This morning I had a meeting with my capstone supervisor at the Dell Medical School library, and she informed me that I will have to use MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) rather than Library of Congress when creating records for the library’s materials. This slightly terrified me because I have no knowledge of medical jargon…so today I decided to focus on becoming familiar with MeSH and also brushing up on LCSH because subject headings are a pretty important part of creating a quality bibliographic record.
- I first located the most important and useful resource for becoming familiar with MeSH: the MeSH database on the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s website. It’s super helpful and it very clearly outlines the MeSH hierarchies, which I imagine I’ll become more familiar with as I begin cataloging for my capstone project.
- NLM also offers a pretty lengthy MeSH online training made up of eight modules, which I completed. Learning the structure of MeSH is honestly kind of like learning a new language, which is unfortunately not one of my great skills in life. The subject headings are broken down into “descriptors” and “qualifiers” and each of these has rules for when they are used and how they are used together. The modules were pretty good at walking me through these rules and had test questions at the end of each module which made me feel like I was making good progress. Most helpful though, was the MARC coding sections:
This week’s biggest challenges:
Some of the training modules I worked on this week were a little overwhelming, because I am so unfamiliar with medical terms and it’s a totally different vocabulary from what I’m used to. Exhibit A:
So I actually did some searching on a couple of librarian subreddits to see how much medical knowledge a medical librarian needs to perform cataloging and reference. It was nice to know that there’s a whole “community of practice” out there for librarians in general, and that I wasn’t the only one concerned about dealing with an unfamiliar subject. Most of the medical librarians who chimed in said they did not have a prior medical background, and MeSH seems to be one of the only big differences between working in a public library and a medical library.
Honestly one of the biggest challenges so far as I’ve been immersing myself into the cataloging world is…information overload. Between MARC, RDA, MeSH, LCSH, I am taking in soooo much information. I’m now trying to prioritize what I should actually know for the kinds of tasks and jobs I may be doing not just for my capstone project, but also in the future.
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