Over the past several weeks, I have been blogging about the Catalog Department’s new priorities. We started work on our third priority, “Find Creative Methods to Address our Large Backlog,” by categorizing and counting the backlog.
As part of this process, we discovered that well over 2,000 dissertations & thesis were waiting for cataloging. LSO programmers volunteered to catalog a small number of these every day, starting with the dissertations. Catalog Dept. staff have now trained the Systems programmers on the finer points of dissertation cataloging and they have begun work on this backlog.
I haven’t tried to estimate when this project will be completed, but the end of the calendar year would be a safe bet. This collaboration between LSO & the Catalog Dept. not only has clear benefits to our library patrons, but will sharpen the bibliographic skills of a number of our programmers. It also will be a useful experience when we start receiving electronic dissertations, as we will investigate automating the cataloging process using metadata from Proquest.
A special thanks to all the people involved in this project. …Bernie