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0:00
Hello. My name is Catelynne Sahadath.
And I'm and the head
of metadata development
at the University of Calgary
Libraries and Cultural Resources,
located in Calgary Canada.
A large part of my role
here at the University
involves assessing and working
with large sets of catalog record,
specifically for the purpose
of making large sets of data
available to library users.
This talk is titled Vendor
Supplied MARC Records for Online
Collections, and is intended for library
professionals with little exposure
to MARC cataloging.
It will first focus on a background
about how MARC records came to be
and how they work, followed by how
and why you could use MARC record
sets to make your
library subscription
services and databases accessible.
For neutrality's sake, I will
be using Henry Stewart Talks
available MARC record
set as an example,
but this really is applicable
to any similar digital resources
that your library
may have access to.
0:51
Their are three
sections to this talk.
The first will take a bottom up
approach to explaining what MARC
records are, how they came to
be, and some basic information
about how MARC records are used.
The second section will look at what
vendor supplied MARC record sets
are, and will explain when
why, or why not, libraries
use vendor supplied records.
The third section will give some
practical suggestions and examples
of how to assess
vendor record quality,
as well as how to plan
for loading MARC record
sets into the library catalog.
1:25
So what are MARC records anyway?
1:30
MARC is an acronym that stands for
machine readable catalogue records.
Prior to MARC's
existence, libraries used
card catalogs to help users find,
identify, select, and obtain items.
Many of you may remember
using card catalogs,
but it is important to acknowledge
that there are also a growing
number of library
professionals and library users
who have never had the
experience of using
a card catalog as electronic
library catalogs have
been in use for decades.
Cards contained access entry
points for the author, title,
and subjects of the resource,
with multiple cards
pointing to one resource.
With the switch to online catalogs,
the same information from the cards
was simply input
into library systems.
As time goes on, the
requirements for this information
are continuously evolving.
The biggest difference between
cards and online catalog records
is that cards only need to be
interpreted once, by humans.
Online systems, however, require
two interpretations, once
by the system, and
once by the human.
For this reason, our
catalog records have
two sets of rules, or standards.
