For some of the children’s books from YUM, MARC records did
not exist in the Center’s library catalog. YUM, as the only museum
among the Center’s partners, has its own database that is separate
from the Center’s library catalog since museum objects follow
different rules for description. For these books, a children’s book
MARC record template was created in DigiTool which was used by the
lab’s metadata librarian who cataloged the children’s books based on
the information available in the museum database. For the ASF
photographs that were digitized by the digital lab, just as with the
YUM children’s books, no MARC records existed in the Center’s
OPAC. In general, not much information was available for them,
which is not a surprise since photographs that are part of archival
collections are rarely cataloged on the item level. The little
information partners usually have about photographs at the point of
digitization, call number, dimensions, rights and repository that owns
them, is generally transferred to the lab’s tracking database. Once
digitization is completed, the data is exported from the database and
converted into MARCXML and together with the images, ingested into
the Center’s digital asset management system. These MARC records
with minimal description are designed to be enhanced, based on the
lab’s cataloging guidelines by partner catalogers once they have
obtained the missing information, such as title, date, and other added
entries