Lesson no. 9 Copy cataloguing

I had no idea that CIP even existed until this course!  I had never noticed that inside most books there was that kind of cataloguing info.  I’m not sure how useful this is to me since many of the CIPs I saw were not complete.  I’m a little frustrated by the lack of uniformity with the CIP records.  Some books have very detailed and accurate CIPs while others have such little information I wonder why they even bothered putting anything.  While doing the activity for this lesson I did find it interesting to compare what was in the CIP and what was in the MARC record after publication.  The books that were more main stream seemed to have better CIP records. 

Copy cataloguing on the other hand is very interesting and will be very useful for me in my current situation.  Not having a decent library computer program has forced me to do copy cataloguing but not in the sense that I import the info into my program.  I need to copy manually the information!  It’s a time-saver in the sense that I don’t need to take a lot of time trying to figure out in what Dewey class to put the book.  If I could just import the information then that would obviously be the ideal situation!

Before the course I was not very familiar with LOC or Amicus.  These two sites are very good reference points for me whenever I’m in doubt about how to catalogue a resource.  I’m happy to see how many French titles Amicus has…finally a website that has some French content! Typically when I’m cataloguing I like to refer to the VSB Webcat or to the VPL site.  The VPL site has very good catalogue and MARC records and Webcat typically has the French titles that I’m looking for since most French Immersion schools in BC order similar material. 

When using any tools to help with cataloguing whether it be the CIP, LOC, Amicus or other sites it is likely that I will have to add some information.  There is always some info that might not be included.  At least when you have a solid base it makes the task of cataloguing much easier.  All this talk about cataloguing has reminded me of all the books I need to start cataloguing!