In early 2007, the staff responsible for acquiring and cataloging Baltic materials at the Library of Congress (LC) compared observations about the Latvian library union catalog. The bibliographic records appeared to follow the same standards used by LC, namely, AACR2 (a Latvian translation was published in 2005), _MARC 21_, and subject headings based on the structure of _Library of Congress Subject Headings_ (LCSH) (regularly acquired by the National Library of Latvia), and they were up-to-date with current publications. LC reached the conclusion that it was duplicating work which had already been expertly done in Latvia and decided to experiment with using cataloging from libraries in countries where the English language is not the primary language.
With local software manipulation and technical coordination, the experiment was undertaken. Staff from the LC Cataloging Policy and Support Office secured information about the eight libraries that contribute to the Latvian national union catalog hosted by the National Library of Latvia, obtained a list of the institutional codes used in MARC field 040, and arranged for the Network Development and MARC Standards Office to establish equivalent codes in the MARC _Code List for Organizations_. At the time LC secured this information, all nine libraries agreed to let LC use their records: the National Library of Latvia, the Fundamental Library of the Latvian University of Agriculture, the Library of Riga Stradins University, the Patent and Technology Library, the Library of the University of Latvia, the State Agency Medical Library of Latvia, the Scientific Library of Riga Technical University, the Fundamental Library of the Latvian Police Academy, and the Library of the Latvian Academy of Culture.
When LC searched Latvian publications with imprints of 2006 and 2007 in the Latvian union catalog, 99.5 percent were fully cataloged. These accurate and complete records save LC the painstaking task of keyboarding words with numerous diacritics and, as an added benefit, frequently include information which is not in the publication itself (e.g., year of publication, birth dates).
LC now downloads and saves to its database a complete and already partially anglicized bibliographic record. By late Sept. 2007, 238 such records had been imported. LC must still do authority work, making use of information provided by the Latvian libraries, including converting existing headings from the Russian to the Latvian form (activity that will decline over time). Since the subject headings have been determined by staff that know the language and the history, they more nearly reflect the subjects of the publications. They are given in a form that largely follows LCSH structure. LC staff who are not knowledgeable of Latvian can often find the relevant English subject heading as a reference on the Latvian subject authority record. Work to correlate topical and geographical headings in the two languages is continuing. There is also an online Latvian-English and English-Latvian dictionary of free-floating subdivisions. Finally, LC must supply the classification. A clarification in English of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) number retained in the adapted records
can be found on the National Library's UDC database.
With the success of this experiment, it is hoped that such efforts can be extended to the cataloging of other nations that have adopted standards similar to those used by the Library of Congress, thus contributing to the timeliness and quality of LC's bibliographic database.
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