May 28, 2004
After mail back and forth to Guatemala, I’ve decided to hold off any more development with WINISIS. It seems they have purchased some scanning software and not being a programmer, I’m not sure how WINISIS will tie into what they need.
I’ve talked to several people in Tech Services departments at MINLIB and MVLC. There are varying opinions for how I should handle the cataloging. I’ve tried searching for a Latin American equivalent to Dewey but, perhaps because of my Spanish, I can’t yet find anything. I’ve send out letters to specialists in Latin American librarianship: Dr. Alice Miranda Arguedas (Costa Rica), National Library of Guatemala, Salvador López Leal (Mexico) and several participants in the upcoming IFLA meeting. No answers yet, so I’m assuming I’ll use the Dewey schedules, up to the 3rd summary. A few people at the public libraries here tell me this is probably overkill. So, I need to find out what Dr. Uelman envisions for this library: will it always be only for children? how big does she see it getting? I’m operating under the assumption that the cataloging scheme should be flexible enough to grow as the library’s needs grow, that it should tie in with whatever appears to be the national standard and that it be as robust as I can make it. To that end, I’ve been paying particular attention to how records are cross-indexed and the sort of controlled vocabulary used.
A note about searching in WorldCat: I’ve found most success following this method: Using Advanced or Expert Search functions, I search for the title of a work limiting the search to books. This usually gets me the record I’m looking for. When I can’t get a hit, I remove the title and search for the author. Since many of these books were donated from libraries in the States, I can usually search and find something. But until I actually see the books, get publication dates or ISBN, I can’t know for sure if it’s the correct bibliographic record. It has been an interesting exercise in terms of writing search queries and I now know the titles of several popular fairy tales in Spanish: El gato con botas, Juan y las habichuela, La bella y la bestia.
