Intro to ILS
Jeeya S -
Hello fellow students! My name is Jeeya Shah. I have had my first day at my site placement and I have learned a lot of things! I got introduced to POLARIS which is the Integrated Library System (ILS) that Glendale Public Library uses. POLARIS is used for many things ranging from patron records, check in/ check out, holds, cataloging, and much more. I focused on cataloging. POLARIS stores all the MARC Records. A MARC record is a machine-readable bibliographic record that contains information about an item in a library catalog (in other words, a digital version of cards that store info about a book such as title, author, genre, edition etc….). Every book in the library has a MARC Record and they occasionally need to be updated. New books are always being imported. Sometimes, if a patron does not return a book for a long period of time, the record is lost, and the book needs to be re-entered. Most MARC records do not need to be created from scratch and are taken from OCLC (an American nonprofit cooperative organization that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large) or provided by Brodart and Midwest Tapes (which is where the library buys the physical and digital books from). However, sometimes the MARC Record needs to be created from scratch if the books are more local and self-published and are not in OCLC, like in the case of the Arizona Authors program. This can also be done on POLARIS, along with editing. However, POLARIS is limited in its editing capabilities, which is where separate applications such as MARC edit and OpenRefine enter the picture. Which is what brings me to my next question: How can we best edit mass amounts of data for library catalogs using these applications?
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