Library at BINcA

I was going to call this post “What MARC records mean to me” but the truth is I was inspired by the show What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck and that show is about looking both backwards and forwards. For me, there is no backwards in MARC records, only forwards. I only learned about them in the last 6 months! Dewey, on the other hand, has been with me since I first walked into a library over 50 years ago.
Like most of us learning to be librarians in this class, I suspect, I always loved libraries. I loved card catalogs and I loved walking the stacks at my university library, seeing which books were where. Before google searches showed related items, it often helped to find a book on the shelf and then see what was nearby to find more resources for a paper on Moliere, for example. Browsing was both fun and work because the Dewey Decimal System made sense up to a point. I remember using the card catalog in a way that is similar to how we search today: Try one subject term; if there are not enough hits, try another. See what else that author has written. Follow some leads.

The feelings conjured up by the reading of Allison Kaplan’s Catalog It! are a distillation of all the challenges of being a new librarian, plus some awe at the work that has gone into cataloging over the last 150 years in particular. Honesty here: I am middle aged and it is hard to be a newbie at anything. I am used to walking into most situations with a pretty good grasp on the steps and the material understanding to do good work. Trying to read this book is hard, so hard that I find myself highlighting sentences just because I understand them. I am grateful for the few tidbits I am gathering that will be helpful moving forward – like looking for genres in 655 of the MARC record and a better understanding of the Dewey Decimal System.
Mostly I am just happy that someone else, namely the experts at the Boston Public Library, are doing this for me. When I scan a new book into the system (Polaris), usually a MARC record pops right up. If it does not, I add the ISBN number, title and author to a spreadsheet which I share with Kelly at the BPL. She usually can add the MARC record into the system and, when I try again, it pops up just like the others. When that information is not enough, I put the book into the delivery box to her attention at the Central branch and then she creates the record while looking at the book in question. Kelly was quite surprised that we had to read this book and she assured me that she is happy to both do the work and answer any questions. Hurrah!
I know it’s possible that someday I will work someplace else where I might have to take more responsibility for the catalog. I’m glad to have worked my way through (most of) this text and I now have a sense of where to look for answers to cataloging questions. I also have a firmer grounding in the discussion of whether or not and how to genrefy a library fiction collection. I can see how the context matters. My library is like a one room schoolhouse. It would needlessly clutter things to split the fiction into genres. Better to highlight certain books and use displays to make connections. If I worked in a larger library or in a school with mostly English speaking students, my choices might be different.