Notes on Operations: One Title, Hundreds of Volumes, Thousands of Documents: Collaborating to Describe the Congressional Serial Set

As part of its participation in the Google Books government documents scanning project, the Purdue University Libraries agreed to contribute volumes of the Congressional Serial Set (CSS). Realizing that the results would be far more useful if the individual documents within this title were cataloged separately, librarians developed procedures to create brief records and began cataloging CSS documents from the 1890s. The University of Iowa became a partner in this collaborative pilot project, and its cataloging staff used the Purdue template and procedures to create records from the CSS for individual documents from two years in the 1890s. Purdue staff used those records to barcode their own corresponding CSS documents before sending those volumes to Google for scanning. Staff subsequently loaded the records into WorldCat to improve discoverability for scholars. The result of the collaborative cataloging effort was the ability to prepare CSS volumes for scanning quickly and efficiently