Cleaning up the Library's Catalogue

For the past few weeks I've been working on a major project: cleaning up the library's catalogue. It started as a fairly minor project. When signing items out for a patron, I noticed that a few items had really odd loan lengths (a book was only loaned for one week, while a video was loaned for three).

In each cataloguing record, there's an entry that tells our circulation program what type of item it is, and how long it should be loaned for. The items in our catalogue fall into a few categories: general collection, adult video collection (being consolidated with juvenile video collection), reference, periodicals, etc. So one by one I've been opening a list of all items in a particular category.

These lists includes the title and author of the library's materials, but also the information that's on the item's spine label (which would look something like "ANF 054.35 JAC") So I can scan down the list looking for things that don't belong (such as a video in the periodical list). I fix the item, then move on.

While doing this quick fix, I stumbled on some other problems. Some items in our collection have screwy entries for the spine label information. Because spine labels on books are just there to help patrons find books on the shelves, they're only supposed to include three capital letters to indicate the author. A few of them had extra punctuation (L'CA), more than three letters (MACK), or a mix of upper and lower case (McL or Mcl). As a result, I expanded my catalogue clean-up to fixing the spine label information in the records.

And I continued on my merry little way. ...until I found another recurring error. Some records had information in the wrong fields. To many people, it probably doesn't matter that much whether the call number prefix is in field 852$h or 852$k. But the programs we use at the library require that information in the right fields to parse it properly. If a staff member wanted to see a list of all the adult paperbacks in the library, many items would be left out because "APB" was in the wrong field. So I expanded my fixing operations. I worked away at it until two days ago. I'm not done, but I became extremely tired of switching back and forth between programs fixing the same things on many records.

The whole time I was doing my "minor" fixes, I kept thinking about the larger picture of the library's catalogue. I saw a lot of poorly entered records and annoying cataloguing practices (many records are entered in all capital characters for instance). In addition, there are some records that are simply incomplete (they include little more than the title and author of a work). As a result, I took a break from my fixing operation and moved onto the overhaul.

Before I started, I had a series of talks with Sharon about what our catalogue should look like. Now, there is an official standard called AACR2 that outlines how things should be done. Unfortunately, AACR2 is often less than helpful for real world use. As a result, Sharon and I talked about a number of topics, all related to standardizing entries the library's catalogue. We also discussed updating our catalogue records (replacing an obsolete MARC tag with a newer one for instance.)

On Thursday evening, I started at the final item of an alphabetical list of the library's materials: a ZZ Top CD. I opened the cataloguing record, fixed the errors, standardized some fields, saved it, and moved onto the next record. I worked on it for maybe an hour and a half yesterday, and around two and a half hours today.

I'm going to be at this for a very long time folks. Our library has approximately 36000 items. The last record I finished today was 344th in the list. I'm less than 1% done. At the rate I'm going (rounded down a bit, it's approximately 60 records per hour), it'll take me nearly 600 hours to finish.

So if you see me staring intently at a list of library items on my monitor, clicking and typing intermittently, please take a moment and say a brief prayer to the deity of your choice on my behalf.