SFPL Internship : Week 8 (Recap)

Since I catalog all day at work, you might think that the last thing I'd want to do once I get off work is to catalog postcards all night -- and in fact, that was one of my worries, too: that I'd be so burnt out from cataloging books, pamphlets and electronic resources for 8 hours M-F that I'd run screaming from the thought of cataloging postcards for another 2+ hours every night ... And that's probably why I put off doing any serious amount of postcard cataloging until the weekend.

But this week, having cataloged approximately 20 postcard scans, I'm pleased to say that so far it hasn't been the case: I'm really enjoying it, and it's going fairly smoothly and fairly fast.

Part of the reason why I'm enjoying it so much is because I collect vintage postcards, so it's fun to spend time with someone else's collection; and another part is that the rules are very different for archival cataloging. It's still important to be accurate, to do authority control, to strive for consistency -- but you don't have to be a slave to fifteen-page punctuation rules, to "if-this-than-that-except-for-when-it's-like-this" convolutions and especially to non-mnemonic and inconsistent delimiter codes (my personal pet peeve).

That probably makes no sense to most readers, so let me put it into terms that non-catalogers will also understand: if conventional cataloging is like playing the trumpet for a symphony orchestra, then archival cataloging is like playing the trumpet for an improvisational jazz quartet.

And in fact, when I sometimes catch myself becoming a bit too concerned with punctuation or capitalization, I step back for a moment, breathe deep, and say: "it doesn't matter as long as I'm consistent" and that mantra brings the smile back to my face and the spring back into my typing.

The Curator has also given me the opportunity to add fields that I think might be of use. This is where my experience as a conventional cataloger and as a postcard collector comes in handy. I think about what I might want to look for in SFPL's collection, and how I might want to look for it, and then I think of the ways that it is already addressed in conventional cataloging, and then simplify them to the greatest possible degree.

I've suggested: Publisher's Series, Printer and Added Entry -- all access points that postcard collectors value, and that might not always be discoverable though a standard keyword search.