Cataloguing Potpourri

A couple of interesting items for discussion have come across various listservs lately. So, while many of you may have seen the following items, I thought I’d post them for those who haven’t.
Article of Interest
After losing users in catalogs, libraries find better search software
This is an article by Marc Parry in the Chronicle of High [...]

Aboriginal Peoples in Canada – LAC’s Canadian Subject Headings Announcement

August 2009 – Announcement from Library and Archives Canada (LAC)
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) initiated a review in 2007 of the terminology used in Canadian Subject Headings (CSH) to identify Aboriginal peoples in Canada. A LAC proposal to change these headings was posted on several discussion lists for comment. To recap, the proposal was to [...]

Recommended Reading

I’ve been waiting for the arrival of our newest professional collection title The Power to Name by Hope A. Olson. Hope was my cataloguing professor in graduate school. I have read other books by Hope, including Subject Analysis in Online Catalogs, and I find her writing comprehensive and interesting.
The summary reads as follows:
The [...]

Contextualizing Subject Access Across Digital Collections

This is a bit old (2006) but Joseph Dalton’s presentation on Contextualizing Subject Access Across Digital Collections is still a useful resource to go through. When I reviewed it, it sparked some thinking on my part as to how I can apply Mr. Dalton’s ideas to our non-digital collection. I’m always interested in professionals discussing [...]

“We want to look for concepts, but we are forced to search for words”

This quote is from my old Online Retrieval textbook by Geraldine Walker and Joseph Janes. 

I’ve been rereading this textbook to reacquaint myself with the theory behind information classification and retrieval.  I’m really enjoying the discussions on the intangible nature of information, information organization and why technology cannot replace the service that information professionals provide.  [...]

Cataloguing Graphic Novels and Graphic Non-Fiction, Part I

I thought I’d write about cataloguing graphic novels and graphic non-fiction today. This is an issue that was raised in our department recently and involved the addition of subject headings to our records to identify fiction and non-fiction graphic novels. In other words, what do we put in the $v of the 650 field.
Before I [...]