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As people seek to learn more about race, bookstores have begun selling out of books on antiracism. These titles are, of course, also available in libraries, but can be difficult to locate in the catalog. Patrons will be able to find them through known title searches, but the catalog should go beyond this.The first user task in the “Library Reference Model” is to find, defined as “to bring together information about one or more resources of interest by searching on any relevant criteria.” Ideally, a patron should be able to search terms such as racism or antiracism in the library’s catalog and find a comprehensive list of titles on the topic or start with a known title and find other, related works. However, catalog records often fall short due to lack of appropriate keywords or subject headings. When a patron is ready to move beyond recommended reading lists and discover new books, will the library catalog aid in discovery?

Conservation documentation provides important information about a library’s collections, including condition assessments and treatment decisions. Paper files or local databases, however, can make this information unavailable to most library staff and create problems for searching and preservation. To avoid these problems, in 2016, Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) started using the MARC 583 field to record conservation documentation for items in the Special Collections Library. By placing this information in the catalog record, conservation information was publicly viewable, searchable, and protected by regular database backups. This article describes the process of implementing the MARC 583 field at Penn State for conservation documentation, including selecting standards, encoding the field, and outcomes from the project.

kalan Knudson Davis (kkdavis@umn .edu) is the Rare and Special Collections Metadata Librarian at the University of Minnesota and has served as cokeeper of the DCRMR text since 2020. Jessica Grzegorski (grzegorskij@new berry.org) is Head of Cataloging at the Newberry Library and has served as co-chief editor of DCRMR since 2021.