The duties of a section in ABA
By Melanie Polutta
Dear readers,
As you've been learning a bit more about ABA [Acquisitions and
Bibliographic Access] via the work we do, the editorial team thought it
would be a good idea to explain about the structure of a section.
Getting a book or a CD on the shelf is a surprisingly complex and
lengthy process, and it takes a lot of cooperative work. The directorate
[ABA] is composed of divisions, which is composed of sections. And on
the theory that one should write what one knows, and I'm the one doing
the writing, I am going to describe my section. Of course, I found in
the process of writing this that I still have a lot to learn about my
own section.
As I mentioned in the initial posting, I am a member of the Iberia/Rio
Section of the African, Latin American, and Western European Division
(hereinafter ALAWE). The sections are organized geographically, which
for Iberia/Rio means that we handle all of the books that come out of
the Iberian Peninsula: Spain, Portugal, and even a few from Andorra. The
Rio part of our name indicates that we have a close working relationship
with the Overseas Office in Rio de Janeiro, so we also handle all of the
resources of the countries that come through that office: Brazil and
Uruguay, as well as Surinam, Guyana, and French Guiana. (Brazil produces
a /lot/ of resources. From the other four, our numbers are much less.
For example, in FY 2011, we obtained 7,876 resources from Brazil.
However, from Guyana, we only acquired 300 and from Uruguay, 1,046
resources. Note that these numbers do not include the law books, as they
are paid for out of different account.)
Our section currently contains eight full time employees, with two half
employees, leading to a total of nine people to handle all this work.
The two half employees are loaners from our neighboring sections that
handle the rest of the Spanish-speaking world: one from the South
America team and one from the Mexico, Central American, and the
Caribbean team. Why do we have loaners? Because, like the rest of the
library world, we are trying to do more with less.
How do the duties break down? Ferolyn Meyer is our supervisor, who keeps
things moving along. Richard Hoey, along with the two half-employees Les
Kober and Hector Morey, handle all the acquisitions work for Spain and
Portugal. John Tarafas, Tommy Hannigan, and myself, Melanie Polutta, do
all original cataloging and some copy cataloging. The aforementioned
Hector specifically helps out with cataloging of electronic resources.
We also have Karen Smith and Marcellus Breach, the technicians who help
with a wide variety of tasks, including creating initial bibliographic
records, copy cataloging, serials check-in and labeling, shelflisting,
and much of the labeling. And finally there is Keisha Horne, who is our
newest technician, who does some labeling and a good bit of the
administrative details of the processing, including maintaining
cataloging and acquisitions statistics.
And now I've gone on long enough for one post. Next time, well, let's
just say thank goodness for cooperative colleagues and helpful volunteers...
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Melanie Polutta
Library of Congress
ALAWE:Iberia/Rio
Librarian cataloger
