While I'm excited by the new importance placed on AV cataloging, I'm also concerned. In our rush to meet this new challenge, one must wonder what will become of those retrospective collections of older formats still waiting for the cataloger's attention. I'm thinking particularly of those items covered by Chapter 10 of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition: "Three-dimensional artifacts and realia." Like their two-dimensional cousins, three-dimensional (3-D) materials provide valuable information to our users. Because the information appears in the form of games, kits, realia, etc., however, many catalogers and cataloging departments decide to exercise one of two options. Either they put them aside in the hopes that someone else will deal with them, or give them minimum-level processing in order to get them on the shelves and off their desks. As Lynne Howarth mentioned during her keynote speech at the Online Audiovisual Catalogers, Inc. (OLAC) 1998 Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, AV materials have suffered from the three D's: 1.) They're "different" from standard print materials; 2.) Because of this difference, they're "difficult" to catalog; and 3.) They "divert" cataloging time and resources. (Howarth 1998) In their research study concerning the place of AV materials in Canadian libraries, Howarth and her colleague Jean Weihs reported that 36 of the 317 libraries surveyed reported not cataloging AV materials at all, while 115 libraries said they cataloged only certain formats. That makes a total of 151 libraries, almost one-half of those surveyed, with completely or partially uncataloged AV materials. (Weihs and Howarth, 1995, 196-197) As Gary Handman put it: "Media ... continues in very many cases to be treated after all these years as somehow secondary or supplementary to other formats and collections-still the recalcitrant child, the frivolous toy." (Handman 1991, 41)

At the aforementioned OLAC Conference, I presented a poster session entitled "It takes a village...to challenge an AV cataloger." My session concerned a troublesome kit containing over 65 items of varying shapes, sizes and textures, and the tools and processes I utilized in cataloging it. Quite a few of the responses I received from conference attendees concerning "It takes a village..." reflected a sense of consternation and puzzlement at just how one would go about organizing such a bibliographic record in the first place. Why this should be the case is somewhat puzzling, especially given the wonderful cataloging resources provided by such AV cataloging experts as Nancy Olson. Perhaps people feel they need a few more examples of these unusual materials to help them conquer their perplexity and delve right in. I would like to devote the remainder of this article to just such a mission. Here then are a few examples of the difficult 3-D AV materials encountered during a retrospective conversion-cataloging project for the Pennsylvania State University Education Library, and the decisions made to handle them.

Before we go any farther, I want to restate the last part of the previous sentence: "...and the decisions made to handle them." Despite all the rules and helpful hints that currently exist for cataloging 3-D AV materials, and one should strive to use them as often as possible, there will still be many situations where personal judgements must be made. This is overstating the obvious, but I also feel that many people are reticent to make these calls for fear that they will make a mistake and "the cataloging police" will come down on them. We need to overcome such feelings of inadequacy and get on with the job at hand. One must remember that, although high national standards should be maintained, helping our users by providing them with access to our collections must be the cataloger's ultimate goal. If one decides to constantly shelve difficult AV items rather than take up their challenge, then that cataloger has done their users a great disservice by limiting or even denying information access.

Please be assured that I'm no seasoned veteran of the 3-D AV campaign. In fact, before I began working on this recon project in Penn State's Education Library, I had never seen many of these artifacts and realia (or as I like to call them, "surrealia") during my professional career. Even my more experienced colleagues were often unable to help because they too had never faced such items. So take heart - we've all been there.

