Policy Information
Jerry Falwell Library
Liberty University faculty, staff, and students; visitors to the Library; anyone who searches the Library catalog via the internet.
The Cataloging and Metadata Services Department provides access for the Liberty community to the Library’s physical and electronic resources by supplying accurate descriptive metadata to the Library’s online catalog and to the Summon discovery service. The Department also prepares physical resources for shelving. All the resources are organized into collections according to their format and location, and then arranged by Library of Congress call number. To facilitate inter-library loan, and to communicate our holdings on the internet to the larger academic community, resources are registered in OCLC’s WorldCat database.
The purpose of the Cataloging and Metadata Services Department is to support the mission of the Jerry Falwell Library by describing and organizing many of its information resources, and thereby making them available to Library patrons for discovery and access.
Metadata: data about data. For a library book, the data itself is the actual content in the pages of the book; the metadata is the record or description in the library catalog that lists the book’s title, author, publisher, subjects, etc.
Online catalog: a catalog, made available in the form of a searchable computer database, of the metadata records that describe the library’s resources.
Summon Discovery Service: a database service that allows library users to search, in one place, for metadata records for library resources represented in the Library’s online catalog, as well as for records for the articles contained in the thousands of journals and magazines to which the Library has access in electronic format.
Library of Congress call number: one or two letters followed by a one to four digit number that is assigned to a library resource to indicate its subject; additional characters are added as shorthand for the author’s last name or the title. Call numbers appear on a label on the edge of physical items to allow them to be arranged in a precise order by subject and then by author or title.
Interlibrary loan: a service whereby a library borrows a resource from another library on behalf of a library user.
OCLC (Online Computer Library Center): is an international cooperative that provides services to libraries and library users.
WorldCat: a database maintained by OCLC, made up of metadata records representing resources in thousands of libraries around the world – in effect, “the world’s largest library catalog.”
Procedural Information
The Department uses reasonable measures to find the best available OCLC metadata record for a Library resource, upgrades and/or modifies the record as appropriate, and adds the record to the online catalog. In cases where an OCLC record does not exist, the Department creates a new record for the OCLC database and the online catalog.
The Department prepares physical items for shelving by adding barcodes, ownership stamps, and call number spine labels.
The Department corrects metadata errors, removes lost items, and performs other maintenance activities to keep the online catalog accurate.
Determined on a case by case basis
None
5/27/2018
8/04/2021
8/04/2026