Information Center Catalog Consolidation

A corporate information center begins acquiring books and media resources from other "non-library learning outposts" within the company. The divisional users would still like to have easy access to their materials since many of them are critical to the divisions' continuing education programs. A learning resource catalog application has been purchased for the corporate Intranet, so the information center decides it is the ideal time to catalog and post all its holdings in the online tool. In total, the holdings information currently resides in 1) a bunch inventory lists in Excel, 2) the information center's catalog in Lotus Notes, and 3) an XML file of their e-book holdings on the netLibrary service.

I was hired to help with the cataloging of the incoming resources and assist with uploading them into the online learning resource catalog. Realizing the other requirements of the center, my solution included merging the catalog information into a single database and optimizing the entire cataloging process.

• Designed and developed the integrated catalog application complete with facilities to search by title, author, and subject.
• Programmed some simple library automation tasks such as printing book cards and spine labels for newly cataloged items
• Wrote a simple XML stylesheet to parse the netLibrary XML file and import it into the new catalog
• Parsed and imported the existing Lotus Notes catalog into the new catalog
• Normalized and cleaned up the subject headings to each resource
• Converted fields from all catalog sources to comply with AACR2 rules
• Developed the export of catalog information to the Intranet hosted learning resource catalog
• Documented the data entry rules for the new catalog
• Cataloged and shelved books

All catalog information sources were standardized into a flexible MARC-compatible database. It contained better searching facilities, offered pick-lists to prevent errant data entry, and kept better track of multiple copies of the same resource.

This was absolutely the perfect application of my technical expertise and library/cataloging knowledge. Data cleanup is not a fun job for many people, but I enjoyed programming the parsing routines to separate data into usable fields and writing the clever SQL statements to weed out inconsistent or duplicate entries.