lis512 lecture 8 access

description vs access There are two part to cataloging, called description and access. The distinction between description and access is peculiar to cataloging. It is not encountered as such in other areas of information organization. The origin of the distinction, like much of cataloging, goes back to card cataloging.

description on a card In description, you describe the item. Basically, you create a card catalog for it. The result is a description on a card. If you just have one card, thats ok. But if you have several cards, you need to determine how to have users find the cards they may be interested in.

description in a database If you describe an item in a database table, then, each item is a row in the database. Each, say, MARC subfield is a column in the database (roughly). Thus users can search for something that appears in fields using queries to the database.

back to the card situation If you have a large number of cards, each describing an item in the library, you can arrange the cards in a box. What arrangement will you use? Typically, you will have to choose one criteria to be the one you list things by.

example You are a car dealership. You want to prepare a list of cars. You could list them by – brand – color – price – time they are sitting in the show room – an attractiveness score made up by a random customer

in a library setting In a library setting the criterion to list all items in a library by is hard to find. Ideally, we would like to use order all our items, by the criterion that users would like to search for most frequently. But this criterion is not constant for each item type. This is a serious complication.

definitions We call access point any criterion that allows an alphabetic listing of items. We call a heading the value that is taken by the access point for an item that we have in our catalog. An catalog may have several access points. Accordingly an item may have several headings. An entry is a MARC term for a heading.

main heading There has been a long-standing debate in cataloging whether – one access point is the main access point. In that case, each cataloging record has a main heading, or – there is a range of access points, each of them is treated equal. In that case all headings have the same status. We follow MARC records to have a main heading.

MARC entries MARC has the following sections – 1?? main entry – 6?? subject access – 7?? added entry – 8?? series added entry Within these you have – ?00 personal name – ?10 corporate name – ?11 meeting name – ?30 uniform title

finding the main entry We use rule 23A to determine the main entry. This will be put in what is the 1?? fields. We use rules 23 to 29 to find out what the other entries are that we should set. These rules say under the heading of …

constructing a heading Concise AACR2 rules tell us how to construct a heading for persons, corporate bodies, geographic names and uniform titles. We do not apply these rules unless we have to. Instead we look up headings in the LoC and copy the entries from there, because we are lazy.

actually we are not lazy One of the important functions of headings is to bring various names of the same thing together. Examples – Bob Dylan vs Robert Allan Zimmerman – Zimbabwe vs Rhodesia We want to find out what is the best way to name the entity.

headers involving names Names come as corporate names and as personal names. We first look here at personal names. Generally, we record works by an author under the heading of the author. We find the heading under in the LoC. If we dont find it we need to build a heading.

Here we can perform searches, to find authorized headings for names. Names are used in the ?00 and ?10 field for persons and corporate bodies. We only use the name as it is written in the Library of Congress record. Sample search Thomas Krichel is easy. Now search for pope John Paul II.

authorized heading personal name We click trough in the authority to the MARC record for the person and we find values in the 100 field for the authority MARC. We copy those into our MARC record for the item that we have cataloged. If we have copy-cataloged, we check the item. We check if the heading that we find for the name is a current heading. Example: Joseph Ratzinger

MARC subfields Transcribe them as you find them in the LoC record – $a is for the name in its authorized form. – $c are titles associated with the name – $b is the numeration – $d are the dates associated with the person – $q is the fuller form of the

Examples $a Hitler, Adolf $d $a Jesus Christ $a Confuzius $a Carter, Jimmy $d 1924-