Guidelines For Handling Fales/Special Collections Materials

HISTORY: For the past 3 years the Cataloging Department has committed to processing a shelf of copy cataloging per week for the Fales Library. Materials are picked up from Fales by the Copy Cataloger on the designated day and they are returned at the end of the day. If the materials cannot be completed within one day special permission may be granted by Fales staff to keep the items an additional day so long as they are secured in a locked office overnight. Materials selected for cataloging may be either new titles or older titles requiring retrospective conversion. In addition, original cataloging of serials, as well as monographs, is handled by librarians in the Original Cataloging Unit.

Fales materials are not marked in any fashion, i.e., no dotting of the main entry nor ticking of the title, no pencilling of call numbers on the verso of the title page, no barcodes, no property stamps and no spine labels.

There will be occasions when an acquisition record is present in the BMC which will need to be "replaced" by a full bibliographic record from either RLIN or OCLC. Fales staff will make a notation in the top left-hand corner of the Fales flag, "Acq", to alert Cataloging staff to the presence of an acquisition record.

Fales staff search all materials in RLIN, "PUT" the record and make a printout in preparation for editing by Cataloging staff. These printouts should be used to note the classification number assigned to the title in question. The lcn does not need to be noted on the printout for Fales staff, however, the lcn must be reported to the Head of LC Copy Cataloging so that a shelflist can be generated.

All Fales materials, including Special Collections items, are designated "Non-circulating" in the Holdings Display, line 9. In addition, they all have a Collection code of "SpecCol", line 4; and they all have a Circ code of "BSPEC", line 11. Fales call numbers, i.e. Brit, appear on the Accession line of the call number field (line 6) of the Holdings Display. This is so that Fales call numbers don't get confused with LC call numbers which appear on the class and cutter lines of the call number field (line 6) of the Holdings Display .

Item-specific notes are frequently used. These appear in a 955 field. It may be necessary to have more than one 955 note for the same item, each describing a different aspect of the book.

SHELVING LOCATIONS:

• Fales fiction: Titles are shelved by the author's name, or, if anonymous, by title. The shelving location for monographs is either Brit or Amer. Location designations of Brit or Amer are for shelving convenience only, (i.e., the Amer stacks also house Canadian and Caribbean English-written fiction; and the Brit stacks house African and European authors writing in the English language). "Fales" is considered a prefix in the Holdings.
• Other Fales locations: If fiction falls within the following categories, other shelving locations may apply: Anthologies (Anth); Periodicals (Per) and Foreign fiction (For). Anth and Per are shelved by title. For is shelved by author, or, if anonymous, by title.
• Library of Congress classification: Books classified with LC numbers are shelved in the following locations:
  • Special Collections
  • Special Collections Reference (reference books in the reading room)
  • Downtown Writers Collection (a collection of NYC authors) "Downtown" is considered a prefix in the Holdings.
  • Canemaker Animation Collection
  • Adkins

ADDITIONAL LOCATION INFORMATION:

Additional location terms are codes which give us more information about where an item is shelved. Examples:

• "Box" means that a paperback or fragile book has been placed in a folder and put in a box which houses similar items.
• "Flat" means a book, due to its condition or structure, cannot be shelved upright, and so has been placed horizontally on the shelf.
• "Oversize" and "Double Oversize" mean the book has been shelved in an area which accomodates oversize or double oversize items.

Within each shelving location (Brit, Amer, SpecCol, Downtown, etc.) there are additional locations which accomodate "flat", "oversize", "double oversize" and "box(ed)" items. The aforementioned additional locations are all added in line 6 of the Holdings Display, immediately following the call number, on the accession line (e.g., Fales Brit Oversize).

EXCEPTIONS TO THE ABOVE SHELVING RULES:

Sometimes an anthology, biography, critical study or other work is purchased because a specific author we collect (e.g., Margaret Drabble) has edited an anthology or written an introduction to another author's work; or, a biography or critical work has been published which pertains to the collected author's life or work. Such items are placed in the collected author's "second alphabet". That is, the book is shelved following the collected author's own published works. Second alphabet titles are shelved by main entry (e.g., author of related work; title of anthology; title of anonymous work). Example: book to be cataloged is Puritanism and Permissiveness [a critical study of M. Drabble's fiction] by Valerie Grosvenor Myer. This title goes in Margaret Drabble's second alphabet, shelved alphabetically under "M" for Myer: