Seeing the Finish Line

I apologize for not posting last week. I completely forgot and then didn't realize I forgot until today! I think this speaks for how busy I am this semester. I titled this entry seeing the finish line because I am finally seeing the end of the cataloging portion of this practicum project and I am seeing my graduation date just around the corner as well!

D. The past two weeks have again been spent mostly cataloging. I have officially finished all of the books and videos at the Child Developmental Services office and now only have the brochures at the CDSA and the remaining resources at the Family Support Network office in Huntersville. Also I was informed this week that there are two more filing drawers full of brochures to sort through as well. As I look at the resources I am not weeding out books or videos that are too old, because I feel that that would not be a good judgement call for me to make, however I am making decisions about the brochures, which is often harder because many lack publication dates so it is hard to tell if they are current or now. Many of the older brochures (especially the ones with newer versions) I have permission to toss. By the end of next week hopefully I will have all the cataloging done and a very large pile to take to be recycled.

This week I also had a meeting with my site supervisors about the physical space of the resource room. Although my supervisors want to create a larger resource area by appropriating part of the lobby space the county has nixed that idea and the library will be housed in its current location which is a room about 10ft by 10ft. I told my supervisors that I would need at least an additional bookshelf (bringing the total to 4) some bookends and shelf labels to complete a bared-bones library set up. They already moved in the extra bookshelf and bought the bookends, however I still need to look up a company to buy shelf labels from.

E. Overall these past two weeks have been very much "business as usual." I spend much of my actual hours cataloging materials, which I will admit can get boring after doing it for 3 hours straight. I am looking forward to being done with the cataloging and moving on to the organizing and creating the instruction manual. I am a little worried about being done by the end of April. I know Dr. Bird said just to do my best, and that giving FSN a list of their materials was better than nothing, but I am not good at leaving projects half finished so I hope to work my butt off to get this all done in the next month.

AL. It is hard to say what I learned these past couple of weeks. I am still learning just how long it takes to catalog things. And I am learning that a lot of good information is missing a lot of metadata about it. For example I found a video today called "Today's Child" And that was it. No other information on the label. I don't have a VHS player to even play it to see what it is, and I don't think I have time to watch it either. So I just cataloged it with the title. But this experience is making me want to label all of my resources at home a lot better. It is making me thankful that my husband created a great labeling system for our pictures and files that we have stored on our computers so I have a lot of metadata about each picture, just by its location and file name.

More Cataloging :)

D. This week I went on Monday up to the Huntersville Family Support Network office, where they keep a lot of their resources. I spent Monday morning cataloging those resources. Most of the resources were fairly straight forward books, however I cataloged my first CD-ROMS and training packets. I also had to email my supervisors to ask for some clarification on some items. For example, there were some magazines called Exceptional Parent, and I looked at these and noticed that they were thematic issues, so I was wondering if I should catalog each issue individually or catalog the magazine as one item. (My supervisor and I talked over this issue today and decided that I would catalog each issue individually, although I haven't actually gotten to that part yet). There were some other issues about out-dated catalogs and other things as well.


Then today I went to the normal FSN office and continued my cataloging work. I finished the first set of resources from the CDSA, and started on the second (smaller set). I again took more resources home to catalog from home. Sandra and I also talked about a time line of where we are going from here. My goal is to finish cataloging all the resources by early April so I can have a few weeks to do the physical organization and also to create the manual on how to use their catalog in LibraryThing.
E. Overall I felt accomplished this week to finally have completed at least one milestone in terms of cataloging. There is just an overwhelming amount of resources to catalog and I am beginning to realize how much stuff their is.
AL. I am learning a lot about this subject area of early childhood, and childhood disorders. For example today I learned that there is a distinct difference between speech skills and language skills. Speech is actually being able to say words while language is choosing the correct words and knowing what they mean. I am also learning just how time consuming cataloging is.

