Every month the Cornell Law Library adds new titles to its collection. The most recent additions for December 2013 are posted, here. A few highlights from this month’s additions are featured below.
Selected Titles
Law and Language : Effective Symbols of Community – Harold J. Berman; John Witte
Animal Cruelty :A Multidisciplinary Approach to Understanding – Mary P. Brewster; Cassandra Reyes
Jean Pajerek
Jean Pajerek, the Law Library’s Associate Director for Information Management, is one of the presenters of “Launching into RDA: The New Frontier” at the American Association of Law Libraries conference this weekend. Jean also prepared “FRBR Meets RDA,” training materials explaining the relationships between the new cataloging standard, Resource Description and Access, and Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. “FRBR Meets RDA” has been nationally recognized as among the best freely available RDA training materials by the Library of Congress Program for Cooperative Cataloging’s RDA Training Materials Task Force. The Task Force’s report recommending Jean’s materials is available at the Library of Congress’s Catalogers Learning Workshop.
At the conference in Boston on Sunday, July 22, at 3:45 p.m., Jean and her co-presenter, Patricia Sayre McCoy of the University of Chicago’s D’Angelo Law Library, will describe the Cornell Law Library’s and the D’Angelo Law Library’s experiences transitioning to the new standard ahead of three national U.S. libraries. Jean and Pat’s presentation about RDA at last year’s conference is available on YouTube.
Have you ever wished you could use the library catalog to search for articles published in journals? Or discover what books other libraries (not just those at Cornell) might have in their collections on a particular topic or written by a particular author? With the new Cornell library catalog, WorldCat Local, you can do that and more.
Library catalogs have traditionally served as finding tools for a specific library’s collection. You could search the catalog for a journal title once you had located an article citation (usually in a periodical index), and then try to ascertain from the catalog information whether the specific journal issue you needed was in the library. This kind of research was time- and labor-intensive. The catalog could show you what the library owned in a given subject area, but a researcher would need a more comprehensive view of the literature in his or her field, beyond a single library’s collection, to identify relevant articles and books. WorldCat Local aggregates the catalogs of thousands of libraries worldwide, allowing you to discover what other libraries have in their collections, in addition to what Cornell has.
WorldCat Local is a new discovery tool that overcomes these limitations of traditional library catalogs, and offers many other interesting and useful features as well (some of which will be described in future posts to The Competitive Edge). To explore WorldCat Local yourself, enter a search in the search box located in the bottom right corner of the Law Library home page (the box that says ‘Search NEW Catalog’) or go directly to the WorldCat Local search page at http://cornell.worldcat.org/.
