David,
At MFA, Boston, our library
staff make our new Bibliography records and link our objects to them. They will
soon start using the z3950 tool available from Gallery Systems to facilitate
the creation of new bib records by importing data from FLO (our local
federation of art libraries) directly into TMS. For the most part, we only make
bib records for publications that are in our libraries.
We have written a report for the
library that they use when a patron asks what has been written about a particular
object. They print out details (call numbers, locations, etc.) of all of the
publications that have the object linked to them, and give the list to the
patron.
Although I am a big fan of the
Bib Module and would use it exclusively, some curatorial departments prefer to
use the fields in the Object Module.
We make the following
distinction between the Bibliography and Published References fields:
Bibliography – used for
general publications about the type of object (but do not have any reference or
image of any MFA objects)
Published References – used
for publication details about the object. Some of our curatorial departments
prefer to use this field as they can enter references to publications that we
do not have in our library.
Hope this is of some help.
Linda Pulliam
Head of Collections Management
From: The Museum System
(TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Aylsworth,
David
Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2009 2:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Librarians in TMS
Can I pester you all again? Our library staff loves
TMS, which is great since they are often the first interaction with the public
where interested people go to ask if we have something in the collection that
isn’t on view. They have their own detailed way of cataloguing, and
their own database for the book collection, and do not want to start using the
Bibliography module of TMS for that. They do, however, want to put data
about books in their collection into the Bibliography or Published References
text fields in TMS.
They would like their reference staff to easily be able to
locate books that refer to objects in the collection, while doing a search for
the objects in TMS.
Naturally, I’m excited that they’re
excited. I have asked them to come up with their own procedures for how
they would enter data and retrieve it, and they came up with some questions for
me that I couldn’t answer, so I need your help:
1.
What is the difference between
“Bibliography” and “Published Reference”?
(I’ve got my own ideas, but I’m curious how others have made the
distinction)
2.
How many characters does each field hold?
3.
Can we change the tag labels on these fields if we
wanted to describe them differently or repurpose them? (I thought this
was a simple questions, but I couldn’t find either in dbconfig, so I
couldn’t answer it)
4.
Can they put a URL into the text field that might take
a user over to a place on the intranet or even to a spot in their
system’s database?
Any life experiences that you have about this type of thing
would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks as always,
David
David Aylsworth
Collections Registrar
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
telephone: 713-639-7824
fax: 713-639-7780