New Resource Offerings in Catalog

Posted on August 3, 2020

by Michael Sheehan

La Porte County Public Library staff have worked on two projects during the COVID pandemic to enhance resource offerings for library customers.

This spring, LPCPL staff added local and county website resource records to the Library catalog for the purpose of offering customers quick access to county resources while they are searching the catalog for information on related subject areas. 

This work was completed in June and the result was the addition of 293 records covering groups and agencies in agribusiness, education, libraries, communications (newspapers and radio), utilities, local government, breweries and wineries, transportation, local business, social services, economic development, criminal justice, non-profits, arts and culture, event centers, parks and recreation, food pantries and medicine. 

Borrowers can see all the records that were added by providing a search on the terms “web sites” or “local resource.”  The formats for these records would be eResource.  Users could filter further by Subject to view resources under more specific discipline.

More recently, staff have begun creating records for the Library Catalog that will link to resources made available by the Library of Congress Digital Collections department.  So far, films and videos have been added which can be searched by the term “National Film Resource”.  Soon library staff will be adding other formats in this collection including audio recordings, notated music, books, and printed material, maps, newspapers, archived websites, photographs, prints, and drawings, as well as other mixed materials.  Once complete we will have added 545 resources that will link from the catalog to the Library of Congress portal for customer use.

We hope catalog users will find these additional records valuable in their information retrieval.

Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan

Michael joined the library staff in August of 2017. He is a member of the Library Admin Team. He has spent much of his adult work life swimming in seas of metadata, bench-pressing card catalogs, and bartering with information system vendors, but those activities have done more to tone his head muscle and less to develop those desirable six-pack abs. These cataloging skills have taken him through Illinois, Wisconsin, and back home to Indiana (queue the Soggy Bottom Boys: “the place where he was born and bred”). In his spare time, he attempts to stay out of family arguments, binge watches British comedy, drama, and mystery programs, and subjects his two cats to the latest in Indie/Alternative music.
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