Week 5

In looking at cataloguing I thought I knew it all, link before. But I found I was learning new things, such at the word access points. It makes sense that we have a descriptive word to for this process. In looking at the mother goose example the first thing that stuck out for me was the image of the book. We have this at my library under a service called title peak. It is a great product as sometimes the information provided by Follett doesn't always help, but the image can tell you a lot about the book when accessing it on the net. I signed up for this service as soon as I could and then a year later our district signed up all the schools for us.

Part of this lesson talks about NAP (naming access points) in how you search one to find a book.... but my complaint about Follett is just this. If you spell the name wrong the search will come up empty. When I teach my students how to search on Follett, I show them with a visual in the lab (they watch me), I tell/show them how misspelled words don't work, give them a number of examples and then I give them a worksheet to do. I purposely put  the "." in Dr. Seuss as the computer doesn't like it and watch them struggle, so they learn. I wish Follett was more like Google with the spelling errors.

In reading the article on library cards I can't help but remember the days of being a kid trying to figure out the cards how they worked and how poorly the TLs of the the day were that never actually taught this skill. We were left to figure it out on our own and it wasn't until I was in university and the net was now doing this task that I understood how a library worked....

I liked the section about the principles of a catalogue (taken from the UBC online article)

Enable the user to find a book of which the author, title, or subject is known.
	Show what works the library has by a given author, on a given subject, or in a given literature.
	Assist in the choice of book as to its edition or as to its character.

The following is cut from this week's lesson but I found it to be interesting how the standards are provided for the information on each book. The standards come from ISBD (International Standards Bibliographic Description). I just assumed that is how Follett was giving the info to me.

Area	Description
Area 1	Title and statement of responsibility (for example: author, editor, artist)
Area 2	Edition
Area 3	Material-dependent information (for example, the scale of a map or the duration of a sound recording)
Area 4	Publication and distribution
Area 5	Physical description (for example: number of pages in a book or number of CDs in the same jewel case)
Area 6	Series
Area 7	Notes
Area 8	Standard number (ISBN, ISSN)