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Nicole,
 
Thank you for responding so quickly! I didn't really expect Koha to provide me with documentation on how to teach, but I was hoping to find an interest group of those using it and possibly some user-provided tips. 
 
I had thought of having students put their initials in the 040 field -- after all, that is the field for "cataloging agency." Having them export the records and send them to me is an even better idea. 
 
The real problem is to keep students from seeing each other's work. Every semester I have at least one student who copies records from LC (WorldCat won't let them get to MARC records); I catch them because they don't know which tags and added entries to eliminate. We use pre-MARC works that were discarded by the university library, so even if they find a record, they have to know enough to upgrade it, which they don't, which is why they are cheating. Then there are the students who just copy from each other; they are fairly easy to catch, because they copy misspellings [sic], typos, and highly original subject headings and all.
 
There is no way to prevent cheating, but at least I don't want to make it easy for them! 
 
I've looked at biblios.net, and it is an option, but the reason that I want to go with Koha is that it provides authority files. After uniform titles, that is the single most difficult concept for most of my students to grasp. 
 
What I need is a staff client for each student. The ones who are going to cheat could still export records to each other, but at least they couldn't just "copy." They'd have to at least export and import.
 
Suzanne
Suzanne M. Stauffer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
School of Library and Information Science
Louisiana State University
275 Coates Hall
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
(225)578-1461
Fax: (225)578-4581
[log in to unmask]

________________________________

From: Discussion List for issues related to cataloging & metadata education & training on behalf of Nicole Engard
Sent: Fri 8/21/2009 7:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [eduCAT] Using Koha with Class to teach cataloging



Suzanne,

I don't think you're missing anything.  I think you have a lot of
valid arguments/concerns listed below.  I am not a cataloging
instructor, but I am a Koha trainer and the author of the
documentation :)  I also pushed the Koha w/ Class movement because I
went to library school and learned to catalog using Excel!!!

Some ideas.

#1 - Have your students put a 500 note with their name in their
records - or pick a 9xx field for that so that you can see who did
what.
#2 - Have your students catalog their records and then export them to
send to you to review (instead of you searching through 5 different
databases)
#3 - Disable the Z30.50 targets so that students aren't searching for
records to copy :)
#4 - The system will allow duplicate records!! It will warn before
saving a duplicate (based on ISBN) but it will allow you to save the
record as a new one anyway (which is where the notes come in)
#5 - Give each student their own log in and run a report to pull
records that they cataloged (if you don't want to do the notes field)

All that said, there is no way to stop students from seeing what the
other students are doing :(

Another option is to look at biblios.net which would prevent students
from seeing each other's work - but wouldn't allow you to control
whether they use the Z39.50 targets or not.

Does that help??

---

Nicole C. Engard
Open Source Evangelist, LibLime
[log in to unmask]
AIM/Y!/Skype: nengard

http://liblime.com <http://liblime.com/> 
http://blogs.liblime.com/open-sesame/



On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 8:04 AM, Suzanne Stauffer<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Is or has anyone used Koha to teach cataloging? If so, would you mind sharing how you did it?
>
> I finally got the company to respond. David Bavousett set up 5 "instances" and 5 "staff clients", complete with bibliographic records. That would be great for staff training, but I'm having trouble seeing how I would use this in a cataloging course. Obviously, I don't need or want bibliographic records. I want the students to create and add records, not search for them. I've asked for help and tried using the documentation, but can't find anything on using it in teaching.
>
> I can see how students can add records to the databases, but what I can't figure out is how I would find the records they created to grade them. Even more importantly, with only 5 bibliographic databases, either the students will all be cataloging different items (which would make grading oh so much fun), or I'll have to divide them into 5 groups, with students in each group cataloging different items. That means I'd have between 1 and 6 different items per group. I'm assuming that the system won't allow duplicate records in a single database; if it did, it would be too much to expect students not to "just take a peek at how superstudent did it."
>
> I'm probably missing something extemely elementary. Can anyone help?
> Suzanne M. Stauffer, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> School of Library and Information Science
> Louisiana State University
> 275 Coates Hall
> Baton Rouge, LA 70803
> (225)578-1461
> Fax: (225)578-4581
> [log in to unmask]
>
>