Session: Teaching Cataloging to School Library Media Specialists
Education of Library Media Specialists Section
25 June 2006
Room 243, Morial Convention Center, New Orleans

The session was broken into two parts.  Alison Kaplan, a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware discussed changes in cataloging, and Dr. Elizabeth Haynes of the University of Southern Mississippi discussed cataloging of multimedia.

I’m very committed to cataloging and believe it is the foundation of librarianship.  It is just as important in the school library as it is in any other kind of library, because without good cataloging, the students don’t have the access they want and need.  Students deserve our best.

The handouts for the session will be available at http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/conferencesandevents/confarchive/aaslconference.htm soon.  (I checked today, and they’re not up yet.)  This write-up will be a paraphrase of the session, with my own comments in brackets.

Alison Kaplan’s part of the session was not specifically geared at SLMSs, yet was full of information that is important for practicing SMLSs and SLMSs in training.  It is important for school librarians to keep up with technology developments and stay involved, because otherwise the developments will be made without school libraries in mind.

Kaplan discussed quite a few things we use acronyms for, including FRBR, RDA, ISBD, and JSC.

Some places where school librarians and others can keep up with standard developments are:

http://loc.gov/cds/downloads/FRBR.PDF

http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/rdafaq.html

http://www.ifla.org/index.htm (ISBD)

Kaplan advises teachers of future librarians to “keep on top of the JSC” by letting the developer know the concerns of school librarians.  Will the standards be affordable for schools, with their tiny budgets?  This means the teachers of future school librarians also must keep up with the needs of the practitioners.  Teachers of future school librarians need to keep in mind that school librarians don’t necessarily need to be catalogers, but they do need to be intelligent consumers of cataloging.  Most school librarians will use pre-processed records from their bookjobbers, but they need to know enough about cataloging to be able to customize records for their location and to find and fix errors.

One way to be involved in the process is to take the survey at rdaonline: http://rdaonline.org/

The second part of the session dealt with the specifics of cataloging multimedia items.

One of the biggest things I noticed was a slight antagonism from the practitioners toward the presenters.  I wasn’t sure if it was from the fact that it was three days into the conference and people were getting tired or whether it is some ongoing discord between academics and practitioners.