While cataloging, we were guided by the questions “how will users find this information” and “what purpose does this item serve our patrons?” Having these as our guides, it helped to develop subject headings, audience, and so forth. This did not solve our all our problems, just allowed us more time to resolve them.
Cataloging born digital resources (audiovisual, ebook, and audio) in RDA and MARC formats was not as seamless as we had expected, but the process became an important learning experience since most user resources are converting to a digital interface. Digital materials have been in use even before RDA and MARC21 standards were created, so it is surprising that the source lists from MARC 3XX and 6XX fields and RDA 3.XX fields do not include more relevant terms than two-dimensional moving image, sounds, or online resource. In this case, a podcast includes sounds, spoken word, and online resource so we assigned the media and carrier type fields to include multiple values. See the Policies section for more information on how and why 3XX and 6XX fields are important to this collection.
Assigning subject headings to the items was fairly simple since this collection’s purpose is to provide cat care, socialization, and education to patrons. LCSH offers a lengthy list of sufficient terms covering the general aboutness of what are cats and where they come from, and how to take care of cats. With the plethora of subject heading options, we focused on a handful of terms to keep in-line with the collections purpose. See the Policies section for more information on the policy implemented.
The podcast was the most difficult item to create records for so we will walk through the procedure in-depth here as an example of how we approached the encyclopedia, DVD, book, and ebook. The nature of podcasts is tricky since it is a fairly new resource that most libraries (it seems) have not widely adopted. It is born digital, commonly remote and online accessible, free, mostly non-commercial, and commonly created by small teams from independent media outlets. We found that credit and sourcing requirements (2.XX statement of responsibility and 19.XX) is not standardized like film or books, so while it’s very easy to credit the hosts/speakers, identifying the publisher, the producer, editor, website developer, etc. is challenging. It will be interesting to see how other libraries and archiving organizations choose to catalog and archive podcasts, since they are a cross between websites, software, and audio.
According to MARC source list, 007 Physical description for the podcast had to be labeled as “accessed remotely (streaming)” and “o” because podcasts are generally streamed or downloaded from online computer connections. This record assignment was mainly guided by Follett Community blog and OCLC’s Bibformat.
Coverage on statement of responsibilities, OCLC directed us to use 028 Publisher or Distributor in place of the standard 037 Source of Acquisition since a podcast is specifically an audio file.
We also used 260 Publication, Distribution, Etc. (Imprint) instead of the standard 250 Edition Statement because podcasts are like periodicals, always including a beginning and an open ended date as they constantly update (Follett Community). On the other hand we also decided to include 264 Production, publication, distribution, manufacture, and copyright notice since 264 is the preferred format for new AACR2 RDA cataloging.
300 Physical description was odd but we followed some tips from a Follet Community blog post and OCLC Bibformats for subfield assignments under the REC guidelines for $b digital HTML and MP3 files.
As mentioned earlier, LCSH provides a robust list about everything cats, but being diligent and efficient librarians, we narrowed down subject heading terms to those about cat care-taking, health, breeds, and general aboutness to illustrate how the collection’s items will give educational information to patrons looking to interact with cats.
We understood our user base approaching this collection already knowing that they’ll learn anything about cats, but it was more important on the level of information they need. An ebook introducing kids to cats will obviously offer friendly care-taking information while an serial podcast will give very specific cat stories in each episode. With that, we focused our policies on material type and physical characteristics since all objects in this collection cover similar generalized subject headings: from Cats--Health to Cats--Juvenile literature.
By assigning the objects by material type (3.XX) as the main access points, this allows users to find the resource that fit the context of their issue/question. These are elements that we included in both RDA and MARC records:
MARCHere are questions that we came up with after the process of creating records and implementing policies onto the collection: