Commercial records

[Linda Fox - Colonie High School <LFOX@CNSVAX.ALBANY.EDU>]

We stepped slowly into the automation world several years ago.
At that time we decided to subscribe to Bibliofile and we
retrieved most of our records from this source (over a long
period of time).  This gave us an opportunity (as well as the
responsibility) to look at each record before we downloaded it
into our database.  We made decisions along the way about subject
headings, tags, and DD#'s. (For example,we remove all "juvenile
literature" tags from our records - high school students do not
need to be patronized!)  Although this is a lot more work for us,
we have maintained a lot of control over our catalog.  When our
middle and elementary buildings are automated, I'm hoping that we
can go to central cataloging so that there is still someone on
our staff who knows our libraries who will be looking at the
records before they go into the database.

I don't know if I'll ever be comfortable letting someone else
have control over my cataloging.  I've often thought that jobber
cataloging diskettes were too good to be true. Now you have
confirmed that for me.

I am also concerned that as a profession, we need to be willing
to continue with those cataloging responsibilities. I worry that
if we allow others to do our cataloging for us, we may lose the
ability and/or the willingness to catalog information.
 The next step may be that
 we do not order materials from places that can't provide
cataloging. Pretty soon we have MacLibraries, all similarly
processed by Follett, B&T etc. There is something to be said for
consistency and uniformity in processing, but I prefer to see our
collections remain unique to the needs of our communities. I am
concerned that we verge on the edge of allowing the big guys, in
making their processing decisions, to also drive our selection
decisions. I'm not willing to give them that!

Linda J. Fox
Colonie High School Library          Internet: lfox@cnsvax.albany.edu
1 Raider Blvd.                       Voice:  (518) 459-1220 ext. 441
Albany, NY  12205                    Fax:    (518) 453-6126