The kit Changing Africa: a Village Study Unit is a collection of 64 items, ranging in format from books and filmstrips to clothing and musical instruments, housed in a container that resembled a steamer trunk. Thankfully this trunk did have a title [Figure C], so there was none of the title proper uncertainty that had to be dealt with in the first example. The kit still lacked overall documentation, however, so there was no way of verifying how many or what kind of items had been included originally. Both title and keyword searches of the OCLC WorldCat database revealed one minimal-level record for the kit as a whole, and three full-level records for selected parts. While these latter records did prove helpful, especially when it came to assigning subject headings and a call number, they didn't cover all the items present. The closest thing to a "packing list" for this title that existed was a printed circulation form that had been created for the kit some years ago by the Education Library's public service personnel. The titles listed on the form corresponded to labels attached to each item. Although it was impossible to determine whether these labels had been locally assigned or not, some of the titles given to the pieces (Fanti shirt, Kwii cutlass, Prassava slingshot, etc.) could lead one to believe that they had probably come from the publisher. Many of the kit's pieces, such as the books, filmstrips, sound recordings, etc., had their own titles and authors; all of which required separate access points. To handle this situation, a partial contents note was created [Figure D, Line 14] with corresponding 7XX entries [Figure D, Lines 29-45].

The third example is something of a hybrid. It's an item whose subtitle and series statements identify it as a book, but its physical characteristics are more in keeping with some sort of graphic material or three-dimensional artifact. Bill Kaufmann's Be a Pirate! consists of a large cloth rectangle that can be folded to resemble a book. One side of the cloth contains eight colored story panels that tell of a young boy's search for buried treasure [Figure E]. The other side depicts a pirate costume complete with sword and pistol [Figure F]. There is a hole in the center of the cloth, allowing the user to wear the book/costume like a poncho. An ingenious and novel design, but how to represent it in a catalog?

First one needs to determine just exactly what this item is, and which chapter or chapters of AACRII to use. Be a Pirate! incorporates both book and non-book aspects in its design, however, so deciding its exact nature could prove troublesome. Let's look again at Nancy Olson's book for guidance. She states: "When cataloging an item that does not fit neatly into one chapter of AACRII, decide by elimination which chapter to use. In other words, eliminate all chapters that obviously do not relate to the item and see which chapter is left." "... look at the item as a whole rather than concentrate on one aspect of it." (Olson 1992, 18) Based on both of these suggestions, one can see that Be a Pirate! is really a book and therefore should be handled under the auspices of AACRII Chapter 2. This is a start, but one still needs to decide how to best reflect the item's unusual physical characteristics. After all, how many books do you know that you could wear trick-or-treating? Furthermore, each of the panels on the story side of the sheet had its own page number, but how does one document this in the cataloging record? Thankfully, the answer can be found in Rule 2.5 D4 in AACRII (1988 revision), which states that: "If the sheet is designed to be read in pages when folded, describe it as 1 folded sheet and give the number of imposed pages and the height of the sheet when folded." (Gorman and Winkler 1988, 78) This information is therefore transcribed in the 300 field [Figure G, Line 8], with the costume portion of the book addressed in a separate 500 field [Figure G, Line 10].

The final example is probably the easiest and most straightforward of all these presented here in this article. It represents, however, another unique format type that could provide catalogers with a few headaches. The Education Library possesses a series of dioramas. Each diorama consists of two or more clay figurines, reinforced by metal rods, depicting Native Americans engaged in a scene from daily life. The dioramas are mounted within rectangular painted wooden boxes that feature both a single glass side panel and a hinged lid, allowing for easy viewing and inspection of the scene within [Figure H]. On the top of each box is a thin metal plate bearing the publisher's name, a publisher-assigned control number, the title of the activity, and the name of the featured Native American tribe [Figure I]. This example's plate contained the following:
W.P.A. MUSEUM EXTENSION PROJECTS (upper left corner, set within a keystone)
45-MD-8
GRINDING CORN
HOPI
The diorama itself features two figures in various stages of processing corn against a painted background. Based on this description and the information from the title plate, "Grinding corn" became the 245 $a subfield, "Hopi" appeared in both the 245 $b subfield and the 246 30 field, and "45-MD-8" was consigned to a 500 field. "W.P.A. Museum Extension Projects" ended up in both the 245 $c and the 260 $b subfields [Figure J].

