Cataloging and Organizing Digital Resources: A How‐To‐Do‐It Manual for Librarians

Citation

Trickey, K.V. (2006), "Cataloging and Organizing Digital Resources: A How‐To‐Do‐It Manual for Librarians", New Library World, Vol. 107 No. 3/4, pp. 165-168. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074800610654961

The introduction to this volume does not state the intended audience for the work, it does let you know about the content. This is a wise move. You can tell from the title (spelling of cataloguing) that this is an American work, published simultaneously by Facet and Neal Schuman in the USA. The Stateside origin is evident in the use of terminology this includes current classics such as deduplication and disambiguation.

The sequence of the work is: basic differences exhibited by digital resources, the cataloguing work flow, a look at alternatives to traditional cataloguing, online bibliographic control, we then move into the cataloguer's section which contain worked and annotated examples of e‐books and manuscripts, e‐journals and periodicals in aggregator databases, online integrating resources. The volume closes with a brief chapter on “trends to watch”.

The lay out of the book is good, it is large format with good size print (no need for my glasses!) with clean white space to the left margin, this allows for the inclusion of helpful text boxes that contain clarifications, definitions or amplifications of terms in the text, this removes the requirement for a separate glossary. The work also contains an attractive index, that when linked to the analytics on the contents page makes the work delightfully easy to navigate.

Before taking a closer look at the contents of this work, it is important to review the overall orientation of the work. It will work well as a background text on this rapidly changing area of bibliographic activity. It will work best as a practical guide if you are a working cataloguer using OCLC to create your bibliographical records and have been asked to start working with online material. All the examples are based on OCLC practice current at the time the book was put together. Although the title includes the term “digital” we have no mention of non‐online digital resources such as music, graphics or film. The addition of the word “online” to the title would have made this clearer.

In compressing the massive array of information that is helpfully reviewed in the opening chapters a level of confusing simplification creeps in, the brief introduction of the Dublin Core could have been more usefully handled if the underlying ambiguity about new and traditional approaches to the articulation of data had been clearer. There is almost an underlying sense that the AACR2 / MARC 21 are past their sell by date, but they had to do the OCLC bit to make the book viable! The opening chapters are useful in that they identify the challenges that these new formats present, in terms of the larger bibliographic services context of managing the resources.

Being a cataloguing nerd I was most interested in chapters 5 to 9 as they deal with the hands on cataloguing stuff. This is where the UK non‐OCLC practitioner may struggle as the work deals with a fullness of record that is not (yet) that common in the UK and has certain imbedded assumptions running (i.e. using the MARC 21 holdings format) that may not be the case in UK practice. That said, you get clearly articulated examples with notes that make it evident as to why a particular route has been followed. It is helpful to have the OCLC version of MARC 21 to hand to follow up details. You find the use of consistent phrasing in the detailing of bibliographic records. For example in dealing with the fixed field 008/22 “Target audience is left blank. This is an optional field that tends to be used primarily for juvenile materials” is the form of words used each time. Initially this annoyed me as I assumed learning had occurred and I would have accepted that from its previous appearance. However, I was not taking account of a cataloguer dipping into the work and sampling specific chapters.

Chapter 5 (Understanding cataloging rules and guidelines) serves as an introduction to the display of the “black art” that follows and makes reference to expected areas like AACR2 and MARC 21 but also mentions PCC (Program for Cooperative Cataloging), CONSER and LCRI (Library of Congress Rule Interpretation). For well informed OCLC cataloguers this is fine, however for lesser UK mortals a brief paragraph on the myriad delights of Catalogers Desktop (a continuing online resource from the Library of Congress) which gives you access to this material and so much more would have been a useful way to indicate that this information was readily available.

The concluding chapter, which should gently lead us to gaze at the digital horizon, is slightly disappointing as it wanders through open access and FRBR (Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records) yet does not articulate any guidance for coping with the brave new world that is heading our way!

I enjoyed this book despite my gripes. It does provide well worked and justified examples of current cataloguing practice in this evolving area of work. It will be useful for students as the opening chapters give the context for the management of electronic resource and the series of examples provide guidance to the cataloguing newcomer as to how this material should be approached.