Well after much angst, I had an "A-Ha!" moment. After back and forth emails with Keith, reading and rereading, a hot bath and a good night's sleep, thinking, thinking, thinking and finally stopping thinking, giving up and turning on the Big Bang Theory, it hit me! I had misunderstood what ISBD was and its purpose. Yes, it is the catalogue, the big authoritative catalogue, but this is only part of the picture. I had not been able to figure out why the information did not look like it was being describe when pulling up an item on the GVPL website.
I called my children's librarian friend and we talked about process a bit. There is the screen the patron uses. If she is looking for something, she too generally starts there. Barring that, she moves to the staff page and looks up the MARC record. While this is not covered until the next section, I am starting to understand more what this is. The next level from there is the full catalogue (ISBD). I had missed all of that. I am starting to feel more optimistic. I think that while I need to understand the ISBD, it will be the MARC records that will be more of my focus - I hope! I was panicking that I needed to be able to create full ISBDs out of the gate. I am starting to understand (I hope correctly), that that is really quite beyond the scope of this course. Whew!
I had to add a note about the patron screen records though. I can understand leaving information out from the ISBD, but I don't understand why these information systems reorganize the areas that are laid out in ISBD, but there you go. Considering the love of order of the librarian profession as a whole, I can only assume that there is a reason for it and it is not just sloppiness.
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