The real stumbling block, however, came in formulating the 110 (Corporate name) field. Thankfully, the other dioramas featured slightly different publisher names on their title plates, but retained the keystone logo shape. Based on this information, and coupled with a search of OCLC's Authority File database, it could be concluded that the dioramas had been created by various divisions of the Work Projects Administration (WPA) for the State of Pennsylvania (hence the keystone logo). The WPA had been established by President Franklin Roosevelt during the 1930s as part of his "New Deal" package, so assigning "[193-?]" to the 260 $c subfield was a reasonable estimation.

Based on the examples presented, here are the points of 3-D AV cataloging I want to emphasize:

• If you're unsure as to which AACR2 chapter to use, first eliminate all those that don't apply and choose from those sections that are left.
• If your item lacks a title, don't be afraid to create one. If you do create a title, however, make sure that it's labeled appropriately in the bibliographic record. One should enclose the title in brackets within the 245 field, and add a 500 field explaining where the title came from (i.e. "Title supplied by cataloger").
• If the item has multiple parts, try to determine if there is a predominant component to focus your catalog record around. In the first example, the wooden pieces outnumbered their rubber counterparts. If the wooden and rubber pieces had been roughly equal in number, then the GMD "kit" could have been used to reflect this parity.
• Whether a predominant component exists or not, make sure you list every part included in the item. Conversely, if the item is missing parts (as outlined in a publisher-supplied contents list) then one should include that fact in the bibliographic record.
• When listing multiple parts of an item in a catalog record, try incorporating them first into the standard 300 field (using the subfield $e, or possibly multiple 300s).
• If point 5 proves too difficult, then go ahead and use one or more 5XX fields. If the parts have significant titles of their own, it might be wise to list them in a 505 note.
• Make your decisions, and move on.

"As the slow, though gradual, evolution of cataloguing codes reflects, the introduction of audio-visual materials into the mainstream of Library collections was a cautious, sometimes reluctant process. Not quite the ready 'fit' of print resources, so-called nonbook items were often problematic to acquire and process, and viewed as a somewhat onerous challenge by less than intrepid cataloguers. With the relatively recent meteoric rise of Internet accessibility and use, audio and visual resources have become the digital darlings, offering yet more unique bibliographic twists to be unravelled by those responsible for creating representative surrogates. In this brave new world of cataloguing e-A/V what are the lessons from the past which we can bring to bear on effective bibliographic control and access?" (OLAC Web Page, 1999 http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/cts/olac/)

Handman, G. 1991. "I Lost It (or Found It) at the Movies: Public Service Implications of Minimum-Level Cataloging of Audiovisual Materials." Technical Services Quarterly. 9(2):39-47.

Horny, K.L. 1995. "Taking the Lead: Catalogers Can't Be Wallflowers!" Technicalities. 15(5):1,10-12.

Howarth, L.C. 1998. "A/V Cataloguing: from the Library's Orphan Child to Cinderella." Keynote speech delivered at the biennial conference of the Online Audiovisual Cataloger, Inc., Charlotte, N.C.

"OLAC '98 Workshop and Plenary Speaker Abstracts and Bios." OLAC Web Page. 1999. http://152.20.25.1/ruthr/olac/Abst_bios.html (22 July 1999).

Olson, N.B. 1992. Cataloging of Audiovisual Materials: A Manual Based on AACR 2. 3rd ed. Edited by S.S. Intner and E. Swanson. DeKalb:Minnesota Scholarly Press.

Olson, N.B. 1993. A Cataloger's Guide to MARC Coding and Tagging for Audiovisual Material. DeKalb:Minnesota Scholarly Press.

Weihs, J. 1991. "Cataloging Nonbook Materials." In Cataloging Correctly for Kids: An Introduction to the Tools. Edited by S. Zuiderveld, p. 46-48. Chicago:American Library Association.

Weihs, J., and L.C. Howarth. 1995. "Nonbook Materials: Their Occurrence and Bibliographic Description in Canadian Libraries." Library Resources & Technical Services. 39(2):184-197.

ISSN 1069-6792
Revised: 9/30/99
URL: http://wings.buffalo.edu/publications/mcjrnl/v6n2/freeborn.html