MARC Records

So Mrs. M was giving me a brief tutorial on how we add new materials to the collection. Here is kinda how it went down.

Me: MARC records are scary....
Mrs. M: Yes yes they are...

The overall process of adding materials to the collection is pretty simple. Destiny (the database for school media centers) allows you to simply enter in the ISBN number and it pulls up the record. From there you can edit, like add subject headings or change the call number.

Why would you change the call number? Mrs. M explained that sometimes the call number will be 697.563, but in the case of a small setting sometimes 697.5 will work just fine. Also, she added that they made the decision to group certain subjects together to help the students. Say a student is writing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, she made the decision to group all books about Fitzgerald's writing together. In a school setting, where students are mostly writing term papers, this groups everything nicely together. At first, I didn't quite understand this, but once I had a class of 25 students, who all needed materials on Fitzgerald, it was beyond helpful to have them all in one place.

If a book is not in Destiny yet, Mrs. M, said that sometimes she will wait a week or two to see if someone adds it (if it is a new material) or she has a list of 5 databases that she uses (I remember one was from Florida) and based on their MARC records of this particular item, she creates a new one within Destiny.