Week 2-Respect my authority!

I was beginning to think I was a hot shit copy cataloger. What is a hot shit copy cataloger, you may ask? Well, I am fast. I am accurate. I assign call numbers. I know (some) OCLC shortcuts and can change bib records in our acquisitions module. It’s taken me the better part of a year to get to this point, but I am proud of what I have learned on the job.

Then I started my internship at UW. It’s a whole new level of cataloging that I knew existed but could not fathom until I started doing it myself. Unlike at SCC, UW does their cataloging in OCLC. This means that they do not download “OK” files and make do with what they can find. They look for “OK” records and make them better…and then share them with the rest of the world.

This makes so much more sense than cataloging the way it is done at SCC but I understand why (budget) it can’t be done there and at many other smaller libraries. Why recreate the wheel? And if you do recreate the wheel why not share it with other so that they in turn, do not waste time and effort?

Not only am I augmenting records within OCLC , but I started my first original bib record last week!!! It’s for a movie called, “Mister Scarface”. Not to be confused with “Scarface”, this is an Italian poliziottesco film. Popular in the late 60's and early 70’s, poliziottesco, are Italian crime films, in this case starring American actor, Jack Palance, he of the one handed, geriatric push-up fame. Much of the action takes place on scooters (badass!) and the fighting in the form of kung-fu. While there are already some 10 records in OCLC for this movie, there did not exist a record for this particular version distributed by a company in Piscataway, NJ. Thus began my first foray into “original cataloging”. Although not completely original because I copied an existing record to create a new one but then made significant changes.

Already, I have learned so much, just by doing. The pieces are now falling into place. The information learned from cataloging class and copy cataloging was merely priming me for this moment. Despite feeling that I knew what certain concepts were about, such as authority work, it really takes doing the work to make complete sense. The first few weeks I thought I was doing "OK" with the authority fields, only to come to realize that there is no “OK” with authority fields. It is either an approved name or subject heading, or it is not. Unlike, may other aspects of cataloging that I have happily come to realize are subjective, authority work is completely objective. That would explain why it is called “authority work”. Also, there can be a decent amount of research that goes into being sure that a name being checked is the same name found in the authority files. While at first I was overwhelmed by this discovery, I now enjoy the sleuthing involved in verifying names.

Of course, there have been a few bumps in the road. I’ve had to recreate fields that have disappeared when I forgot to “lock” a file while working on it. I also lost an entire record that I had enhanced last week when I attempted to verify my fields before I saved it. Also, it can seem very slow going compared to the copy work I do at SCC. In 6.5 hours, I have been averaging 2-3 records but I know that there is a steep learning curve and that I will get faster as I become more familiar with the practices of UW and functions of OCLC.