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Cataloging Online Resources
from the 2002 FDLC
This panel discussion was very interesting and I picked up several tidbits of information that will be useful in dealing with electronic publications as AACR implements new rules for these materials. The rapidly increasing number of electronic publications has resulted in a real change in the nature of work for GPO's catalogers. Rather than just waiting for print or fiche documents to be delivered to them for cataloging, now they must work to discover these titles, and then catalog them. This is the session where we learned about the large number of new GPO catalogers. Tad Downing, head of GPO Cataloging and one of the panelists, said he hopes these new people will more easily recognize serials and we will be getting fewer serial issues cataloged as monographs. He told us that GPO closes out a serial record (which results in a "changed" record from Marcive) only when they are VERY sure that the title has gone to electronic only.
Jim Noel, from Marcive, was also on the panel and he noted that sometimes when we get changed records that don' t look changed, Marcive had originally caught the typo or other mistake and corrected it themselves. Then GPO catches it later and changes the record, therefore sending a "changed" record to Marcive. The third person on the panel was Rebecca Culbertson, from UCSD, who has much experience cataloging electronic records for the UC system; it was she who taught us about "integrating resources," the new AACR material type.
I have brief handouts from Tad and Jim, and extensive notes from Rebecca's talk, if any of you are interested in more detail on this subject.
