A little bit of cataloguing....

Yesterday, I finally got the chance to put some of the theory I learned in my London Library cataloguing training sessions into practice - hurrah! It's been a long time coming, and I honestly thought I would have forgotten all things related to MARC21 and AARC2, but it turns out that somehow, I've actually managed to retain it!

Over the past couple of weeks, I (along with the other graduate trainees) have been examining the London Library's extensive fiction collection, and attempting to categorise our holdings into author nationalities. With a fair few spreadsheets covering lists of Australian, Canadian, Pakastani, Ghanaian, Malaysian, German, French, Spanish and Hong Kong authors whose books we possess(to name but a few), the aim of the project was to transfer this information into the item record as an LC Subject heading, so that if a library member were to search our OPAC with a wish to view our german fiction holdings, for example, this would now actually be possible.

After being briefed by the Head of Bibliographic Services, I set about acquainting myself with the Library of Congress Authorities. In order to make our fiction collections searchable by author nationality, I had to first find out which "authority record" to use. For those unfamiliar with the term, an authority record, according to the Library of Congress:

"Is a tool used by librarians to establish forms of names (for persons, places, meetings, and organizations), titles, and subjects used on bibliographic records. Authority records enable librarians to provide uniform access to materials in library catalogs and to provide clear identification of authors and subject headings."

I started with my list of German authors, and by typing in a variety of possible formations - that is, German authors, authors, german - I finally found that the authorised heading to use was the latter: "Authors, german." The next stage was to then transfer this information into the London Library item record (which also meant braving the cataloguing module on Aleph for the first time as well!)

Having opened up all records relating to Heinrich Boll, (he was by chance, the first author I started with!) I began adding in the LC subject heading that he was not only a twentieth-century German author, but one who also wrote fiction.

For the London Library, this information must be entered under a 650 field, with a second indicator of 0, which marks that the heading I was using had come from the Library of Congress Authorities. Under subfield a) I wrote Authors, German.

I then created another 650 field, so that I could also indicate the book in question was fiction. Under subfield a) I wrote "German fiction", and because I knew Boll was a twentieth-century writer, I added under subfield y) 20th century.

The first record I created can be viewed here.

If you scroll to the bottom, you will see that these headings now appear on the item record. SUCCESS!

Now, this, to me, is an extremely good idea. I can't tell you the number of times I've dealt with members who would simply just like to know which American authors, or French authors we stock in the Library. Although time-consuming, it's definitely a worth-while project, and will hopefully offer a much broader search for members who would rather browse, than specify exactly what they are looking for.