Lay-by

It's that time of year when people get into shopping mode in search for the perfect gifts to give friends and loved ones in this festive season of Christmas.

Here in Australia, anytime of the year shopping is made easy on the pocket because of lay-by. In Tagalog, paiyakan or hulugan or "gives". But the goods don't come from our friendly tinderas or from officemates or from "viajeras" as in the Philippines but from big retail stores like KMart, Target, BigW, Myer, and David Jones to name a few. (In the Philippines, these stores are equivalent to Shoemart, Robinsons, and Landmark for the first three on the list, and Rustans for the last two. Incidentally, Myers has the same slogan as our very own Shoemart - "It's my store" - wonder who copied from whom? Hmmm...)

Lay-by purchase beats buying on credit because there are no interests although payment has to be completed within eight weeks. Periodically, these stores would extend the lay-by terms depending on their promotions. In September and October, KMart and Target offered lay-by terms with payments until the 24th of December this year. Now that's what I call being shopper-friendly. And you can bet I've used this option before to buy presents for my sons' birthdays and I've put on a couple of Christmas presents on lay-by, too.

Introducing lay-by in the Philippines won't be such a bad idea given that the Filipino shopper is already predisposed to this concept at home, at school, and at work. Big retailers make big money during their quarterly sales blitzes, so why not consider lay-by and make the cash register ring some more? Now wouldn't that make shopping a tad more pleasant?

But of course nothing beats the fun out of haggling the vendors and surviving the crowds in Divisoria.

Copyloading

That's what I do, a term I thought of putting together copycataloging and downloading bibliographic records straight into our database at the click of a mouse button.

Cataloging has never been easier for me thanks to our library's subscription to Kinetica - a national database of materials in Australian libraries. Click here for a background on Kinetica.

Our library uses Unicorn Workflows from SirsiDynix and as a subscriber to Kinetica, there is a function within the Cataloging module that automatically connects to the Kinetica portal. I just type in the ISBN - among other searchable fields that include AMICUS (I still have to determine what this is), Author, Title, General, ISSN, and Subject - and a search is generated and the result/s is/are displayed on screen. I then select the matching record (a title can have multiple entries), click on the 'Capture' button and the entire MARC record is downloaded to our database. Finally, I save the record after modifying some bibliographic information to fit our policies. It's that easy.

This leads me to the state of cataloging in the Philippines. I wonder what happened to the meeting of cataloging experts held middle of this month? I hope something tangible resulted from that meeting especially because they were supposed to come up with policies for a national cataloging standard.

I could not over-emphasize the importance of coming up with a national standard as it will make the job of cataloging Filipiniana materials a lot, lot easier. And if the Phillippine National Library, with the help of catalogers in other library institutions and a lot of support from stakeholders, can have something similar to what Libraries Australia has other than a searchable database, it will be a big, big step forward for Philippine librarianship. However, some catalogers I know would be out of part-time jobs should this happen, but hey, it's for the good of the majority.

I still do original cataloging for other materials not in the database including audio-visuals and I look forward to the challenge each time.