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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 47| October 2000
Cataloguing-in-Publication enhances its service
The National Library has provided the Cataloguing-in-Publication service to publishers for many years. Well known to librarians and readers alike, Australian publishers still print bibliographic details of new books on the verso of the title page. The data is provided to publishers at the pre-publication stage by the staff of the Librarys Cataloguing-in-Publication Unit, and the information is used by libraries adding the title to their collections.
The unit has made considerable improvements in efficiency over the years with the availability of new technology. Where staff once typed cataloguing entries in letters and posted them to publishers, they now enter the details to the National Bibliographic Database via Kinetica, download the record to the CIP database and then fax it direct from their PCs to publishers in the format in which it should appear in the book. These improvements enabled the speedy availability of pre-publication records on the NBD for all libraries. At the same time the CIP service was able to continue operating at its usual high standard of quality and turnaround time.
Recently a further enhancement was introduced, as the unit decided to trial an email CIP service. Up to now, publishers have been receiving their CIP data mostly by fax (some smaller publishers without faxes are posted their entries). There was an enthusiastic response from the majority of publishers with whom the CIP Unit deals to the idea of transmitting CIP entries in electronic form as email attachments. This enables publishers to transfer the data directly to the proof publication, with no necessity for re-keying. All of our current publisher contacts were surveyed on their preferred attachment format (most opted for html) and the new process was trialled, with few problems. Email has now been adopted as the preferred method of sending CIP entries. A small number of publishers opted to continue to receive fax entries, while an even smaller number will continue to deal with the CIP Unit using the postal service.
Thanks to the flexibility of the technology currently supporting the CIP
service the staff of the unit are able to service all clients in the
manner in which they prefer. The National Library will continue to seek
efficiencies and improvements in the service, while maintaining its high
standard.
Deirdre Kiorgaard
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: gateways@nla.gov.au