OT: Library of Congress pulling a fast one!

Joan,

Could you explain what this is and why it's a problem?

As a very casual library user, I am totally in the dark! lol

Caryn

DITTO!

Cheryl

Sure! What it means is that any book that is part of a series, for example, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series or the" ...For dummies" series of books, the Library of Congress (LC) will no longer consider them a "searchable" field on a record. They have been the leader (in cooperation with a number of other organizations) in creating authority records (standards) for series, which means that a series will be done the same way for each title in the series so users don't have to think of every possible combination of search terms (is it disk world? disc world? diskworld? or discworld?)

Not only that, but if I were to enter a record into the national database that librarians use and do the series correctly, if LC is working on the same book they will come through and change my record so it can't be searched!

The most outrageous thing, though, is they decided this without any discussion or communication with their affiliations or any other librarians. It would kinda be like the president of a corporation, let's say Nestle's (to pull a name out of the air) deciding to change the ingredients in Nestle's Quik without notifying the FDA or their own quality control people.

I hope all this makes sense to you and others.

Joan

Sort of? So if I wanted to search the Library of Congress for Monica Ferris books, they wouldn't appear as a series but as separate but unrelated books. How about related non fiction books (like a two part book on mathematics).

Cheryl