SUL News Notes

Volume 5, Number 28
August 9, 1996


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SUL Staff Badges

SUL Staff Badges expire on August 31, 1996. Badges for the year beginning Sept. 1, 1996 will be issued to permanent staff members who request them by sending the following information by e-mail to PRIV@SULMAIL or campus mail to PRIVILEGES DIVISION M/C 6004: Name, Department, Supervisor's name, ID mail address, length of appointment if it will end prior to 8/31/97, and indicate if you need a plastic badge holder. When this information has been received and processed, a new badge will be sent to you through ID mail. Badges will not be issued to temporary or hourly personnel at this time. Badges for these people should be requested according to existing procedure.

Staff badges are valid for access at both Green and Meyer Libraries. If you prefer wearing a Staff Badge for acess to Meyer Library or East wing portal entry at Green LIbrary instead of showing your University ID, please send the above information to the Privileges Division by Friday September 13, 1996.

If you have any questions, please contact the Privileges Division at PRIV@SULMAIL or 3-1492.

--Robert (Monty) Mantovani, Privileges Division

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Applications Invited

Applications and proposals are now being accepted for three SUL/AIR-sponsored opportunities: The Payson J.Treat Fund for Library Program Development and Research, the David C. Weber Librarian's Research Award and the David C. Weber Leadership Award.

The Payson J. Treat Fund provides funds to develop innovative projects to improve and enhance the effectiveness of library services and programs. In effect, the Fund offers seed money for research, development and testing.

Awards for the Weber Librarian's Research Award are intended to support research in librarianship and related fields, including both scholarly and professional writing leading to publication.

The David C. Weber Leadership Award is the Staff Development and Career Enhancement Initiative supported through funding from Charles J. Tanenbaum. Its objective is to provide the kinds of support that can make a career-enhancing difference for individuals within SUL.

Proposals should be received no later than September 30, 1996. A complete description and information regarding application procedures is provided via SUL's Home Page at:

-- Catherine Tierney, Asst. Univ. Librarian, Technical Services

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Free Passes Offered

As has been the tradition, passes are again available for this year's San Mateo County Fair. I have about a dozen free passes for the fair which runs from Friday, 8/9 to Sunday, 8/18. Anyone wanting up to 2 passes can contact me at fastbook@sulmail or call 3-3278. And visit the putting green garden vignette!

--Sharon Hom, Inter Library Loan

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Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) Core Bibliogrpahic Standards

One of the cataloging issues that SUL will need to deal with during the coming year is that of the PCC core cataloging standard which is endorsed for use by libraries participating in the PCC BIBCO cooperative cataloging program. As Catherine Tierney indicated in an earlier NewsNote article, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) was initiated to rationalize the cooperative cataloging process and increase the supply of mutually acceptable catalog records in the national databases. One focus of the PCC has been standards development.

Core bibliographic standards have been developed for books, sound recordings, scores, and CONSER has developed a core record standard for Serials. PCC Core standards are in development for other formats and will soon be available. You may view the approved core standards via the Cataloging Services Home Page at http://wwwsul.stanford.edu/depts/catalog/policy/policy.html

The core standards are designed to be employed by catalogers who have undergone special training that emphasizes developing new values and criteria for exercise of judgment in a time of great change for catalogs and catalogers. So-trained, catalogers may choose to exceed the minimum set of core data elements when local needs or the nature of the material dictates. Conversely, the standard offers an alternative to mindlessly following some of the rote prescriptions of the current full level MARC record when those prescriptions do not fit the material being cataloged or serve local priorities.

The core bibliographic standards should not be confused with minimal level cataloging (MLC) or SUL's local intermediate level cataloging (ILC) have a single, narrow goal--to minimize cataloging effort--although the core standards also support a more efficient and cost-effective cataloging process. The widespread use of core bibliographic standards should result in a greater number of records in the cataloging databases that can be relied upon to describe materials as fully as necessary for identification and to provide a basic level of access. Additionally, all access points on BIBCO core records will be authorized by national-level authority records. Since local needs differ, the core record should be regarded as dynamic and will be subject to enhancement. Use of this standard by BIBCO libraries will result in more fully usable catalog records for all libraries; those libraries that choose to enhance this record will be able to do so since they will need to do less from scratch cataloging.

At SUL both Mia Rode and Willy Cromwell-Kessler have been trained as BIBCO trainers and are currently planning how to extend BIBCO training to all SUL catalogers. Participation in the BIBCO program should increase SUL's contribution of widely usable records to the national shared databases. As we go forward with our planning, we expect to be talking with many of our public service and collection development colleagues about the appropriate use of the core standard.

--Willy Cromwell-Kessler, Technical Services

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Titles to Make You Smile: "Most Amazing Titles of 1995" (Part 2)

The results are in on the challenge to find the titles in the list published in part 1. As a reminder, the titles were:

There were four responses to the challenge, two from within the Stanford community and two from without. The two Stanfordites, Molly Carroll (macarrol@leland.stanford.edu) and Sharon Hom (fastbook@sulmail.stanford.edu) wrote to say that they each own one of the books in question, The Joy of Chickens. Per Sharon, the author, Dennis Nolan, is one of her sister's teachers at San Jose State. She says the book was so poorly distributed that "in order to give us copies, [he] had to literally talk his way into a warehouse somewhere and liberate copies of his own book." Molly got her copy from the author's son.

The two remaining respondents were the only ones to actually take the challenge. Each located eleven of the titles (one more than I did), identified a twelvth as bogus, and scratched on the two remaining items. I judge Emma Lee Yu (elybc@cunyvm.cuny.edu) winner by a hair over Michael H. Arshagouni (marshago@library.ucla.edu), for providing full bibliographic details with her response.

The title they found that I couldn't was The Baby Jesus Touch and Feel Book, which per Emma "was published in the 'A touch-and-feel book' series in 1995 by the Abingdon Press in Nashville."

The title everyone identified as bogus was Virtual Reality: Exploring the Bra, a cut-off version of "Virtual reality: exploring the brave new technologies of artificial experience and interactive worlds, from cyberspace to teledildonics." Presumably the original compiler of the list encountered the truncated form in an electronic title search and didn't bother to glance at the full record.

The two titles no one found were Big and Very Big Hole Drilling and Simply Bursting: a Guide to Bladder Control. Anyone know if these actually exist?

--Brian Kunde, Serials & Electronic Resources

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Prepared by Brian Kunde and Geoffrey Skinner

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