Sibley’s Top Five Golden Rules of Cataloging
5. Acceptable error rate is zero. We don’t mean to scare you. This just means we have always valued quality over high rates of production. Strive to create records with no errors. Obviously, it isn’t really possible to achieve that, but adding a quick proofreading step at the end of the process can make a world of difference in this regard.
4. There are no stupid questions. Please don’t be afraid to ask anything at all. That said however…
3. Before you ask, try to look it up. This is because a command of the documentation is essential to your development as a cataloger. In no time at all you will memorize the most commonly used rules, but you’ll never memorize all of them. Besides, they keep changing, and this is one way to keep up. Time spent looking things up is never wasted. It leads to being able to find the answers faster next time.
2. All right, maybe there aren’t actually five. Please read no. 3 again.
And no. 1 is:
Remember that music cataloging is a lot like using your musical skills in detective work, or maybe CSI (without the blood and dead bodies) and for most of us, that’s what’s the most fun about it. If it takes a long time to track down the information you need to identify a person or a piece of music, no one will mind, because all of those sources you hunted through in vain this time will turn out to be the very ones you need the next time around. So don’t be afraid to spend time researching things. It’s the crux of what we do.