lis512 lecture 8
access
description vs access
• There are two part to cataloging, called
description and access.
• The distinction between description and
access is peculiar to cataloging. It is not
encountered as such in other areas of
information organization.
• The origin of the distinction, like much of
cataloging, goes back to card cataloging.
description on a card
• In description, you describe the item.
• Basically, you create a card catalog for it. The
result is a description on a card.
• If you just have one card, that’s ok.
• But if you have several cards, you need to
determine how to have users find the cards
they may be interested in.
description in a database
• If you describe an item in a database table,
then, each item is a row in the database.
• Each, say, MARC subfield is a column in the
database (roughly).
• Thus users can search for something that
appears in fields using queries to the
database.
back to the card situation
• If you have a large number of cards, each
describing an item in the library, you can
arrange the cards in a box.
• What arrangement will you use?
• Typically, you will have to choose one criteria
to be the one you list things by.
example
• You are a car dealership. You want to prepare
a list of cars. You could list them by
– brand
– color
– price
– time they are sitting in the show room
– an attractiveness score made up by a random
customer
in a library setting
• In a library setting the criterion to list all items
in a library by is hard to find.
• Ideally, we would like to use order all our
items, by the criterion that users would like to
search for most frequently.
• But this criterion is not constant for each item
type. This is a serious complication.
definitions
• We call access point any criterion that allows
an alphabetic listing of items.
• We call a heading the value that is taken by
the access point for an item that we have in
our catalog.
• An catalog may have several access points.
• Accordingly an item may have several
headings.
• An entry is a MARC term for a heading.
main heading
• There has been a long-standing debate in
cataloging whether
– one access point is the main access point. In that
case, each cataloging record has a main heading,
or
– there is a range of access points, each of them is
treated equal. In that case all headings have the
same status.
• We follow MARC records to have a main
heading.
MARC entries
• MARC has the following sections
– 1??
– 6??
– 7??
– 8??
 “main entry”
 “subject access”
 “added entry”
 “series added entry”
• Within these you have
– ?00
– ?10
– ?11
– ?30
 “personal name”
 “corporate name”
 “meeting name”
 “uniform title”
finding the main entry
• We use rule 23A to determine the main entry.
• This will be put in what is the 1?? fields.
• We use rules 23 to 29 to find out what the
other entries are that we should set.
• These rules say “under the heading of … ”
constructing a heading
• Concise AACR2 rules tell us how to construct a
heading for persons, corporate bodies,
geographic names and uniform titles.
• We do not apply these rules unless we have
to.
• Instead we look up headings in the LoC and
copy the entries from there, because we are
lazy .
actually we are not lazy
• One of the important functions of headings is
to bring various names of the same thing
together.
• Examples
– Bob Dylan vs Robert Allan Zimmerman
– Zimbabwe vs Rhodesia
• We want to find out what is the best way to
name the entity.
headers involving names
• Names come as corporate names and as
personal names.
• We first look here at personal names.
• Generally, we record works by an author
under the heading of the author.
• We find the heading under in the LoC.
• If we don’t find it we need to build a heading.
http://authorities.loc.gov/
• Here we can perform searches, to find
authorized headings for names.
• Names are used in the ?00 and ?10 field for
persons and corporate bodies.
• We only use the name as it is written in the
Library of Congress record.
• Sample search “Thomas Krichel” is easy.
• Now search for pope John Paul II.
authorized heading personal name
• We click trough in the authority to the MARC
record for the person and we find values in
the 100 field for the authority MARC.
• We copy those into our MARC record for the
item that we have cataloged.
• If we have copy-cataloged, we check the item.
We check if the heading that we find for the
name is a current heading.
• Example: Joseph Ratzinger
MARC subfields
• Transcribe them as you find them in the LoC
record
– $a is for the name in it’s authorized form.
– $c are titles associated with the name
– $b is the numeration
– $d are the dates associated with the person
– $q is the fuller form of the
Examples
•
•
•
•
$a Hitler, Adolf $d 1889-1945
$a Jesus Christ
$a Confuzius
$a Carter, Jimmy $d 1924-