Why I am mentioning this is that I live in a country where it is hard to get books delivered from Amazon or other sources. There are huge delays in delivery. If the value of the book is more than 80 Euros it is held up in customs until you pay a tax on it. Needless to say I was nervous about purchasing our textbook. I will outline how I managed to do this below but I do have the book. I had a serious crisis of confidence that I had the correct book when Kasey mentioned that the textbook had a purple and red cover. The one I have has a lovely blue cover… yikes. I quickly double checked and YES it is the right book. My book is a “simultaneous U.S. edition published by ALA editions..” So the colour of the cover of the book is not necessarily a good attribute to use when describing it to students who may be purchasing it from other sources globally.
The elements/attributes I used when purchasing our textbook were title, author, publication year, publisher and city of publication. I decided to use Amazon as a source for the book as my husband and son were about to go to London to visit friends. So when using these elements in the four basic tasks described by FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) it looked like this…
FIND – I used the title of the book to find it on Amazon. The title and subtitle were very helpful in the search.
IDENTIFY – Once I had a search result I used the author name, publication year, publisher and city of publication to check I had the correct book. There was no ISBN given in the subject outline which is where I found the onformation. I am not sure it would have helped actually.
SELECT – Here I checked the price of the book on Amazon US and compared it to the price of the book on Amazon
UK. The UK book was much more expensive and sent to the UK from the USA. I also checked withour friends to see if there was any difficulty ordering from Amazon USA and getting it delivered to the UK. No problem at all. So I selected the book from Amazon USA and gave our friend’s home as the delivery address.
OBTAIN – The book was delivered to our friend’s house and my husband and son collected while they were visiting and brought it back to Turkey for me.
Why should Teacher Librarians have an understanding of resource description?
Even if we are importing record information into our local school catalogues understanding resource description is important because
* our students and colleagues have local needs, specific curriculum standards and units that may be best served by adding to catalogue records we import.
* some of our records may have been created before other were imported so we need to check to see if they are of the same quality.
* understanding our own needs and then viewing the records as they are imported may help us give feedback to the catalogue record creators so they can improve their records for everyone’s sake.
* some resources we acquire may not have records to import.
* we will want to add locally produced resources to our catalogue. We have quite a few books created by students which other students use and enjoy.
*it could help us determine how to teach our student and colleagues how to use the catalogue so that as they move to other schools or use other libraries they will have expertise to access their collections too.
