Why do I need to send images or physical items to SCIS for cataloguing?

Our aim is to create accurate catalogue records, and the best way to ensure accuracy is for our SCIS cataloguers to examine the items themselves. This will provide the ability for optimal retrieval of resources by maximising the chances of your users finding and accessing the material they need within your library catalogue.

Quality assurance

Without the actual items in hand or clear complete images of items, cataloguers may not be able to:

• fully determine the subject matter of the material
• provide full metadata such as pagination and the types of illustrations; this may matter for resources such as geography books where the number of pages or types of illustrations included is important
• retain consistency with author names via authority files so that full results are returned on an author search. By examining the physical item, cataloguers can determine who the actual authors are – sometimes the requesting subscriber might identify the editor or compiler as an author.

Provide images of title

SCIS receives its cataloguing metadata from books received at our depot from schools and the AUS/NZ retail book distribution network.

However, SCIS is often asked to catalogue items that have been purchased outside of this retail network.  These titles are:

• Sold exclusively to one store (eg: Aldi, Newspapers)
• Ordered direct from overseas (eg: Amazon, Ebay)
• Ordered from publishers/distributors/authors who don’t provide materials to SCIS (eg: Book Warehouse - NSW)
• Small press authors/publishers who don’t provide materials to SCIS
• Pre-publication titles

An example is the title: The wheels on the ute go round and round, 9781760667351, published by Scholastic, in 2019.  At the time, this item was sold to one store only and no information was available for cataloguers to create an accurate record.

In these cases, when there is no metadata available anywhere that we can use, we must receive the book (or the scanned images we request) in order to accurately catalogue the book. 

Compliance with international cataloguing standards

SCIS provides records aligned with international cataloguing standards, which rely on:

• the transcription of some critical metadata that comes from examining exactly what is on the item
• the identification of the item’s subject headings that should come from analysing the resource itself.

Therefore, we rely on physical items or scanned images of book cover, title and copyright pages and back cover of the item.

Physical items receive highest priority

SCIS prioritises physical items in the cataloguing queue. Requests accompanied by physical items will be completed faster than those which have only been submitted online (see How long does it take to have my items catalogued?).