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Monographic Services Division

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The Monographic Services Division is one of two technical services units within the Resource Acquisitions and Description/Information Technology Services department of the University of Washington Libraries. It acquires and catalogs monographs and integrating resources for all three University campuses, as well as Cascadia Community College, in most formats, languages and subjects. The Division creates digital collections, provides subject analysis and authority work for them, and plays a lead role in setting cataloging policy and in developing metadata standards and applications within the Libraries.

(Aside from the acquisitions and cataloging done within the Division, some acquisitions and cataloging are decentralized within the Libraries: acquisitions and cataloging of CJK materials in the East Asia Library, cataloging of sound recordings and computer files housed in the Music Listening Center, and cataloging of sheet maps in the Map Section. The Serials Services Division acquires and catalogs serial publications. International Studies sections acquire materials in vernacular scripts and often perform simple copy cataloging. In addition, the Government Publications Division receives cataloging records from Marcive for its U.S. depository collection. Finally, the Gallagher Law Library on the Seattle campus is a separate administrative unit and is responsible for its own acquisitions and cataloging.)

Personnel

The Division has 35 members, including 11 librarians and 24 classified staff.

Organization

The Division is comprised of five sections:

• Monographic Acquisitions
• Monographic Cataloging
• Special Materials Cataloging
• International Studies Cataloging
• Database Management

The Monographic Acquisitions Section orders approximately 30,000 monographic titles annually from vendors around the world. The section also operates approval plans for newly published U.S., Canadian, British, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin American and Scandinavian books, in addition to German and U.S. music scores and art exhibition catalogs, which add another 20,000 titles to the collection each year. The section is responsible for simple copy cataloging of material with copy from the Library of Congress and selected OCLC member libraries. Monographic Acquisitions also carries out digitization projects, including rights management, scanning and descriptive metadata.

The Monographic, Special Materials and International Studies Cataloging Sections perform complex copy and original cataloging. The Monographic Cataloging Section covers most of the humanities, social sciences and sciences in Western languages. The International Studies Cataloging Section handles materials in Near Eastern, Slavic, South Asian and Southeast Asian languages. The Special Materials Cataloging Section handles non-book materials, as well as many books in a variety of languages and subjects. Staff from the three sections also provide subject cataloging for digital projects. The Monographic Cataloging, International Studies Cataloging, and Special Materials Sections are self-managing.

The Database Management Section is responsible for on-going maintenance activities such as corrections, including those resulting from authority processing and daily OCLC loading. Other activities include retrospective cataloging of the pre-76 U.S. Documents collection in the Government Publications Division.

Standards

The Division catalogs according to Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, and Library of Congress Rule Interpretations. Library of Congress classification and subject headings are used for everything except medical materials, which receive National Library of Medicine classification and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). The Libraries uses the OCLC bibliographic utility and the Innovative Interfaces local library system. Monographic Services has OCLC Enhance authority for the Books, Computer Files, Scores, and Visual Materials formats. The Division participates in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging by contributing full-level bibliographic records (BIBCO), name authority records (NACO) and subject headings (SACO). Cataloging for digital collections in CONTENTdm is done using Dublin Core.