding out what’s new at your library – looking on the new acquisitions shelf, through circulation lists or updates on the library’s blog, or by talking to your nearest friendly librarian.
But have you ever wondered about what kinds of things are being added to WorldCat? Now, every 8 seconds, you can see the latest things as they’re added!
Want to stay up to date with what’s happening in the world of cataloguing? Then head over to the cataloguing motherlode, Planet Cataloguing. Planet Cataloguing is a blog that aggregates almost 60 blogs on cataloguing and metadata all in the one spot, wtih a handy RSS feed to save you from having to subscribe to, or check, all of those other places to stay up to date. Three cheers for things that make life easier!
Taking a look at the lighter side of things, Fake AACR2 on Twitter gives AACR2 the humourous treatment in an update it labels as the “2010 Desecration”. Well worth the visit for gems such as:
1.7A3. When making informal notes, use statements that present the information as briefly as clarity & grammar permit, ie: LyK tHiS LOL u C?
and
1.1F5. If a single statement of responsibility names more than 3 persons or bodies, use a single combination of their names ie “Brangelina”.
That’s good advice for us all.
Trove is the National Library’s latest ‘discovery experience’ or catalogue or search engine to various Library collections. It moved from beta to production last week and is designed to be the single user interface for Library users.
Trove brings together all the Library’s collections and a whole other suite of online resources. For information on it go to http://trove/general/about
Trove allows, nay encourages, user participation in tagging and commenting on works. See the below image for how many people have been using the Trove system (as of 11am 9 Dec.)
Most of the comments relate to the text corrections to Australian newspapers which have been a phenomenal success (see http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/gateways/issues/102/story06.html)
But looking through them, there are a number of other public additions by comment or tag that enhance our catalogue records. Subject headings as we know are pre-coordinate in that a structured set of subject headings is used when cataloguing (LCSH with Australian extensions) however tags (which are in effect subject headings) applied and hopefully used by users, are not structured (post-coordinate) . It will be interesting to see once a large number of tags are in place, which prove more useful. A good paper on post vs. pre coordinate headings is at: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/pre_vs_post.pdf
All areas of the Library have received greater amounts of user feedback on the Library’s catalogue records as the catalogue has lately been exposed to search engines (leading to much greater usage) , with Trove this user interaction will no doubt increase as easy access is given to users to notify us of errors or omissions. It makes more work for us all, but improving the integrity of our data is incredibly worthwhile.
