Proposal put forward by C. Hixson at Cataloging Congress meeting of October 18, 1996. Revised by C. Hixson per suggestions from Congress; revision date: 10/19/96. [HTML markup by S. Anspach]

Local Cataloging in IUCAT

Nationally, many libraries control certain kinds of materials at the local level, rather than contributing cataloging records to a shared utility such as OCLC. There have been many discussions about the ethics of this practice, as well as practical considerations about the impact of such practices on the shared databases. Nevertheless, many libraries consider such an approach both ethically viable and practical in certain cases. Some of the types of materials that are commonly cataloged only at the local level are:

1. materials not intended for use beyond a local site, even though they might be of wider interest.
   An example of this might be collections of photographs roughly grouped by subject into file folders or other containers
2. materials of interest primarily to local users.
   Examples of this might be senior honors papers, locally- produced videos, or local manuals
3. materials that will only be part of a collection temporarily or whose contents may change.
   Examples of this might be current events vertical file materials or textbooks that are frequently updated and replaced
4. materials of such bibliographic complexity and with limited anticipated use that the effort of contributing a record to a shared database is deemed to be too great for the anticipated return.
   An example of this might be a series of pamphlets that were bound together because of their general subject and for which very brief cataloging with a supplied title was done in the manual environment
5. materials which are incomplete and/or cannot be properly identified bibliographically.
   Examples of this might be journal articles which have been detached from the journal (not to be confused with standard reprints) or books lacking covers and title pages
6. materials which are highly specialized and deemed too expensive to contribute nationally but which receive heavy local use.
   Examples of this might be collections of comic books or political posters
7. materials which are used as instructional aids.
   Examples of this might be course syllabi, bibliographies, or pathfinders

PROPOSAL FOR GENERAL GUIDELINES

1. Individual cataloging agencies, in consultation with fund managers, branch managers, and others, will make the decision on whether they will catalog some, none, or all of the above categories of materials locally.
2. Only materials that fit into one of the above categories would be considered for such local control.
3. Creating, maintaining, and deleting any locally-created cataloging records will ultimately be the responsibility of a cataloging agency. Training and supervision of any staff involved in creating such local records would be carried out by a cataloging agency.
4. Any name, series, or subject headings would be established according to existing policies for the IUCAT database.
5. All records will be identified with the partial or minimal-level encoding level available in the local system (in NOTIS, this would be encoding level 5 or 7) and will use current MARC tags and indicators.