Today was my first day on prac in a public library in regional NSW. I spent the day getting acquainted with the space and the staff involved. Today I mostly worked the circulation desk, doing tasks not unlike those I do everyday as a teacher librarian – running the front of house. Over the day, there were no reference or readers advisory enquires, but there were a great many “do you have…” and “How do I print?”. The LMS seems very unfriendly, antiquated and difficult to use. I did learn of a great tool: Fantastic Fiction – a selection and readers advisory tool that I think could be an extremely useful tool in a school library, though I think it will take some investigation to work out how to limit its suggestions to children’s literature. One of the goals I had right at the beginning of my studies was about how to recommend texts and undertake readers’ advisory, especially being unfamiliar with the collection and with adult fiction more broadly. Children’s fiction I am getting a better handle on, but adults are another beast altogether.
I had an interesting conversation with the library tech today. She was creating a lot of new catalogue records as the library is opening a new branch and all of the items have to be sourced, processed and catalogued. She was working from a purchase list and writing the catalogue records manually, using details found on the Libraries Australia website. Despite being able to download the MARC record using the z cataloging feature of the LMS, she insisted it was faster to do them manually as too many details would need to be deleted. Some of the things she would delete was all but one of the subject headings, any alternative titles and the series statement. I asked her why she deleted this metadata as it seemed it would make for an easier discovery process using the library catalogue. I still don’t understand why you would want to limit discoverability, especially the series statement in the fiction collection (or the non-fiction collection, come to that). I can understand why you would want to identify just one genre term that best describes the work, as it would allow you to label it with a genre sticker and make it easy for patrons to visually identify a book they might like to read. The library tech was quite insistent that the other data was unnecessary and would only make the catalogue more complicated than people could handle. Having spent a good amount of time recently doing searches of my own library’s catalogue in order to create some resource guides and class collections on specific topics, I have been very glad of having the level of detail available that I do from the SCIS records. I can see that not everyone would need to use all of the data all of the time, but it doesn’t hurt, surely? And it might help sometimes. I will broach this subject with her again in a few days to see whether I have misunderstood. An example is that this same tech asked me to pull some resources for a display about winter. As each catalogue record had been deliberately limited to one subject heading for each resource in the fiction collection and two in the non-fiction, I was not able to run a complete search to find possible resources. The fiction collection mostly had the subject heading “Australian Fiction” which doesn’t really describe what the book is about at all. How does this help with resource discovery?
