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!