Monday, June 8, 2009

Cataloging - Worrying about the details

Little nitpicky things I got to worry about today while cataloging:
  1. Copyright renewal dates - If a book that says it was originally copyrighted in 1972 includes a copyright renewal date of 2000, should it be cataloged on a record that uses the 2000 date or the 1972? According to LCR 1.4F6, it belongs on a 1972 record, because copyright renewal dates for works first copyrighted before 1977 are ignored. I waded through a few archived AUTOCAT posts to confirm this as well.
  2. Author cutter for Theo. LeSieg - Dr. Seuss's real name was Theodor Geisel. He used the name LeSieg when he wrote books to be illustrated by others. The cutter number used on the book I was cataloging was G276, which appears to be based on Geisel rather than LeSieg. Not sure why that is, but it was assigned by LC. I decided to just go with it, since we've got other LeSieg books that use the G276 cutter. One of these days I'll figure out why it was cuttered for Geisel when the authority record is for LeSieg.
  3. PS8615 in an 050 field - I at first thought that the punctuation and subfield coding for this call number was badly done, but then I realized it was probably a Canadian classification number than someone just copied and pasted into an 050. It doesn't fit into the section identified in Classification Web as being for Canadian literature (PS8001-8599), but the original record was created by the National Library of Canada, and that call number was exactly what was in the 055. So, I got to build a new one.
  4. 050, 2nd indicator 4, not checked against LC's shelflist - 050 2nd indicator 4 is an LC call number assigned by an agency other than LC. I'd love to be able to assume that these call numbers have been checked against the LC shelflist, but, alas, this is not always the case. Usually, I probably won't find out if the call number is off unless someone reports the problem to me later on, since I don't often check call numbers. Today, I identified one because it was a PZ7 call number with a very short first cutter number. Many PZ7 call numbers have extremely long first cutter numbers, because there are so many authors that must be alphabetically arranged in a very small space. In this case, the cataloger who assigned the call number used the cutter table to create the cutter and then never bothered to check it against LC's shelflist. I fixed the call number, but as many as 300 libraries may have used this incorrectly cuttered number. This kind of thing annoys me.

Numbers 3 and 4 aren't really nitpicky things, not to my mind, but I'm sure the entire list would make most normal people twitchy.

1 comment:

  1. oooh, you're messing with my books again (in a good way)

    ReplyDelete