Journal, week 3
Starting this week, we've changed my in time to 9:00 a.m. so I have an opportunity to attend the library's weekly all-staff meeting. I showed up a few minutes early to give myself time to boot up the computer (and to recover from my morning ride through the flurry of pollen), then accompanied Allison to the conference room on the ground floor. The library is preparing for an event on Friday hosting a scholar on Mormonism, and preparations for this comprised the majority of the meeting. A few of the staff would be out for most of the week, so they also discussed covering each others' responsibilities. Finally, one of the staff—Cheryl, I recall—offered an update regarding the leaky bathroom in the reading room. Apparently, the fix is simple; researchers need to stop flushing wipes and paper towels down the toilet.
Because JCB and the John D. Rockefeller Library at Brown University (the "Rock") share a common backend, the process of transferring items from the cataloging software to JCB's public-facing software is a little complicated, especially if the two libraries each have their own copy of the same item. For this reason, we have decided to split my work into two parts:
- I'll spend the majority of my day cataloging new accessions into OCLC Connexion, JCB's cataloging software.
- During the last hour, Allison will sit with me to double-check my records and will export them to Ex Libris Alma, their Library Management System, along with me.
I was thankful for this because I'm still not fully comfortable with MARC syntax and am sometimes unsure what to add or remove from a record I have retrieved.
I cataloged four items today, one of which was a brand new publication gifted to JCB by an author who'd researched at the library frequently for it. The Rock also has the item, so when I exported my cataloged record to Alma I had to edit the Rock's Alma record so it didn't merge with mine. Specifically, Alma matches based on the OCLC record number, so in the Rock record I changed the 035 field to 045 while exporting, then changed it back after finishing.
I ended the day plating and creating flags for my cataloged items and auditing my records with Allison. My biggest struggle was in finding an OCLC record for an item that the Rock had used but that wasn't appearing when I searched for it by its ISBN. Allison taught me that I could search by the OCLC reference number, we found the Rock's record, and decided to wait to update the one I had created until next week.