Thursday, May 22, 2014

Cataloging articles within books

Apologies yet again to the non-library people who may come across this blog..I'm boring you to tears!

So, now I'm cataloging all the books which were published by the Center.  The previous cataloger cataloged each individual article in edited books.  I think this does make lots of sense, but on the other hand, it makes for lots of work for me.  Some books are taking more than a full work day to catalog!

And then you have this beauty.... the majority of the articles were published in other books published by the Center, so I can just link them up with the previous record (add a second call number etc...).  On of the chapters is the introduction to a previous book, so it wasn't done. I've decided not to do it either.

The next one is where I'm deep in discussion with myself. (I'll probably skip it and wait for my librarian friends to help out.)  The article is actually snippets from a book we published. The book has a regular book record (as opposed to an article record) and no article references.  The article is pages: 24-27, 261-264...blah blah blah.   So the question is... do I create an article record, or not?

To give a better idea what I'm dealing with, I've been cataloging the articles using the records in RAMBI. (oh what a wonderful resource!!!!).  RAMBI doesn't have an article record for either of the two cases mentioned above. In fact, of the 25 "chapters" in this book RAMBI has only created records for 13 of them. (I don't know why....I haven't checked the others yet.)

For those who want to go deeper: the book is החוויה היהודית האמריקנית.

All input would be welcome....