The ABCs of TOCs: Enhancing Your OPAC with Tables of Contents

There were three presenters for this program: Karen Selden (Coordinator and Speaker) of the University of Colorado, Mary Strouse (Speaker) for Catholic University of America and John Bissett (Moderator and Speaker) from Washington & Lee. They were brought in to discuss how they are using TOCs in their institutions.

Mary Strouse spoke about Catholic University of America Law Library’s choice of using vendor-provided TOC data loaded into the 97x fields of the MARC record format. Their particular institution uses an Innovative ILS and Blackwell Book Services (www.blackwell.com) TOC information. Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (www.syndetics.com) and Marcive, Inc. (www.marcive.com) also provide TOC data in the 97x format. Karen Selden talked about the University of Colorado Law Library’s use of manually created enhanced 505s in their MARC records. John Bissett discussed how the process of scanning TOCs works at the Washington & Lee Law Library.

All three panelists discussed the reasoning behind their decisions to implement these procedures. Also discussed were the actual procedures that are followed, the ramifications or what needs to be considered before you begin, the benefits and limitations of the various methods. John Bissett even discussed his aspirations for the future of TOC enhanced records.

The handouts for the session were included in the annual meeting program materials. The slides used during the presentation can be found at http://staff.cua.edu/strouse/.