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The ability to describe and analyse resources for a teacher librarian is crucial. This often-tedious task is relegated to staff within a school library who do not have an educational perspective in mind, which is the main perspective that users of a school library catalogue have. The usefulness of a library resource is linked to its ability to be located at the point of need. As the library users move through the five FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) tasks of finding, identifying, selecting, obtaining and exploring, their experience is affected by the organisation of the bibliographic records within the catalogue (Hider, 2018). In today’s modern school most users are accessing records remotely, the simple act of maintaining resource records to ensure that the electronic version of the text is included with the physical text record assists the users in finding the suitable resources for their needs.

Many catalogues use ‘lists’ to collate resources of the school library that will be useful for particular school assignments. Such lists allow the library staff to assist students and teachers by ‘pulling’ together resources for an assignment easily, so that students do not have to comb shelves or the catalogue individually to locate relevant resources. Although many may argue that this is not teaching students to use the catalogue effectively, some feel that this simple act ensures students locate and use published reputable information from books and hence become aware of the ease of locating quality information within a published text versus online scrolling. Inclusion of subject terms that reflect why a resource was purchased in the first place ensures that it remains useful when a specific ‘list’ or assignment is no longer relevant.

A well-maintained library catalogue that has been constructed with a curriculum focus ensures that purchased resources are not only useful but are used by the patrons they were purchased for in the first place. Cataloguing through describing and analysing resources following set guidelines ensures that users of your library can search within any catalogue in any library. This ability to transfer learnt search skills enables students to become lifelong learners.

Bibliography

Hider, P. (2018). Information resource Description (Second edition ed.). London: Facet Publishing.