I’m really not an idiot

Week 5

These are my current mantras,“I am not an idiot”, “I am smart and capable”. Maybe if I keep telling myself these things, I will stop making so many silly mistakes. 

"I will not make (too many) cataloging errors"

After having left my notebook at home the week before and not having tried my hand at assigning accession numbers of basically dealing with the Millenium OPAC (they call it iii, so that’s how I will refer to it from now on), I took a stab at it this week. Now, Cate had showed me how to do all of this two weeks prior, unfortunately, if I do not physically use the information I have been taught within a few days, I may as well have never heard it at all.  I was able, after much trial and error, to sign into iii, but that’s where it came to a halt.  It's so frustrating how not knowing just on tiny step, one tiny click, can bring your work to a standstill. But as it had been said, the best way to learn is to make a mistake….or something along those lines.

So when Cate came in she showed me the link I was looking for and all went well with assigning accession numbers and adding barcodes.  Easy, schmeasy.  The next challenge was bibliographic overlay.  I and e-mailed myself the document on how this is done and read it over, but having never seen it done, it was like reading gibberish.  I had no conceptual model to apply it to so I used the conceptual model that we use at the community colleges, thinking, “How different can it be?” Very different. Unlike at SCC UW does batch processing which means that they do not import records directly from OCLC to iii, instead they use a field ( 948) and enter a code  (.b) that signifies what record to overlay on top of the existing record in iii (either a stub or just a bad record).  It took a bit of explaining to fix the mess I made by mistakenly uploading multiple copies of a record.  I think this was the biggest mistake I had made so far at UW…and to be honest in the scope of things, it’s not really that big.  

My brain on cataloging.

It feels good to look back in hindsight and realize this and now I can pretty confidently say that I will probably not make that mistake again.   So…two big lessons learned this week. Two more pieces of the puzzle to try and wrap my brain around.  Next week I get to sit in on a big departmental meeting about some major restructuring that will be happening in UW Acquisitions and eventually, Cataloging, departments.  I will also be interviewing the Assistant Acquisitions librarian to get a sense of what that position entails.  Stay tuned….