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I represent the technical services department for a large Colorado school district (132 schools, 80,000+ students). We provide cataloging, retrospective conversion, automation software technical support, and library automation "how-to" consulting services to the media centers in our district. In the face of budget cuts, our district has forced us to operated on a break-even, for-fee basis ... charging fees for every item we process/catalog. Once again, this year we are being asked to justify our jobs. QUESTION: How do school districts, public, and academic libraries justify cataloging staffs now that bibliographic records are available so cheaply from book vendors? Many of you must have been dissapointed in the quality of this type of cheap data. Even LC is not immune to mistakes. Our job is to catch those errors, provide quality original cataloging and catalog the great quantity of Audiovisual material for which cataloging is difficult to find. CIP data is often inaccurate, and many of our media specialists don't have the time or the experience with MARC it takes to produce a full record. We even keep a file of "LC Bloopers" with such gems as a bumble bee book with a mammals call number, an LC cataloger's initials and notes listed as a subject heading, a riddle book classed with folk dancing, and our favorite, a book on Wisconsin Cranberries with a Dewey number for Kola Nuts with Fleas! :-) Then there are incorrect ISBNs, typos, spelling errors, etc... which drive us crazy as catalogers. (Yes, we know we are a strange breed anyway.) ?8-) Database clean-up is just not something our LMSp have time to do. They want to work with kids, not MARC records. That's where my staff of detail-oriented, MARC-loving catalogers and clerks come in. We want to provide support, giving our Media Specialists the time and tools they need to teach. They are being forced to buy fewer books to pay for processing or settle for a higher degree of database pollution. Soon, they may not even have that choice. How do we convince administrators of the importance of "clean" data? Please respond to me directly at toyokura@CSN.org and I'll do my best to post a HIT>. Thank you in advance. Vanessa Toyokura toyokura@csn.org LibraryData & Automation Services, Jefferson Co. Public Schools, Colorado (It's not a typo :-) our LibraryData is one word)