Tuesday, March 31, 2009

great trick

this is how it all comes full circle.
Jim asks a question on twitter, which gets me thinking about new uses for social networking.

just a couple of statements back and forth and my constant concern with bridging the old and the new leads me to add a simple 856 tag in the marc records of one of our non- fiction book club title, which is now an online venture in the form of a blog.

eat this! old stubborn OPAC!

I think it's pretty neat, if I may say so myself.

Now this:




Goes to this:







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Monday, March 30, 2009

a lot of lil' ramblings

I have skipped a few fridays, here is a bunch of stuff not to miss:


seth and job applications I love Seth...

DOW in perspective I love that...


WJ 23 things online summit
one of the best online event I attended.


Technologies and Savings
since I know there is never enough money, thanks Bobbi


real help for yous meetings (and mine)


Drupal resource list
from the LIB who always creates top notch resource lists


twitter advice
(i use twitter to listen in as smart people muse... it works for me)

from stephen, tech guy at staff meeting


new wireless device
smile


the coolest



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Monday, March 23, 2009

Monday, March 09, 2009

Monday musing

Was I wrong to send this out to all the staff at MPOW?


1st AN ANSWER________________________________
I got a question this weekend which seems to be asked on a regular basis in different forms so I thought I'd share some info on AV searches/finds in our catalog. There is no good way to retrieve sensible results in an AV search. Period. You can get full lists and good results by ITEM TYPES. That is it. You cannot reliably narrow by language, by fiction or non-fiction, you cannot get only comedies nor can you trust that a subject search on cookery will lead you to all our instructional videos on cooking. The best you can do is become more familiar with what our “good” marc for movies can look like (search burn after reading) and look at the marc tags which are specific to the type of items you are searching. Rating, Genre etc. Also, become more familiar with the copy cataloguing spreadsheet created for you in the \support_services\collection shared directory. It will give you a guide in what is consistent about copy data at MPOW. I can certainly give you some tricks but I am sorry to say, none to help the weekend gang who had an issue with non-fiction CD books.

THEN, A SOAPBOX STATEMENT ;)_______________________________________________
If you care to hear it, an editorial comment:
I do believe the source of our recurring problems with av searches comes in part from a generalized lack of respect for AV materials in libraries. It manifests itself in many not so subtle and a few very subtle ways. Everywhere (some) librarians complain about the lack of value, the high amount of work and all the other pains AV items bring, such as higher theft rates, fickle format sustainability etc...

One of the most obvious means libraries have discriminated against AV is thru cataloging (or lack thereof.) Possibly because we thought this was just a fad, we never extended the breath of our talent to standardizing and polishing the cataloging of AV materials.

To this day, in marc records, we mislabel actors as authors, we use the same term for any video format whether it's recorded on tape, dvd or only exists in the digital world. We hardly make use of any subject headings, (not consistently anyway) and that's only the tip of the iceberg... think of tv series and all the volume, episode names and other challenges we face there.

From this trend, locally, we also neglected to thoroughly think our call number prefix/suffix strategy AND WE NEVER CREATED DISTINCT cat1 or 2 (general type and audience) item type and location for the fiction/non-fiction materials which are AV. That goes for ALL our AV items, not just dvds, but also books on tape/CDs, language lesson with audio components, children's music etc... Look at any copy record for any AV item and you'll find a good example of inefficient use of multiple fields data entry. Too much repeating of the same entry in different fields…

LAST A POSSIBLE SOLUTION _____________________________________________
Our best (easiest) option would (will) be to create at least new LOCATIONS for these different items "types".
After all, currently, everything with various av TYPES all shows a location of AV. Audio books, music, movies, language and instructional videos etc...

You must remember that this is not unique to us, all libraries struggle with this.

See:
http://www.aadl.org/node/17414
how serendipitous...


Please let me know what questions you have.


sylvie (what-did-she-eat-this-morning?)

sylvie

"Change. Bring it."
-Laura Solomon, Library Geek Woes blog



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Friday, March 06, 2009

ramblings

Yep, another friday comes around...
here is some of the best of what I saw this week:

too cool:
mini golf at the library

creativity


Quintessential Godin:
be fedex, dont let me (sylvie) be "that guy"


and fresh off the wire:

Her name is Maureen Clements and she is a librarian for NPR.

I wanted to let you know about a new blog we've started at NPR for librarians called As A Matter Of Fact. We hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to share your comments, ideas etc. We'd love to hear them. You can also follow us on twitter under the moniker NPRLibrary.
Thanks so much. We look forward to seeing you in the blog-o-shere!
Maureen Clements
Librarian (and now blogger)
National Public Radio
635 Massachusetts Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20001



also, finally,
my bucklette came
I'm psyched. But wait, what flickr? "I'm the only person who has used "bucklette" as a tag."
...not for long I hope.

PS: I found bucklette reading the great Popgadget blog
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