CIC Cooperative Cataloging Pilot – Project Summary

Submitted by Paige Andrew, maps cataloging librarian

At the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Heads of Cataloging meeting held during the 2013 American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago, the group present began a discussion of what it might take to share original cataloging expertise for languages that individual library cataloging departments cannot do in-house. Since not all CIC institutions were interested in this topic, a small study group was formed in September 2013 of volunteer institutions interested in continuing to talk through the challenges and opportunities. Those institutions were:

  • University of Chicago: (Christopher Cronin, Chair)
  • University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
  • University of Iowa
  • University of Michigan
  • University of Minnesota
  • Ohio State University
  • Penn State University: (John Attig)
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison

Paige Andrew, maps cataloging librarian, joined this group in December 2013 at a point where the committee was ready to move into format-based cataloging needs within the CIC. The CIC Cataloging Languages Expertise Committee, lead by Christopher Cronin, established several parameters and a one-year pilot project was launched, to conclude on April 1, 2015. The pilot project is tracking how much time it takes to carry out all aspects of a shared effort, from packing and shipping materials and the mailing costs, to time spent searching for copy, to actual cataloging of individual titles. This focused tracking effort will help to indicate to participants, and to the administrators of participating libraries, the actual costs involved in a multi-institutional cooperative cataloging initiative.

Members of Penn State’s Cataloging and Metadata Services Department, including four maps catalogers (John Hamilton, Susan Houser, Steve Kroger, Paige Andrew) and three language experts on other teams (Lily Huang, Fannie Mui, Susan Lane) formed the Libraries’ CIC Cooperative Map Cataloging Team and volunteered to catalog a total of 120 map titles from two institutions – the Univ. of Minnesota (Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic) and the Univ. of Iowa (Japanese).

Currently, the Penn State CIC Team has completed about 60% of the goal of 120 titles for its two institutions and anticipates completing their part of the pilot project by the end of the calendar year. Maps in Arabic and Cyrillic have been completed to date. All bibliographic records created or enhanced are being done using the new international cataloging standard, Resource Description and Access (RDA) and under the Library of Congress, Program for Cooperative Cataloging’s BIBCO standard when applicable, and at the Full Record level. All records created or enhanced by the Team include key data elements, such as titles and authors, paired with parallel fields of information that include their non-Roman script equivalents. Adding information such as a title in a native script such as Japanese will enhance the discoverability by our patrons of the maps owned by our institutions. Partnering with CIC libraries in this consortial cataloging effort will enable us to garner help with our Korean language materials needs while expanding upon the Penn State Libraries’ cooperative efforts, a win-win situation.