Week 7

Music cataloging!

This week I met with Cate twice to begin learning how to catalog popular music. I chose a few CDs from the cart outside her office and brought them in to start working on. We started with the eponymous album Yuck. I learned how to upgrade a record from AACR2 to RDA and all the changes involved, such as updating the LDR info, changing the 260 to a 264, and updating the main headings, because while AACR allowed you to use the performer as a main access point, that is not the case in RDA where you must use creator of the song. However, if there are multiple creators across multiple songs on a CD, then the title becomes the main access point.

Cate walked me through updating the whole record, showing me how to find the music number and search OCLC for the record, how to set up text strings with all the 3XX fields commonly used, and which 5XX note fields I needed to include (500 notes for what kind of music and where the title is from, 511 for who is in the band, 505, 508, 515, etc.). She also showed me how to add the record to holdings in Alma and create an item record from there. The music I selected was from gifts, so they had not been added yet which will give me more experience working in Alma, something I have previously lacked.

I was then sent off on my own to try my own hand at it, and worked on an Aerosmith CD that also needed updating from AACR2 to RDA. I also continued some ETD work. Overall a lot of new information to digest and things to practice.