Catalogers on the Reference Desk

To start the post this week, I would like to start with a quote from Autocat, the cataloger’s discussion listserv:

There is no question that technical services librarians who serve on the reference desk often come back with a great idea or two for improving entries in the catalog. Where the unfairness lies is that reference librarians are not expected to do the reverse. A better knowledge of cataloging would be a huge benefit to reference librarians and yet, while you see many technical services positions advertised that require evening and weekend hours on the reference desk, how many reference positions do you see advertised that require cataloging knowledge and experience? I am willing to bet that if you go to a library jobs site right now and check the first few reference position openings, you are unlikely to see even one that requires a contribution in technical services. It's a double standard. I suspect that this is the reason why many good catalogers will not apply for positions that require reference work.

OCLC WorldCat Quality Report

My job as a cataloger (as you probably know) requires me to use OCLC’s WorldCat daily, through the Connexion Client. For you intrepid readers that skimmed that jargon-heavy first sentence, allow me to explain. WorldCat is the largest bibliographic database in the world - meaning that it has more catalog records in it than any other database. It is where I start when I catalog a book, as well as where I do the majority of my work. As we are an OCLC member library, we are expected to contribute records (and update our holdings) for every item we have in the library collection. As you can imagine, in the course of cataloging items in the collection, I come into contact with records of a wide array of quality, from very minimal level records, to records that (to me) seem to have too much information in them. There is truly no standard level of quality in the WorldCat database, and even records indicated to be of the best quality are often not exactly that. When my colleague Penny Baker at the Clark posted this tweet recently (in her usual humorous style), I came across OCLC’s report on the quality of records in the WorldCat database.