SIGALO

Serials Interest Group for Academic Libraries in Oklahoma

November 19, 2002

Midwest City Public Library

Midwest City, OK

The semi-annual meeting of SIGALO (Serials Interest Group of Academic Libraries in Oklahoma) was a real treat to the 25 attendees. Held November 19, 2002, at the Midwest City Public Library, in Midwest City, OK, we were very lucky to use the $1,000 scholarship that NASIG awarded us earlier this year for continuing education. Lisa Furubotten, Head of Serials Cataloging at Texas A&M University, College Station, instructed us in the changes that are just around the calendar corner for Electronic Serials.

The Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program (SCCTP), a division of the Library of Congress CONSER Program, has a number of programs available. One of these programs is Electronic Serials Cataloging. After questioning our colleagues in SIGALO, we felt using the money for the Electronic Serials Cataloging course would be money well spent. We had already had one such request earlier and felt that more knowledge in this area would only increase our abilities as serialists and catalogers.

Lisa Furubotten is a wonderful trainer. For those of you that haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Lisa, her background includes delivering this training class in English and Spanish. She has had the opportunity to travel to Mexico a number of times to deliver this program and has translated many of the slides into Spanish. She is very involved in the NASIG-Mexico Student Conference Grant program. One fact that we found impressive was that she was transcribing the CONSER manuals into Spanish. Talk about a job!

The Trainee Manual that is available through the Library of Congress has six sessions. Lisa went over each section but the areas that our group was most interested in were how to deal with aggregator records and the single record/multiple record approach for electronic serials. Most of us are also anticipating the roll-out of the use of the more specific descriptor of ‘Integrating Resources’ which is for loose-leaf publications, websites, and online databases when cataloging electronic resources. This will be used instead of a more general term that is the standard today for computer files.

The one activity or idea that attendees really wanted to try once they got back to their home library was:

Using new integrating resources options

Rethinking the single record approach

Aggregators – linking all in a batch so can pull all if publication is pulled

Buying packages of records from aggregators

More electronic cataloging

Global updates for rule and description changes (007)

Adding extra fields to the single record that has already been created to show multiple links that are available such as various aggregators.

Access by source of aggregator.

Connecting cataloging records.

Needless to say, most of us decided at the end of the day to go back and review our own serial records!

We are very thankful to NASIG for supplying this money to us through the Continuing Education committee and we highly recommend other interested people to contact their CE liaison to see what funds are available for local training opportunities.

ATTENDEES