Three interviews with four catalogers

Michelle Townsend, Mississippi Library Commission

Ruth Ann Gibson and Julie Thornton,Mississippi College

Elizabeth Beck, Millsaps College

The catalogers were camera shy, so sorry, no photographs.

Mississippi Library Commission

“Today, the Mississippi Library Commission offers a wide variety of direct and indirect services to libraries, government agencies and the citizens of Mississippi.” From the website

Mississippi College

• Largest and oldest private college in Mississippi, with 5,000 students, and the second oldest Baptist college in the U. S. Located in Clinton, a suburb west of Jackson. There is also a Law School at a separate campus in downtown Jackson. Where I got my undergraduate degree.

Millsaps College

• Small, liberal-arts college, affiliated with the United Methodist Church, home to 985 students. Located in downtown Jackson.

First Topic: RDA

• Of the three institutions I visited, only Mississippi College has updated their original cataloging to RDA, which they did gradually over the past 3 years. The other two institutions plan to do so in the next year and are copying RDA records.

• There were some mixed feelings about RDA. The two catalogers at Mississippi College felt that it leaves two much up to individual cataloger’s discretion, which leads to inconsistency in cataloging. They are making their own rules to add to RDA so their cataloging is consistent.

• Despite this, everyone thinks RDA will be around for a while. There were some major improvements over AACR2, especially with being more open to different formats.

More on RDA

• All the catalogers I spoke with applauded RDA’s implementation of the philosophy behind cataloging, such as FRBR.

• Listservs and webinars were two ways catalogers keep up with changes in RDA.

• RDA Toolkit is the most frequently used RDA tool, but I also saw a large print RDA book.

• RDA is constantly being updated, with unpopular rules being changed and language being clarified.

Cataloging Tools

• All the catalogers I interviewed use OCLC Connexion. Some use the browser, and some the client.

• Other resources used: RDA Toolkit, Classweb, WebDewey, Cataloger’s Desktop, and some other resources built into the OPAC software.

Dewey or LC?

• Mississippi College’s library is a medium size library collection. However, unlike most academic libraries, they still use Dewey. There have been plans to migrate the collection to LC for over 20 years, but due to understaffing this has never happened. There is only one full time cataloger (Ruth Ann Gibson) who has other responsibilities and one part time cataloger (Julie Thornton), although the Law School has its own cataloging staff.

More on Dewey and LC

• The Mississippi Library Commission’s collection is small enough to use Dewey, and there is no desire to migrate to LC. Millsaps, even though a much smaller collection than Mississippi College, uses LC.

Hybrid Catalogs

• All three of the institutions have hybrid catalogs- there are records in the catalog that are done in accordance with AACR2, RDA, and older cataloging rules- some records being digitizations of records going back as far as the 1950’s. Understaffing, a problem at both the academic libraries, has made updating the catalogs impractical.

Collections

• The Mississippi Library Commission is a state document depository, housing many state government documents. These use a different cataloging system which is neither LC nor Dewey. All three institutions hold mostly book collections with some AV and microfilm. The collection of e-resources are expanding at the 2 academic libraries.

Millsaps’ Big Search

• Millsaps Library’s website links one first to Bigsearch. This searches everything the library has access to, both print and electronic. This is a big time saver for the only cataloger at the institution, Elizabeth Beck, since it means she does not have to do any cataloging for e-resources. The students or faculty simply search Big Search, which searches both the catalog and their e-resources which are indexed by the vendors.

OPAC software

• All 3 institutions use different OPAC software. • Ruth Ann Gibson at Mississippi College

bragged that her institution uses the best OPAC software available, Innovative Interfaces.

• The Mississippi Library Commission uses Auto-graphics, whereas Millsaps uses Sirsi-Dynix.

Backlogs

• Mississippi College has a backlog for most of the year, from the time purchases start coming in almost to the next year. Purchases come in shortly after enrollment stats come in at the beginning of the fall semester. Not much of a backlog at Millsaps or MLC.

Archives

• Both of the academic libraries have archives associated with them, both of which include the state archives for the churches to which they are affiliated. However, both have archivists who do all the archival description and cataloging, and the cataloging staff usually have little to do with the archives.

Dublin Core

• Both of the academic libraries said they have no plans to use Dublin Core and haven’t used it in the past. MLC likewise hasn’t done any cataloging in DC yet; but there are plans to catalog some websites for the public in the near future.

The Future of Cataloging

• RDA was made to be compatible with formats other than MARC, including Dublin Core, Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), and Encoded Archival Description (EAD).

• Now, another RDA compatible format, Bibframe, is being developed by the Library of Congress together with the national libraries of the UK, Canada, Germany, and other countries.

• Many think Bibframe will replace MARC. It is intended to be more internet friendly than MARC.