Today’s question: Cataloging sources. What cataloging sources do you use most? Any particular reason? Any idiosyncratic choices, or foreign sources, or sources you like better than others? Are you able to find most things through LT’s almost 700 sources?
Most of my books have been added from the Library of Congress; Amazon comes in second. I joined LT and input the majority of my (and my consumption partner’s) books back when the LoC and the various Amazons were the only choices, and that was a pretty frustrating experience. I have a lot of foreign-language books that were almost impossible to find except as catalogued by third-party Amazon sellers, and their data is atrocious. (I still haven’t fixed it all!)
I’ve used several of the universities and other national libraries a few times each, but I find now the one I go back to most is ILCSO—they seem to catalogue faster than LoC and often have a paperback edition, so I don’t have to turn to Amazon as much.
Craziest cataloguing thing I have done: I also joined LT before call numbers carried over in green to everyone’s catalogue (okay, I also joined before the works system was in place, so obviously that makes sense). And I’ve always been pretty anal about adding my exact edition. So I had to have a lot of paperbacks pulled in from Amazon, and in the following weeks I looked up each book individually in the Library of Congress catalogue to add call numbers to all of them. Seriously.
I never knew that there was so many choices. This TT has been very interesting, though I’ll probably just stick Amazon because I’m in that habit.
Huh I’ll have to check out LoC!
I agree that trying to catalog foreign language books can be a nightmare!
Holy cow! I am in awe of your effort.
I know, it was nuts, and of course later changes were rolled out that would make it unnecessary. But I suppose I helped get some of the shared data in the system that way!
The really unfortunate thing is that ever since the work page redesign the MARC records have been unavailable to view. That was really helpful for combining and separating stuff.