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What to do with unwanted books 21: From book art to book furniture, discover the best ways to reuse



As you may know 7 year olds vary in reading ability so these chapter books do vary in difficulty, some are fairly easy to read and some are a little more challenging, and some offer greater levels of support through graphics. Overall however, as a general guide, these books are suitable for readers aged 7 to 9 years.


If your child is only just starting out with chapter books you might like to check out our Best Chapter Book Series for Young Readers and Best Graphic Novels for Early Readers collections. The illustrated chapter books on this list are generally easier to read.




what to do with unwanted books 21



For more information about the titles listed below, each is linked to an online bookstore page where you can find reviews and age recommendations for titles you are unfamiliar with (these are affiliate links).


For instance, the subject heading list indicates that all books about cats should be assigned the subject CATS. Using this authorized heading eliminates the possibility of listing some books under CATS and others under FELINES. Even if a book is called All About Felines, the subject heading will be typed CATS. That way, all books on that subject will be listed in one place in the catalog for the patron to find. The patron does not have to imagine all the possible synonyms for the word he is looking for.


However, to allow proper cataloging of books and other library items, the best file structure allows for records with an unlimited number of fields and unlimited field lengths. This flexibility is necessary because not all titles are the same length (The robe versus Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day). Some books are part of a series, requiring a field for that information, while others have no series statement. And audiovisual items have much longer physical descriptions (5 filmstrips : sd., col. ; 35 mm. + teaching manual) than do most books (403 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.).


The computer cannot expect a certain type of information to begin and end at the same position in every bibliographic record. The statement of responsibility will not always begin with the 145th character of the record and end at the 207th position, for example. Therefore each MARC record contains a little "table of contents" to the record, according to a predefined standard.


If a bibliographic record has been marked correctly and saved in a computer data file, computer programs can then be written to punctuate and format the information correctly for printing a set of catalog cards, or for displaying the information on a computer screen. Programs can be written to search for and retrieve certain types of information within specific fields, and also to display lists of items meeting the search criteria.


Using the MARC standard also enables libraries to make use of commercially available library automation systems to manage library operations. Many systems are available for libraries of all sizes and are designed to work with the MARC format. Systems are maintained and improved by the vendor so that libraries can benefit from the latest advances in computer technology. The MARC standard also allows libraries to replace one system with another with the assurance that their data will still be compatible.


MARC 21: The Library of Congress serves as the official depository of United States publications and is a primary source of cataloging records for US and international publications. When the Library of Congress began to use computers in the 1960s, it devised the LC MARC format, a system of using brief numbers, letters, and symbols within the cataloging record itself to mark different types of information. The original LC MARC format evolved into MARC 21 and has become the standard used by most library computer programs. The MARC 21 bibliographic format, as well as all official MARC 21 documentation, is maintained by the Library of Congress. It is published as MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data.


A comparison of the same record with textual information and with MARC tags illustrates the compactness of the MARC 21 format. It's a matter of storage space. Look at the box charts below . The MARC 21 format uses "260" "$a" "$b" and "$c" to mark the field that holds imprint data instead of storing the words "publication area," "place of publication," "name of publisher," and "date of publication" in each record. This convention makes more efficient use of computer storage space.


This section covers how to read, understand, and use a MARC record. It deals with what librarians using a library automation system will see and need to understand on their computer screens when adding, editing, or examining records. The emphasis will be on those areas commonly used in cataloging for schools and small public libraries, i.e. books and audiovisual materials. However, what is covered in this section applies equally to all forms of materials, including sound recordings, computer software, maps, and other non-book items.


The box chart in the previous section showed a MARC record labelled with "signposts." The proper names of these "signposts" are field, tag, indicator, subfield, subfield code, and content designator. These MARC 21 terms are covered in this section.


A field: Each bibliographic record is divided logically into fields. There is a field for the author, a field for title information, and so on. These fields are subdivided into one or more "subfields." As previously noted, the textual names of the fields are too lengthy to be reproduced within each MARC record. Instead they are represented by 3-digit tags. (Though online catalogs may display the names of the fields, the names are supplied by the system software, not by the MARC record.)


A tag: Each field is associated with a 3-digit number called a "tag." A tag identifies the field -- the kind of data -- that follows. Even though a printout or screen display may show the tag immediately followed by indicators (making it appear to be a 4- or 5-digit number), the tag is always the first 3 digits.


The Cataloging Distribution Service of the Library of Congress distributes a detailed listing of all tags in both the 2-volume publication MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data and a summarized single volume work entitled MARC 21 Concise Formats. For continued work with MARC records, these sets are highly recommended. They are detailed documents containing many examples. (See the bibliography for complete reference.)


In the MARC record, 10% of the tags are used over and over, and the other 90% are seen only occasionally or rarely. After even a short exposure to the MARC 21 format, it is not unusual to hear librarians speaking in "MARCese." Librarians who work with MARC records soon memorize the numbers for the fields common to the materials they catalog.


Indicators: Two character positions follow each tag (with the exception of Fields 001 through 009). One or both of these character positions may be used for indicators. In some fields, only the first or second position is used; in some fields, both are used; and in some fields, like the 020 and 300 fields, neither is used. When an indicator position is not used, that indicator is referred to as "undefined" and the position is left blank. It is the convention to represent a blank, or undefined, indicator position by the character "#".


A first indicator value of 1 in the title field indicates that there should be a separate title entry in the catalog. In the card catalog environment, this means that a title card should be printed for this item and an entry for "Title" added to the tracings. A first indicator value of 0 would mean that a title main entry is involved; the card would be printed with the traditional hanging indention, and no additional tracing for the title would be required (since it is the main entry).


A subfield: Most fields contain several related pieces of data. Each type of data within the field is called a subfield, and each subfield is preceded by a subfield code. Fields 001 through 009 have no subfields.


"Authority control" means following a recognized or established form. Usually, a cataloger chooses subject and name headings from a list of approved headings. In a conversation, if you talked about visiting the "Getty Museum" and the "J. Paul Getty Museum" in California, your listener would know you meant the same thing. But if a cataloger sometimes uses "Getty Museum" and other times uses "J. Paul Getty Museum" as headings in a catalog, the library user will have a difficult time finding all the books on that subject. If a cataloger follows the Library of Congress's list of established forms for names, he or she will use the heading "J. Paul Getty Museum." As long as the cataloger always uses one established form, all the books on that museum will be found in one place in the catalog.


What is more important on the computer-based library catalog is what is termed "local authority control." Local authority control allows the librarian to look at the list of subject headings or the list of author names and ask to reuse one that has already been entered. In that way, all headings for the same person or same subject will be entered exactly the same way -- which is the point of authority control. Names shown in Cataloging in Publication (CIP) data in books are also based on Library of Congress authority records at the time of publication. The forms shown for current publications in an online catalog after a retrospective conversion of data should be correct, since nearly every book or data vendor's database is based on Library of Congress MARC files.


By combining this chart with the chart "Tags divided by hundreds" (above), it becomes evident that if the subject of a book (6XX) is a person (Lincoln, Abraham), the tag will be 600; if the subject of the book is a corporation (Apple Computer, Inc.), the tag will be 610; if the subject of the book is a topic (Railroads), the tag will be 650; if the subject of a book is a place (United States), the tag will be 651. An added entry (7XX) for a joint author (a personal name) will have tag 700. 2ff7e9595c


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