Cataloging, Week 2: MARC, continued

This week I took my cataloging journey to the next level by learning to create my own (simple) MARC records. Yay! Here was my process…

1. I read through one of the Library of Congress MARC reference materials, “A Summary of Commonly Used MARC 21 Fields.” This thing is life-saving. It gives clearly outlined examples of the most common fields, which was a great jumping off point for me. Here’s an example of the 100 MARC field:

2. Utilizing my references, I then pulled up the MARC record from UT’s library catalog for a few common books. For my first one, I just filled out the most common MARC fields with information I had (author, publisher, title, etc.) and checked my entries with the book’s existing MARC record as I went along. I then made note of mistakes I was making as I compared my MARC fields to the existing record:

• I kept forgetting to include all of the information present on the cover of the book.
• Getting all the punctuation just right was also tricky.
• When I looked at the record I realized how many more fields I still needed to include. My practice records are waaaaay shorter than they would be in reality.

3. I also watched a quick YouTube video from OCLC about original cataloging. It was interesting just to see what the process looks like when creating records for WorldCat.

What didn’t work for me this week…

During the first part of class, I tried doing some RDA training modules from the Library of Congress but struggled to grasp what I was reading…I think they were meant for people who are already trained in cataloging or in AARC2, which I am definitely not. I decided I really needed to just start practicing and familiarize myself with common MARC fields and “learn by doing” rather than try to learn and memorize RDA rules.

This week’s accomplishments:

Overall, I feel relatively ready to put what I’ve learned about cataloging so far into real-world practice for my capstone project at the Dell Medical School library next week. My supervisor and I are selecting an open-source content management software and I feel somewhat prepared to start creating records for the collection I’m helping out with. Yay!

One of my mini-MARC records:

Compared with the complete one pulled from UT’s catalog:

I mean…gotta start somewhere.

Next steps…start creating bibliographic records for the books from my capstone project next week in class! I also want to familiarize myself more with Library of Congress subject terms, so I can accurately complete the 600 MARC subject fields.