Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Intro to Cataloging for Non-Catalogers
This was the second course I took from WebJunction. It gave a brief explanation of the 4 different types of libraries and why library catalogs are needed. Cutter's Rules established in 1876 are still followed today: enable a person to find a book by author, title, or subject, show what materials a library has, and assist in the person choice by giving bibliographic information and character of the book. Card catalogs are pretty obsolete. Most libraries use OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogs). The main down side to that is that many people don't know how to use them and they are all different. The course then moves on to cataloguing which has 3 parts: descriptive cataloguing, classification and subject analysis. I found this course very interesting.
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Before I started taking LTA courses I was unaware of how many different catalogs there were now that libraries have moved on to OPACs. This might be a worthy course to take based on your description in order to find out exactly what they are.
ReplyDeleteI think this would be a good supplement to our Cataloging course at JJC. I must say that I much prefer the learning curve in using different OPACS than having to deal with the musty old card catalogs. Can you imagine having to type one of those bad boys out perfectly on a manual typewriter. Yikes!
ReplyDeleteI took this course as well and I found that there is much to learn about cataloging.
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