OCL & the PCC: BIBCO Edition
When last we left our heroes of DMS, we had tackled NACO, the Name Authority Cooperative Program. This month's exciting new adventure into the hidden side of the library world of tech services involves how OCL participates in another branch of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC): BIBCO (Monographic Bibliographic Record Cooperative Program).
BIBCO participants contribute bibliographic records to various shared international databases by meeting or exceeding the requirements of BIBCO. BIBCO records include access points backed by complete authority work (i.e. all that NACO stuff we talked about last time), as well as descriptive and subject access points (i.e. all the rest of the unique identifying information you find in a catalog record that links together to describe a book/score/DVD/basically anything). The big goal of BIBCO is to make less work for the rest of the library world by producing timely and very high-quality records that will be used by libraries around the world. And the fun part: any BIBCO participant can enrich and improve existing PCC records to improve their discoverability. The immediate result of that is that OBIE folx can find things more easily, but then a much wider library community can also know what rich resources we have in our collections!
Below are examples of how the same bibliographic record appears behind the scenes and in OBIS.
Above image: This is how our catalogers in DMS and the Conservatory Library see bibliographic records as they work on or create them in OCLC.
Above image: This is how the same record appears to the public via OBIS.
