Tuesday, January 22, 2013

The tedious task of fixing a card catalog.

So, amongt my many goals for the media center, we decided that one of them is to clean up our catalog.  When the catalog was switched from the standing cards to a digital format, some of the information about our books was missed.  We decided we are here for kids and our catalog needs to contain as much information as possible.  We are working diligently to get as much from the books as possible into our system.  It is a tedious process. We have started the process of typing the information from the index or table of context of our books and putting into the catalog.  We want kids to be able to type in the subject and see all of the books where it can be found, even if it is only one page.  Our hope is using less ILL and more of our own materials.  I have also started finding special links that relate as well and adding them to our catalog.  It is a long process, but we feel doing so will help our students with their various research needs, especially if they are required to get books.  Are we crazy for doing this?

Sorry for such a short post today, I am guessing most of the forthcoming will be a little shorter as I no longer have posts pre-written because this time of the year is crazy busy for me.

2 comments:

  1. How many books does your library have? I would love to fix/update our catalog but fear it would take an exceptionally long time. We have Alexandria which is not the most user friendly. Even something as simple as including genre in location is time-consuming.

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  2. We have about 300-400 books we have to do this to. We decided to focus mostly on the books the research papers are about. I think if we had to do 20,000 we would not even think about it.
    ~Jen

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