Circulation and Cataloging

Today I got further into the circulation end of things, mostly because there is a shared circulation/reference desk at the Waltz Library. I think that there are a lot of benefits to having this kind of arrangement. First of all, it provides one point of contact for the public. As a result, the staff have to be somewhat cross-trained, which in my case, gave me a more complete picture of how the library operates. I feel this is lacking at DU, where my separation leaves me at a disadvantage, or having to refer people to circulation when I can't answer their question. Economies of scale play a role in this, but it certainly underscores the logic of information commons and the like.

The second benefit derives from the first. It is that students and faculty don't have to walk around a particular library to get all of the information that they need. The Waltz Library naturally benefits from this already, with the exception of the audio/video materials, which are housed in a closed stacks arrangement. I'd suppose Raganathan would have a fit, but as far as the preservation of the materials (especially LP's) it makes a lot of sense to do it this way.

I was also given a lesson in cataloging, which I had been looking forward to, especially the importance of the uniform title in music cataloging. It seems that more so than any other genre, music has the most issues with publishing, be it with scores or sound recordings. It might be he fact that music is so widely distributed, over such a long period of time, that the composer sometimes loses authoritative control and works tend to take on lives (and titles) of their own. This is aggravated by the fact that so many composers and publishers use the form (sonata, trio, etc.), an accession number (i.e. opus 41, number 5) , and/or instrumentation to name a work. Makes for an exciting time, certainly.

That being said, I think that cataloging is somewhat underrated. It's importance is central to librarianship. The cataloger I spoke with described it as solving a puzzle, and when it is solved, you have a complete thing that people can use to actually find what they are looking for.

First Day!

So begins the first day. Aside from taking a few moments for setting this little blog up, I'm getting some training here at the Waltz Library for circulation, since it is a shared desk, as well as editing the questions for an in-class assignment for the 4th.

Since I'm pretty adept, with Innovative, I'm hoping the circulation work goes smoothly. However, it has been a while since I've used music directories, so I am spending some time today going over them, as well as revising some of the questions for the assignment. There's not a whole lot of complexity to music directories, but it's still somewhat easy to get lost in the weeds unless you have a process to go through. I also caught myself when I was having some trouble searching the Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts, until I realized the initial question only works for the online edition.

In any case, I'm editing the questions for the in class assignment, which is pretty exciting.