I hope to keep cataloging a lot more and put in a lot of hours over the next couple of weeks

More and More cataloging

D. Today I essentially spent my entire time cataloging and adding more resources into the FSN collection. The process has become fairly streamlined, especially since I can input most of the bibliographic description of each book straight from Amazon.com or Library of Congress into LibraryThing. The longest part is decided on what tags to use as subject headings. For that I have to skim the back cover, inside flap, and table of contents. I was also briefly called into a meeting today to present a short tour of the FSN collection on LibraryThing to all 4 of the FSN staff.
E. I still wish I was working faster at cataloging. I have entered in 130 records into the catalog. I think I am getting faster with the books, but the pamphlets are still taking a while because I have to enter them by hand. Also I looked at my time sheet and I need to start increasing the hours I work on this project each week. I am still taking books home to catalog from home. And next week I will be going in two days to catalog.
AL. It is hard to say what I learned this week. I feel like I am gaining knowledge of early childhood, parenting, and childhood disorders through all of the resources I am looking at about those subjects. I think I am also improving on my skills in terms of picking good subject headings and knowing when to create new ones.

This week has been very busy in other areas of my life, I have been working more hours at work and we are in the process of buying a house which is also stressful.... so hopefully next week will be calmer, but honestly I doubt it. :)

Catching up on Cataloging

I apologize for not posting last week. Time seemed to get away from me. So this week's post will talk about both last week and this week. Both weeks were very much the same.


D. Essentially I have spent both of the past two weeks entering books into the Family Support Network's LibraryThing catalog. I have worked some at the office and have brought books home both weeks. I have entered books, pamphlets, and booklets so far. Some can be entered using data from amazon.com or Library of Congress that LibraryThing automatically imports into your record, but most I have had to enter manually. For each record I obtain all of the basic bibliographic data about the book and then also enter in "tags" to create subject access points. To figure out what tags go with the resource I either skim through it, or look at the table of contents, and examine the Library of Congress' Cataloging in publication data on the copyright page if there is any. I am trying to only use terms for tags that are in this subject heading list, or taxonomy that I created a couple of weeks ago with the input and advice of my FSN and CDSA supervisors. So far I have entered in around 70 resources.

E. Overall I have not been impressed by my cataloging speed. I feel like I am going very slowly and because there are so many systematic details to follow in format and content I hope I am not making too many mistakes. I am also going slowly because I am enjoying these resources too much. I really just want to stop and read all of them. Some are these great children's books about kids with disabilities or normal fiction books about a child with down syndrome. I hope to pick up the pace in the future.

AL. I know as I catalog these materials I am learning a lot about children's health and development. I also learned how to create Spanish typing when outside of Microsoft word, for example how to type a "é" or an "ó". I learned how to do this because some of the resources I am cataloging are in Spanish and the keyboard shortcuts that I learned (from the Internet) seem like the best way to type in Spanish without trying to translate the entire LibraryThing website into Spanish (which you can do, but then I would have a really hard time reading it all).

I am looking forward to continuing my cataloging!

Setting up Our Catalog - From Feb 18th

D. Previously I had created a subject heading list of terms to use to catalog the resources with. My three supervisors had comments on my terms so I spent a good hour revamping the list and creating one hopefully authoritative list. LibraryThing also has some synonyms that are tags are all come up when either one is searched so that is helpful too. Then I officially set up the FSN catalog on LibraryThing (check it out here: http://www.librarything.com/profile/FamilySupportNetwork). I entered the in the basic organizational information and set up the collections. The library will have 3 collections: FSN, Children's Developmental Services collection, and a wish list collection. Then I started cataloging. I already had my game plan set of what information I was going to put in which of the librarything blocks (Since we are modifying some and codifying some). For example in the comments section the only two things in that section will be the location of the resource and if it is available. In the private comments section will be the information about if it is checkout who has it and when it was checked out. I got through cataloging six books, and then I took a box of materials will be home to catalog as well.
E. Yesterday was so exciting! I created a product that is live online and that anyone can see I progress has been made. So it felt really good to get started cataloging.
AL. As I cataloged the first six books I realized that I was going really slowly because I wanted to get a real feel for what the book was about and therefore categorize it accurately. So I feel like I learned more about my strengths and weaknesses as a cataloger and how long this might really take me