Watson’s New Cataloging Resources Page

The cataloging team in Watson Library recently created a new page on The Met’s website that contains resources for art-related bibliographic cataloging. Aimed primarily at fellow librarians, and in particular cataloging librarians, we wanted to share some of the resources Watson catalogers have created to meet the demands of the work that we do.

We currently provide access to eight different cataloging guides, all of which can be downloaded as PDFs directly from the site. These guides cover a wide range of cataloging topics, from artists books to hot permalinks for special collections. We also offer helpful lists in our guides, such as “NAR Common Qualifiers” (with an emphasis on qualifiers used when creating name authority records related to people in the arts) and “Relationship Labels” (again, with a focus on those that come up most in art-related bibliographic cataloging).

In addition to these guides, we also have a few software tutorials, which are linked on our Cataloging Resources page and are also available on YouTube. Three videos are currently available: “Using OpenRefine for Name Reconciliation,” “Using Macros in Connexion,” and “Using Text Strings in Connexion.”

In addition to this new page and video resources, we’ve also migrated our MARC record sets from GitHub to The Met’s website. If you’re asking “What’s a MARC record set?,” check out our 2021 article “Steal This MARC Record: Sharing Through GitHub.” In short, we provide large numbers of catalog records that other libraries can easily add to their local library catalogs, and every record in the set includes a link to free online resources that are accessible to anyone, anywhere.

We hope that these resources will be of use to our fellow catalogers. And if you read our recent article “Think Globally, Catalog Locally” about all that goes into library cataloging, you might fall in love with the creation of bibliographic metadata and want to start doing it yourself.