Re: GEN:MARC RECORDS

[earl sande <sandes@AFSAT.COM>]

Listen closely, Superintendent.  Your District/State has invested a
significant amount of money into your libraries for which your parents,
teachers, and students expect a quality return in information.

Your library is ALREADY out-of-date.  You are already failing to provide
the information that is expected to fit the needs of the curriculum and
your school system.

Consider, if you will, that you ask your principal or guidance officer to
provide a list of the names of the students in a school and you get either
a hand-typed list that took hours to do or, worse, a computer printout that
contains a random mixture of student addresses, some zip codes, a little
bit of grades, and a few student names all of which are neatly labelled
"Students Names".

What has happened, of course, is that the records have not been correctly
entered or there is no common definitions for each of the fields used.

MARC, used throughout the world's libraries, provides such definitions for
information used by the library to provide efficient access to information.
 The field -082 is ALWAYS the Dewey Decimal Number.  The author field is
ALWAYS the author.

When your students enquire about a title, the title ALWAYS comes up.

What is the second reason?  Certainly you are aware of the remarkable
potential of the Internet and resource sharing.

I can, if I have previous arrangements, access a library in Washington
State through their sites, borrow materials, locate additional resources,
and a whole range of other services that libraries are increasingly asked
to provide but which, also increasingly, individual libraries can no longer
provide.

All such sharing and all future developments occur using the MARC system.
I know of no library that would even consider permitting me reciprocal
access without a commonly defined records system.

What may concern you is the initial cost.  Granted, there are a variety of
ways to develop the library's MARC records, some more expensive than
others.  Some computer catalog programs allow for retrospective cataloguing
using disks like Books in Print or the LCMARC records, others encourage you
to submit a list of items in your collection and they will provide the
records.

The question is whether it is worth it or not.  And, from my own experience
of some 30 years, a typical outlay of $10,000 for programs and records well
pays for itself in simply considering the man/woman hours required for a
paper catalog.  It well pays for itself in providing effective access to
information.  And, it says something when students return from a MARC-based
university library to thank the librarian that they were already familiar
with the computerized system when they arrived when others weren't.

Education, like a business, requires active support of practices that will
make the delivery more effective while, at the same time, cutting
unwarranted expenses.

Of course, the final argument :  when you go to the State Convention of
Superintendents and be able to brag, nonchallantly of course, that your
libraries are computerized using the high standards of the Library of
Congress (MARC!), while that "other superintendent" still is in the dark
ages........  That you libraries can interconnect with any library in the
world AND borrow materials, too.......   That your libraries are saving you
lots of money and getting rave reviews from parents, teachers, students,
and school board members.....  Don't you think it's worth it?

Earl

Earl Sande
Secondary School Librarian
International School of Tanganyika
Post Office Box 2651
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
(e-mail :  sandes@afsat.com)

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