Cataloging Grey Lit In the Trench

I know, I’ve been away for a while. Between work, sickness (both mine and in my family) and deadlines for delivery of a hellish number of catalog records to the National Library of Medicine, it’s been both busy and distracting.

But it’s important to have fun while you’re cataloging a document. It doesn’t matter what it is. An example from this morning:

It’s a bit of fun to catalog the following grey lit document: “Marijuana and Methamphetamine Trafficking on Federal Lands Threat Assessment” from the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center. I don’t have a template for this one so we go with a new “Books” workform in Connexion Client (which I’m still getting used to, although I’ve decided from the experience I’ve taken from it over the past three weeks that I like it.)

The local item number is easy, so that’s my 099 $a NQ 15732. No problem. The title and statement of responsibility is more tricky. There’s no actual author mentioned anywhere in the text, so I settle for a 245 0 0 $a Marijuana and methamphetamine trafficking on federal lands threat assessment / $c National Drug Intelligence Center, and then before anything else, I drop down to the bottom of the form and get my corporate name/added entry out of the way: 710 2 x $a United States. $b Dept. of Justice. $b National Drug Intelligence Center.

Okay, now what? A couple of general notes : 500 x x "Product No. 2005-Q0317-007.", and "February 2005." take care of that. Whoops, forgot my publication statement and physical description, so let’s do that now:

260 x x $a Washington, D.C.: $b National Drug Intelligence Center, $c [2005]

. . . whereupon it occurs to me that there’s no real way to be totally sure of any publication date when dealing with non-copyrighted works like anything the the GPO is going to produce. Ah, well. Now to the physical description:

300  vi, 14 p. $b ill., maps ; $c 28 cm.

Gotta make sure the fixed fields match all that of course. No sweat. Okay what next? I’m still looking at the bottom of the page so of course I need an electronic resource trace:

856 41 $u http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs10/10402/10402.pdf (yes, that’s a live link)

followed by a 949 which I’m not going to put here (it’s on my constant data list anyway) and scrolling up to see what else needs to be here, I notice I still need a bibliographic resource statement. That’s easy, because it’s just one short page of (poorly cited, IMO) ‘sources’:

504 x x Includes bibliographical references (p. 13).

And a brief table of contents entry:

505 0   Executive summary — Background — Marijuana — Methamphetamine — Sources.

I miss the Clinton bunch–those guys could write heavy duty bibliographic reference lists. They loved research, they produced tons of it over eight years. This current bunch writes position papers that sound like they’re talking to a bunch of friends in someone’s living room–Sources? We don’t need sources. Those are for that reality-based crowd, you know like that asshole Ron Suskind talks to. Cretins.

Okay, after I save this to the local file, I have the real fun open in front of me. How to figure out what the heck MESH heading I can use for this.

Hmm. Marijuana seems pretty straightforward: "Cannabis" is all I get for the substance itself, although if people were smoking it, addicted to it, or dealing with the chemistry of the plant I’d have more choices.  "Pot" doesn’t work (I get thousands of responses all with those three letters in them); neither does  "reefer". "Weed" gives me a choice between "Dill weed", "Jimson weed", "Mayweed, Crown", or "Pineapple weed", which is instructive but not really helpful.  "Grass"  and "Herb" gives me every kind of plant known to modern gardening but no drug references, so I stick with what I have.

650 12 Cannabis $z United States.

I’d stick a qualifier in there if I could find one that had anything at all to do with moving the stuff from place to place. Actually, while I’m on the subject let’s stick 650 12 Federal Government $z United States in there as well.

Now for the second major subject:  "Methamphetamine"  is a MESH heading in its own right, but "Crank" is not (go figure.) Neither is "Crystal", which gives mostly chemistry terms, and "Meth" gives the same list as the full term. Still no qualifiers having anything to do with moving the stuff.

But . . . "Trafficking", it turns out is a valid search term but the list doesn’t give me anything I can use (I get twenty or so types of protein transport terms though). "Drug and Narcotic Control" helps a lot and it’s a valid search term. I think we’ll stick with that.

That’s a half hour out of my morning. I need seven more of these things to hit quota, after which I get to work on the serials databases, which is good, because there’s a few problems with the XML file that Serials Solutions is supposed to send us that need to be resolved. Work, work, work.