SCP’s Becky Culbertson headlines OCLC Member story on shared cataloging

Recently, Becky Culbertson, stalwart member of the Shared Cataloging Program (SCP), was interviewed by OCLC staff about shared cataloging. The interview is now online as one of OCLC’s Member stories, highlighting how catalogers at the California Digital Library share work and rely on other libraries’ contributions as well.

Contribute to and benefit from shared cataloging explains how Becky and her SCP co-workers catalog and maintain records for the California Digital Library’s consortially licensed (and some open-access) serials, databases, and monographs, which are distributed to the ten UC campus libraries.

According to Becky, “Vendor records are good starting points, but they generally don’t have subject headings.” Without WorldCat, catalogers at the ten individual campus libraries would have to add this information themselves. “This is where the updated records, WorldCat updates, come in. As the records become fully fleshed out, we will ingest them into our system. We then just pass the record on to the other UC campus libraries,” she said. Thanks to this service, 88% of SCP serials (and 77% of monographs) include at least one subject heading. “It no longer bothers me to send out skimpy or lower-level records since I know that through Collection Manager, better records will automatically be supplied based on our library profile.”

Read the OCLC Member story.