What does a cataloger DO all day?

In case you are wondering just what I do as a cataloging librarian, here’s part of today, just a random day. I don’t actually sit at my desk and catalog non-stop, which is a good thing, because I don’t think I could have done that for the past 15 years. All of us who have our master’s in library science do a lot of advising and helping with our clerical staff, and while I didn’t go to a meeting or need to confer with someone in a subject department today, we all do some of that as well. It’s lunchtime now, and here is what I have done so far.

Searched the national database for 6 new CDs. Found records for 2, exported the records into our system, cataloged the items, and wheeled them over to the processing dept. The other 4 are not in the database yet, so we will give them a day or two before we would start from scratch and catalog them, so those go on a special “holding” cart in our dept.

Helped one of the clerical people who had never typed up any contents notes in German and didn’t know how to make the diacritic markings. (This falls under two of my responsibilities, assisting with computer issues and foreign language cataloging).

Recataloged 15 music scores. This is an ongoing project to get all of the music scores that are on the public floor for browsing into the correct Dewey Decimal 22nd edition call number. We started getting music scores around Dewey ed. 17, so there are thousands of scores in old numbers. Even limiting the project to the browsing collection, it is probably a couple thousand. So I bring down one small cartful at a time. I just mark the new information on a paper slip (known around libraries as a p-slip), and 2 of our clerical people do the editing and put the new labels on the books. Then I get the p-slips back and I look online and make sure there are no errors, and also bring the punctuation up to Anglo-American Cataloging Rules ed. 2, if they were originally done per ed. 1, which many old ones are, and I add the designation “scores and parts” if the content area shows it has parts but the subject headings don’t.

Checked with a supervisor as to whether a particular book should go in the “Easy” call number or juvenile non-fiction, since it looked borderline to me, and with 25 copies going to branches, we don’t want to get it wrong and have to relabel them all later. Her judgment call was juv non-fic, so in the private note area that the public can’t see, there is a note saying “juv non-fic per CAH” so that if a branch librarian questions it, we will know it was already looked at by a supervisor, thus saving us a lot of time.

Called computer services for one of the clerical people who needs to be able to route label printing to a shared printer. (As the dept. ACE, more or less computer services liaison, I generally make these calls for the clerical people if they need something that requires administrator permission, since I don’t have that. This limits the number of calls and number of different people calling over there.)

Searched for a particular novel on Playaway, a fairly new media player device. I found the novel as a book, CD, cassette, and downloadable book, but not as a Playaway, so I created a new record in the national database for it (cloning one of the similar records to save a lot of time), then exported it to our system, then cataloged it and put it on a cart of other completed Playaways.

While cataloging the Playaway and checking a call number, I found a typo that someone else made in a call number label on Monday that will affect about 30 copies of something. Since they still show as “on order”, they may still be in the building and they could be corrected if we catch them in time. I printed this out and took it to a supervisor, since I am not supposed to go over routing around in the on order AV materials. (Security is quite high in Processing, with a special lock-up room for AV).

My boss was hosting a group of about 8 librarians from a small library system that is going to migrate to the same software that we have, so they were here for an overview of how we do all of our procedures. Their cataloger (she does ALL of it) had a lot of questions about how we interface with the Connexion Client, which is how we edit in the national database, and since I do more of that than anyone else, I met with her for about 15 minutes to show her some shortcuts and procedures.

Next on my agenda, search the national database for about 25 items related to inland river development and navigation. Which will lead to more exporting records, cataloging items, creating new records, and building new call numbers. And so it goes!