Two more visits

My supervisor was out for the first two days of the week, and I had two more visits with other staff in the cataloging department.

One was with someone who, amongst other duties, handles the automated reports the cataloging system generates when authors are added to the catalog for the first time. These reports are designed to allow the maintenance of the catalog to make sure that authorized names are used and no duplicate names are accidentally created. It was a nice insight into the processes used to prevent accidental corruption of the catalog during the cataloging process without requiring a lot of careful, and often needless, upfront work during cataloging. It also allows for mass loads of data without upfront manual verification of every record.

The other visit was with a serials cataloger. This was particularly interesting as I'd had little exposure to serials cataloging before. The major differences between serials and monographs that I observed were:
* the use of the CONSER guidelines rather than straight AACR2. CONSER's manual provided needed elaboration on the AACR2 guidelines to make them more useful and specific to serials.
* the focus on relationships to other records. This is required to track title changes, publisher changes, corporate author changes, and the like. These relationship and changes were expressed in the Notes fields (5xx) and in specific fields for relationships (7xx).
* Subject headings tend to be pretty broad as a serial will tend to cover a broad subject area over the course of their lifetime. While specific entry would mean many monographs would have a more specific subject than "biology", for some serials that broad a subject heading is entirely appropriate as anything more specific would exclude some articles.

We also discussed the differences between serials and integrating resources and the issues faced in cataloging print serials in conjunction with online serials. Online serials often use different numbering, or lack numbering all together, which can render cataloging them difficult in conjunction with their print versions.

Those were my last two visits for now. I may visit other people later in the summer, but for now I should focus on cataloging again now that my supervisor is back.