The back story:
I work in a sixth form college in North East London. The students have a high prevalence of English as a Second Language and literacy problems. The college has existed for just seven terms and the library has under 5000 items.
The previous manager delegated all the cataloguing to the LRC assistants. During the college's short life they have had a high turnover of LRC assistants - estimates stand at around 10 different LRC assistants. The majority of these had no previous library experience. We still have an LRC assistant working here who has been here since the college opened and she can't recall having any training or being shown any guidance notes. About a month ago I found a notebook containing hand written cataloguing notes so some efforts were made to give guidance.
When I first arrived here in October I thought the problems were on the minor of inconsistencies with commas and capitalising, and unnecessary detail such as putting the title or author into the keywords. Slowly it dawned on me quite what a mess the catalogue. This was particularly resonant when we had training from the makers of the LMS and I felt embarrassed at being linked to it professionally.
My goal is that during my legacy from this role will be cleaning up the catalogue and preventing these problems in the future. I have already created and disseminated clear cataloguing training notes and put them in the staff shared drive (which I created when I realised that no such thing existed!). My manager only became aware of the depth of problems a few weeks ago and has prioritised the task of cleaning the catalogue up. She has also put a ban on paraprofessional staff cataloguing.
One of the most frustrating things is where people have followed someone elses mistake - so we had about nine Shakespearean texts all catalogued as 'Shekespeare'. Often staff have followed book publishers suggestions of keywords without questioning if it is is excessively detailed for our collection - leading to keyword such as 'Cooking With Meat and Game' in a collection with only about 40 cookery books.There are a lot of time period problems in terms of consistency of format (C1900 / 18th Century, 17C, 1600S, 1500s) and expressing accurately the item's content: '16th to 18th Centuries' is not an adequate keyword. And people creating a new keyword when an existing one would be appropriate (e.g. Business Presentation and Communications / Business Communications / Business Communication.)
Having run a report and reviewed the keywords used, the most glaring thing is that most keywords have only been used once. I'm now looking at this 112 page document and deciding where to start. My original plan was to go through from A to Z. Now I feel it would be better to focus on specific areas such as going through by each nation to cure problems such as one or two hit keyword entries for: British Army, British Artists, British Cinema, British Film, and so on by turning them into two keywords e.g. 'British' and 'Army'.
As I'm doing this I thought that I would share some of the things that make me feel like hitting my head on the wall. These are keywords that have honestly been inputted in our catalogue (they appear in this list in the format in which they were inputted):
The bizarre...
Being pursued
Being Yourself
History of Champagne
Moral Status of Animals
Contacting the Dead
The excessively detailed...bearing in mind our user group and size of collection
American History of Food
AIDS: social aspects (we only have 2 hits under AIDS at all)
18th century India
18th Century painters
African American poems
Biographies of notable atheletes
Obama's speeches
Advice on Careers & Achieving Success
Literature of Special Lesbian Interest
American Supermarkets
The vague...
Answers
Approaches
Arguments
Spelling mistakes...
Growing Ou
Shekespeare
Aging
Three different spellings of Al-Qaeda19th c china
Ciminals
Contemorary Art
Disctionaries
Much of the problem is using one keyword entry where two are appropriate...
A Level / AS / GCSE + subject
Nation + anything you can think of!
To multiple keywords to express the same principle..
World War 2, World War II, World War Two, Second World War, 2nd World War, World War 1939-45, European History: Second World War
Oh, the horror! That's even worse than you'd previously made it sound. You have my sympathies. Here's hoping that having the library to yourself this week means you can tackle this job with the aid of tea and cake!
ReplyDeleteThe spelling mistakes are the worst in my mind. It is very difficult to position yourself as information experts when you've got dictionary spelt wrong in your catalogue! I have made some progress but it is slow going.
ReplyDelete