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Tag: cataloging

12 Days of Cataloging: Festive Recent Additions to our Collections

Our Resource Description department is busy throughout the year cataloging books and other materials for our 21 branch libraries. This holiday season our catalogers shared a few delightful items that were recently cataloged, using the hashtag #12DaysofCataloging. Below is a round-up of all the titles we featured on social media.  Get ready for lots of pop-up books, castles and winter themes!  These fabulous books were compiled by staff members Heidy Berthoud, Lesley Parilla and Julia Blakely.

Increasing accessibility with the “MARC cocktail”

This post was written by Lesley Parilla, database manager and cataloger for the Field Book Project.

What is a library to do when it has fabulous materials to share with users, but making library records for each item requires significantly more time than a typical collection? This was the challenge of the Russell E. Train Africana collection. It contained materials with both broad public appeal and significant historical value, however content and formats varied widely. The library wanted to create records in the predominant library and archival description standards to assure that materials would be discovered by as wide an audience as possible. By using the library and archive standards, records could easily be shared across online platforms. The Libraries decided to pursue a short term project to see if they could determine a solution to these challenges.

Philatelic literature at the National Postal Museum Library

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Restored lobby of the National Postal Museum.

This post was contributed by Michael O’Connor, contract cataloger.

Directly across the street from DC’s Union Station is the spectacular 1914 neoclassical structure that houses the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum (NPM).  Since July of 2013 I have worked as a project cataloger on NPM Library’s Small Journals Project, an effort to catalog thousands of rare periodicals from the 1800s to the present.