Week in the Law Library Life: Kathleen MacAndrew, Catalog, Metadata, and Archives Librarian

I have been the catalog librarian for 30 years at the School of Law.  Over the years, my responsibilities have changed to reflect changes in staff and types of material available to library users.  When I first started as the cataloging assistant and then as the catalog librarian, it mainly involved traditional materials, like print, microform, audio, or video materials.  Over time, that began to change as more titles were available electronically.  With the departure of one of the librarians, I took on maintaining, organizing, and collecting the law school's history for the law school archives.  The library then joined with the main campus library to become a part of their digital repository, and along with Jessica Silvia, I create metadata for documents that are loaded to the repository.

Now that I’ve explained what I do in the library, I will describe a week in my life at work.  Each day starts with opening my email. I review all law school emails for archives content, such as event announcements, emails about students, faculty, staff, and alumni, law student news, etc.  I copy and paste each email into a Word document and save that document to my computer.  Later, I will burn these documents to DVD for storage.  I then print out the document.  Each printed document is filed in archival folders according to topic, event, or person.  For each academic year, I maintain individual folders in archival boxes just outside my office.  At the end of the academic year, I will file these folders in the archival boxes designated for these files in the archives collection.  

When I’m finished with emails, I check Facebook for postings to the Law School, Law Library, and Law School Alumni pages. I copy and paste the information into a document and print it out to be filed accordingly.

As the day progresses, I monitor the incoming emails to continue creating documents for the archives.  While monitoring email, I am cataloging materials purchased by the library.  This involves using a database called OCLC.  Most items come with a processing slip that provides the record number to locate the title in OCLC and another record number I use to download to the library catalog from OCLC.  While using the OCLC record, I am editing it to make it useful for the law school library catalog users.  I will delete or add information.  I compare the description created for the item in my hand.  I verify that the description is correct.  If it is not, I correct it.  When the editing is done, I download the record to the catalog.

Once the download completes, I look at the record in the library’s catalog.  I verify that certain parts of the record are correct, such as location.  The library has about 27 locations, including Reserves, Periodicals, Stacks, Reference, etc.  I create and attach an item record from the bibliographic record that describes the physical piece, including location, barcode number, item type, and whether it circulates outside the library.  I place a barcode on the item and add that barcode number into the item record, set the circulation status based on location, and the type of item. The location also determines whether the record is suppressed (faculty office copies), and whether the item gets a color tape to help shelvers know its location at a glance (for example, yellow tape for reserve materials).  Once materials have been cataloged and processed, they go to the labelling shelf.

Some items are deemed priorities such as office copies or route to…  When this happens, the item goes to the head of the line and is cataloged, processed, labeled, and delivered as soon as possible usually before the end of the day.

Each day of the week involves what has been described so far.  While this is the mainstay of my week, it is not all I do.  One day, I will get emails from publishers informing me that there are new electronic records to bring from their websites to the library’s catalog.   I extract the records from the publisher’s site and load them into the catalog, from one record to as many as 5000 records.  Some of these records need editing, but they go in as they are most of the time.  Some records are for periodicals, and others are for electronic books. This allows you to find these digital items in the catalog, without searching another database.

Often, I receive requests for information found in the archives.  Someone may want to know when a particular event began.  If I have an archival box of this event, I can look back at the number of files in that box and locate a date.  Someone may ask me for photos of an event or a person.  Sometimes, locating pictures of a person is difficult and requires a lot of time, going through various boxes to locate a photo or photos.  When I find the photo or photos, I attach them to an email and send them to the person who requested them.  It can be a long and involved process. [Editor’s Note: Kathleen’s excellent curation of our archives collection means that she will find it if it exists in the collection!]

Because the library documents the life of the law school in all its forms and endeavors to collect all Rhode Island legal titles, I spend time creating original cataloging records for these materials.  These include YouTube videos of law school events and Rhode Island CLE titles.

Other tasks that I do week to week include physical processing of items to add protected call number labels, distributing items to circulation for shelving, exchanging editions of treatises or updating pocket parts, updating catalog records to reflect new locations or withdrawn items, removing holdings information from OCLC for withdrawn items, repairing or treating damaged books, meeting with the library dean to make retention decisions, updating records and correcting mistakes in records or labels, setting up archival boxes for continuing or new collections, and visiting the Providence clinics to swap out materials in the library and deliver office copies to the professors.

That is roughly how a week may be for me working in the library. Each week is different, which keeps it interesting. It also keeps me behind the scenes of the library. I like working quietly to keep the library running. I know that the work I do provides the materials and records with links that enable library users to do their research and help with their studies.