I'm going to give this blog thing a try. Constructive feedback is always welcome.
I've had a change of plans this year. Rather than take on a school library or substitute teach, I am homeschooling my 16 year old daughter. I'll still work my part-time hours in the cataloging department. I'm only taking a detour, not a complete change of course.
I created a list of the top 500 circulating titles in Insignia (using all the titles checked out at BVSD). I then looked at every title and cleaned it up. This meant touching over 12,000 MARC records. Doing a search based on a title could potentially bring up 100 records because we combined 65 library catalogs into the union catalog. Sometimes, each school had multiple copies of each title, stored as separate MARC records on their own database. Sometimes the titles were entered slightly differently or, may or may not have had an ISBN attached. Insignia did not merge records that were not a match on the ISBN field or title field when we migrated over to the union catalog model.
I would search for a title from the report, review each record in the resulting list, determine if there were duplicates, then merge the duplicate records. Once I felt there was a cleaned-up list of titles, I added reading program data to the titles. I'd say about 80% of the titles had at least one type of reading program: Accelerated Reader, Reading Counts!, Lexile, Book Adventure, or Fountas and Pinnell/GRL. Your patrons should be able to get a decent list of leveled books from the top circulating titles.
A few of the classics I couldn't clean up. They've been published in so many permutations and revisions, and the records are often so scanty, that I just couldn't bring myself to merge them into one record. The forwards and afterwords, the dedications, sometimes the illustrator all varied from copy to copy.
I'm sure there are mistakes in the clean up. If you catch one, please let me know so I can correct it.
I will continue to clean up the older records. There is still much to be done. But, the most popular books should come up as a clean search for your students and teachers. Yay! I hope it makes your job easier.
