It was really nice to be able to attend an NCLA conference again — one of my music conferences, as it happens, has been held at the same time for years. I attended a session on RDA, the new cataloging standard recently beta-tested by LC. Christee Pascale of NCSU gave a very helpful, concise reprise... more ›
I’m a bit late in writing up my report about the 2011 ALA in New Orleans, because I’ve been trying to find the best way to explain a statement that profoundly affected my thinking about cataloging. I heard it at the MARC Formats Interest Group session, which I chaired and moderated. The topic of the... more ›
Today, Erik, Carolyn, Lauren C, Derrik, Alan Keely, Leslie McCall, Steve Kelly, Beth Tedford, Mark McKone, Linda Ziglar, Jean-Paul and Chris B. attended the first of a two part NISO seminar on RDA. The webinar gave a good overview of FRBR and how RDA facilitates the creation of records following the FRBR metadata model. Rorbert... more ›
I’m back from another Music Library Association conference, held this year in Philadelphia. Some highlights: Libraries, music, and digital dissemination Previous MLA plenary sessions have focused on a disturbing new trend involving the release of new music recordings as digital downloads only, with licenses restricting sale to end users, which effectively prevents libraries either from... more ›
The second keynote of the morning was Dianne Hillman – she talked about collaborations between programmers and catalogers. Dianne dated her career by showing us a few tools that I remember from my early time as a librarian (Cord catalog rods and a card filer)! I wonder what that says about the pace of change... more ›
I have to admit that I have some conference fatigue. Back to back conferences can make it tough to focus so to combat fatigue I decided to pick and choose sessions on a whim on Saturday. I saw some interesting talks on book reading clubs that dovetailed nicely with an NPR piece I heard last... more ›
It’s not often that you go to a conference and have a major realization about the need to re-organize how you do your work and how your library functions, but I did at this year’s ALA. Through the course of several sessions on RDA, the new cataloging code that is slated to replace AACR2, I... more ›
Music librarians are inured to battling winter weather to convene every year during February in some northern clime (during a Chicago snowstorm last year). So it was almost surreal to find ourselves, this year, at an island resort in San Diego in March (beautiful weather, if still a bit on the chilly side). Despite the... more ›
On Oct. 30, Leslie attended a webinar hosted by OCLC, detailing OCLC’s preparations for the soon-to-be-released new cataloging rules, RDA (Resource Description and Access), which will succeed AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules), the standard that has been in place for the last 30 or so years. A poll of webinar attendees, posing the question “How is... more ›
Earlier this afternoon, Lauren C., Leslie, Patty, Chris, Jean-Paul and I attended (watched? listened to? whatever) a NISO Webinar called Bibliographic Control Alphabet Soup: AACR to RDA and the Evolution of MARC. The program consisted of three presentations related to RDA and the future of the MARC format. The first speaker was Barbara Tillett, the... more ›