2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
Another possible way to enhance the value of the catalogue is to enable to
search for content within specific departmental materials, for example searching the
contents of the department's annual reports. Usually a department will have
digitally born annual reports and hard-copies that have not been digitised. To find
information within the annual reports they each must be searched individually. One
solution is to add an extra full-text searchable field to the catalogue record
structure. Then OCR digitize the hard-copy annual reports. Catalogue each of the
annual reports separately and import the content of each document into the
respective full-text field. A search page can be designed for just searching the fulltext
contents of the Department's annual reports. See Figure 1.
Figure 1. Example of a separate search page for searching full-text records in a
library catalogue
Keep in mind, whatever changes you make to your catalogue, maintain a
record, such as a procedures manual. You may leave your job and the next person
will need to be able to identify the non-standard fields you have created and how
they are used to ensure that the added value is not lost. Also, this would help
mapping fields if a new library catalogue system is introduced (whether an upgrade
or through amalgamation).
The whole concept of collection development is changing. Many solos now have
to decide to catalogue or not to catalogue, to import or not import (within
copyright) digitally born non-commercial materials produced by external
organisations that are relevant to their department. You need to assess the risk of
the importance of not having the material at all. The risk of material disappearing is
not a variation of the “just-in-time” or “just-in-case” argument regarding collection
development.
While on the subject of cataloguing, cataloguing rules are changing with the
most significant change being the introduction of RDA. RDA is being adopted as the
cataloguing standard by major libraries. To keep oneself abreast of the changes
subscribe to a cataloguing discussion lists or LinkedIn Group. One such list is ACAT
(AutocatListserve) (https://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A0=AUTOCAT) and the
discussions on cataloguing are very illuminating.
For enhancing library services including the catalogue and other services,
Code4Lib (http://www.code4lib.org/) is a good list to follow. You will find
discussions on new services, issues, and problems that might arise in
implementation to new services, alternative software available and/or work-arounds