Bernard Becker Library Begins Medical NACO Funnel

The Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine, hosted a NACO training session for medical catalogers Sept. 19-23, 2005. NACO is the Name Authority Cooperative Program of the Library of Congress’ Program for Cooperative Cataloging. NACO participants establish authorized forms of personal, corporate, conference and geographic names, as well as uniform titles, in the Library of Congress’ official authority files. A single authorized form of a name allows library users to find all items by an author or all editions of a title in library catalogs and collections. The Library of Congress authorities are the national source for authorized names and their variants (cross references) for most American libraries. Although the National Library of Medicine began contributing to the LC file in 1984 rather than maintaining its own independent authority file, authorized names for the field of medicine remain somewhat sparse.

This training was the official beginning of the NACO Medical Libraries Project, a new NACO funnel coordinated by the Bernard Becker Medical Library to enable medical catalogers to participate in NACO. Because most medical libraries are relatively small, it was not feasible for those institutions to become full NACO members since they would be unable to meet the required annual contribution quota (100-200 new records). The NACO funnels are designed to allow participation without stringent quotas. However, no appropriate funnel existed until now.

Paul Frank of the Library of Congress and Mary Dabney Wilson, Head of Cataloging at Texas A&M, taught the weeklong training session. Attendees included librarians from:

• Washington University
• Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville
• University of Missouri-Columbia
• University of Maryland-Baltimore
• University of Alabama-Birmingham
• University of California-Los Angeles
• University of Massachusetts-Worcester

Susan Lewis of MLNC (Missouri Library Network Corporation) taught the group how to use OCLC’s cataloging program, Connexion, to generate and submit new authority records.

The new Medical Libraries Project came about through discussion between the Bernard Becker Medical Library and the cataloging librarians at the National Library of Medicine. NLM demonstrated its support of the project by funding half of the training costs. The Bernard Becker Medical Library covered the rest, with attendees paying their own travel, accommodation and other expenses. After receiving the intense training, participants are now able to properly construct authority records for materials they are cataloging at their institutions. New records are reviewed for quality control before being added to the LC authority database. The Bernard Becker Medical Library is proud to have a leadership role in promoting the creation of authority records for medical authors, conferences, institutions and corporate bodies.

Training Attendees

Lefthand, top to bottom:  Christopher Handy, Susan Lewis, Cathy Sarli, Paul Frank, Amy Pennington, Wilma Bass, Debra Schraut.
Middle, top to bottom: Mary Dabney Wilson, Chamya Kincy, Masha Sapp, Jill Garbs, Cecile Bianco
Righthand, top to bottom:  Ted Gemberling, Marysue Schaffer, Martha Riley, Amanda Sprochi, Lisa Palmer, Asako Shiba, Ellen Dubinsky