In order to determine the “value added” by a particular step in a process, an effort must be made to understand customer needs and then to determine an acceptable trade off between the value and the cost of meeting those needs. Bonnie Doepker put this principle into a cataloging perspective in her General Session presentation. She explained that the online cataloging environment is still relatively new and that it has raised expectations of what a user can know about a library’s collection. Local catalogers now have an increased ability to provide searchable information about holdings that can be specifically tailored to their clientele’s needs. Unfortunately, the cost of local cataloging modifications can be high, forcing librarians to use the “value added” principle to determine which customer needs they can afford to meet.

Doepker summarized many of the local changes that can be made to MARC records to meet the increased demands of library users and public services staff. She concentrated on three MARC areas: subject access (local subjects and subdivisions), title and series access (resolving series conflicts, correcting inconsistent title data, resolving uniform title display problems) and physical description data (physical description notes, related works field, gmd for large type, accompanying materials field, contents notes).

As she looked to the year 2002, Doepker predicted that OPACs and collections will become even more complex and library patrons will continue to expect better access to library collections through online catalogs. Although a growing number of software programs exist that can assist catalogers, there are as yet no expert systems which can replace the “value added” by local catalogers. The impact of growing information retrieval possibilities, the cataloging of Internet resources and the need for searchable tables of contents are just a few of the options which can be added to local catalogs at a price and which will continue to challenge librarians as they determine how much they can afford to spend on meeting the local cataloging needs of their users.