Starting soon, I will be moving from the Reference Department and into Technical Services. Many library materials start here before they are available to library cardholders. A major part of my job is cataloging materials so they can be searched for in the library’s online catalog. The catalog is made up of many, many records that have important information like title, author, summary, physical description and subject headings. Proper cataloging is important so librarians and patrons know what topics and subjects are covered in a particular book and also where to find those subjects in the library.

It is important that these records are accurate so it is easy to find everything we have in the library on any given topic. Many of the records you see in the catalog are ‘copied’ from other sources to help insure records are similar throughout libraries. However, it is very important that we go over the records we put into our catalog to make sure everything is correct and in sync with existing records. Occasionally we will find errors or need to fix something so it fits in with existing records. Two major errors I have found was the wrong last name for an author in the record (I was able to correct this because I had the book next to me with the correct information) and the subject heading ‘fantasy fiction’ spelled ‘fantasty ficiton' (I was quite shocked with these!)

Mistakes will always be found in cataloging records, but it is important to me to find these errors and fix them. A while back, someone mentioned a blog about common library catalog typos. It is called ‘Typo of the Day for Librarians.’ I read a few posts but hadn’t gone back to it much…until very recently. I was doing some searching online and stumbled upon this blog again. And now that I am working with cataloging records, I am very excited to use this as a tool. I have already put it to use and tested our catalog. I have found some typos and have fixed them. For example:

1. In a record’s summary we had resistence instead of resistance.
2. Another summary had troubador instead of troubadour.
3. We had twelth instead of twelfth.
4. And finally, we had meterology for a subject heading on one record instead of meteorology.