Losing Sleep » Cataloging

More CPL Website Goodness…

Chris — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:31:55 +0000

I’m such a library geek. I’ve been exploring the new CPL site and I’ve found more goodness locked away. While browsing the catalog I’ve found that some books have: reviews, summaries, excerpts and character information included in the catalog record (as well as being able to see the MARC record). All of this content seems to be brought to us from TLC (The Library Corporation) and Syndetic Solutions. The reviews include Booklist, School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly among others. The summary and excerpts are nice also (the excerpt was the entire 1st chapter for the books I checked, Sun of Suns and Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Let’s see if the catalog urls are persistant.) but I really would like to point to the character information. The character information contains much more than that, it also includes: annotations, awards, genres, topics, setting, time period and series. There’s a lot of information there. Right now I’m so happy I could cry. CPL has met and exceeded my expectations. I have some frustrations with CPL but they just made a huge deposite in my good will bank.

My Dream Come True… A Library Video Game

Chris — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:03:38 +0000

During my education as a librarian I’ve been bemoaning the fact that there are no good video games on libraries. My dreams have been answered. The guys over at Joystiq have brought my attention to The Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Library Arcade. The arcade has two games: I’ll Get It and Within Range. The former is a game on answering reference questions and the latter is all about shelving book using the LOC Classification system. If only I had the shelving game when I was taking cataloging. I might have done better than a B.

The Maricopa Metablog Post…

Chris — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:10:52 +0000

¹ I was looking through the LIS 768 blogs the other day when I decided to count up how people felt about the whole Maricopa issue. This is a rough estimate and some people might argue the positives/indifferent/negative counts but these were the numbers that I came up with based on the tone of the post:

50% positive,
37.5% indifferent,
12.5% negative.

It looks like the majority has come down on the side of BISAC and Maricopa. What does this mean for the future? These are the future librarians of America and it looks like they would implement BISAC in a library. Even the indifferent ones would probably go along with an implementation. Will the Dewey system slowly fall by the wayside to be forgotte? Maybe, maybe not. The Dewey system is entrenched. There is A LOT of library infrastructure built around it. To really implement something like BISAC would mean Stripping a lot of book spines of their Dewey stickers, editing the catalog data to include BISAC data, recoding the catalog software to accommodate BISAC. There is a lot of stuff that needs to be done to fully implement BISAC. I don’t think it’s something that can be phased in but has to be done all at once. That’s not to say that I’m against BISAC. I, for one, welcome our new BISAC overlords. Whatever works. Honestly I don’t really care one way or another.

The Card Catalog taken by haaaley.