THE WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, AND HOW OF CATALOGING
Mission statement:
To provide timely and effective access to information resources selected
for our collections, whether held in our buildings or accessed remotely.
Who:
About 40 staff and 25 students divided into four divisions with eleven units and functions.
What:
We're responsible for creating records for materials and electronic
resources for Roger, the online catalog. We're also responsible for
maintaining the Roger catalog and its synchronicity with other systems
such as Melvyl and San Diego Circuit. We
catalog materials in many formats (books, serials, electronic resources,
computer files, videos, maps, and microforms) and in many languages (most
Roman alphabet languages, Chinese and Japanese).
Where:
We catalog for the Arts (Art and Architecture, Film and Video, and Music), Biomedical, CLICS, International Relations and Pacific Studies, Medical Center, Science and
Engineering, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Social Sciences and Humanities libraries.
Why:
Bibliographic records and an accurate, up-to-date database give library
users consistent and dependable access to the resources of the UCSD Libraries
collections.
How:
We use computer systems such as Millennium (the technical subsystem for
maintaining Roger), Melvyl, and OCLC.
OCLC is a bibliographic utility with a database of nearly 100 million catalog records contributed
by libraries all over the world. Catalogers either modify OCLC records
and copy them into Roger, or create new catalog records which we contribute
to OCLC.
Prepared October 1997
Revised March 2008