Sunday, June 29, 2008

Name (& subject) authority work in E-books

I am working on an ongoing Name Authority project for the summer and have noticed that for our Electronic Books, there are very few records where we have an existing record in the NAF for the author in the 1XX field of these E-book records.I found out from my Electronic Resources Librarian that this was not normally part of the Electronic book workflow. I have requested to be updated about all new E-book loads so that the authority work can get done at the time the records are added, just like with regular print books.I have also noticed that especially with E-books, some of these vendor records get rather creative with their subject headings and especially their use of subdivisions; either they completely ignore the scope notes or just start seemingly making up their own subdivisions willy-nilly. Sometimes I will take time to fix/repair them into proper subject headings that follow the rules (often requiring breaking the single heading up into a couple of distinct headings, etc), other times I'll just let it stand as is. Sometimes the 1XX from the vendor-supplied record does not jive with the 1xx in the authority record from OCLC, and I have to cut & paste in the correct(ed) heading into the (local) bib record so it will link up correctly with the authority record I'm about to import from OCLC.I seldom encounter the same problems with copy-cataloging print monographs; It seems to be a quality control issue mainly with E-books; That said, it's not a BIG problem, most e-book records are just fine; it's just the phenomenon is quite a bit more noticeable when contrasted with monographs. It's admittedly hard to resist a little pop-psychoanalysis here; Do Electronic resources catalogers who work directly for vendors (instead of in libraries) feel special, like they're entitled to willfully flaunt subject cataloging rules/guidelines that the rest of us "ordinary" (i.e. mainly monographic, higher ed institution embedded) catalogers have to follow?

Inquiring minds want to know.