BookWhere at Upper Grand District School Board
The cataloguing department at Upper Grand District School Board is responsible for the cataloguing of 70 school libraries as well as two central resource libraries. We have a very broad range of customers which include: the students of Upper Grand District School Board, teacher-librarians, and teachers /consultants /administrators of the board. On our staff we have three full time cataloguers and one half-time, as well as one full-time and one half-time cataloguing assistants (who do “first pass” cataloguing). We found that we were consuming most of our time with the creation of MARC records; it was definitely far too time intensive. This is why we decided to invest in BookWhere and MARC Notepad.
The main focus of our department is to create quality cataloguing of school library resources, to ensure easy access and use of online library databases by students and teachers. This is a very achievable goal with the reliability that comes from access to thousands of library databases via BookWhere, allowing more successful searching. There are many reasons BookWhere and MARC Notepad have been such an asset to our department, for example we have the ability to group databases by “type” to enable the automatic searching of a group: for example all French databases can be searched. We have the ability to define and sort the columns (e.g. title, author, date, host, Dewey) and icons that represent the type of material to be displayed in the list of retrieved records, and also the choice of Marc view record display. Having MARC Notepad to clean up the records is another time saving feature, other outstanding features in MARC Notepad are allowing the automatic deletion of unwanted tags, the easy exports into our Horizon system etc.
Having BookWhere and MARC Notepad become a part of our daily routine has dramatically decreased time spent on creating our own Marc records. With features like the ability to perform several searches simultaneously and batch searching (which we are still learning to use effectively) and a friendly support staff, we are very pleased with how much WebClarity has helped us become a more successful operation.
The main focus of our department is to create quality cataloguing of school library resources, to ensure easy access and use of online library databases by students and teachers. This is a very achievable goal with the reliability that comes from access to thousands of library databases via BookWhere, allowing more successful searching. There are many reasons BookWhere and MARC Notepad have been such an asset to our department, for example we have the ability to group databases by “type” to enable the automatic searching of a group: for example all French databases can be searched. We have the ability to define and sort the columns (e.g. title, author, date, host, Dewey) and icons that represent the type of material to be displayed in the list of retrieved records, and also the choice of Marc view record display. Having MARC Notepad to clean up the records is another time saving feature, other outstanding features in MARC Notepad are allowing the automatic deletion of unwanted tags, the easy exports into our Horizon system etc.
Having BookWhere and MARC Notepad become a part of our daily routine has dramatically decreased time spent on creating our own Marc records. With features like the ability to perform several searches simultaneously and batch searching (which we are still learning to use effectively) and a friendly support staff, we are very pleased with how much WebClarity has helped us become a more successful operation.
