Cataloging Standards
- Heather Baker
- Natalie Sommerville
- Leeda Adkins
Scope: Describes guiding principles for original cataloging and copy cataloging and touches on corresponding workflows.
Contact:Â Natalie Sommerville
Unit: Resource Description
Date last reviewed:Â Â
Date of next review: Â
Original cataloging
Our guiding principles for original cataloging are to follow Library of Congress-Program for Cooperative Cataloging standards and to contribute new and enhanced cataloging to OCLC WorldCat per these standards. Collections Services’ basic standard for original cataloging (including the upgrading of vendor and other minimal records) is the Standard Record as defined by the PCC. Our cataloging should be readily available and acceptable to other libraries, and follow the principles outlined in the Statement on Inclusive Description. Edits to local MARC metadata should be confined to the addition of administrative metadata, with corrections and additions to existing cataloging made in the national database as well as locally. See the policy on Use and Maintenance of Local Data for more information.
The principle of following LC-PCC standards commits Collections Services original catalogers to learning and applying a large corpus of data elements, instructions, and policies. New or early career original catalogers are trained and reviewed for at least six months, with the first three months being the most intensive. Thus, original cataloging represents a substantial institutional investment, not just in the time spent on each resource, but in the time that went into learning how to describe that resource.
Copy Cataloging and Cataloging from Vendors
Our guiding principles for in-house copy cataloging and for copy and original cataloging outsourced to vendors are to use LC-PCC standards to inform policies and workflows. By accepting copy and vendor records from a variety of sources, created over a long period of evolving standards, we build a catalog of records of varying degrees of completeness. The base standards are that the description should accurately reflect the work and that access points should be under authority control trough automated authority control services run against the library services platform.