Another week gone by

Another week has passed, and it's time for another blog entry to keep up on what I'm doing. Toward the start of the week, my supervisor and I sat down and cleared up the last issues in the backlog of cataloging problems that came up while she was at the ALA conference. One significant element that came up was the assignment of call numbers. Because call numbering is a classification system it can be tricky to specify a single number to represent the subject of a book. Is this book more about bicycles or traffic safety? It becomes a judgment call on the part of the cataloger, and not all catalogers will make the same judgments.

I also pulled a few more theses for cataloging in the future. I tried to keep to subjects that were interesting and that I also had some knowledge of. "Alpine Samurai", about samurai in the mountains of Japan, ought to be interesting and two others are computer science related which was my field before getting into library science and cataloging.

On Thursday I started with original cataloging for one book. But I think it makes sense to discuss that in a separate post.