Angela Murphy-Walters is a member of the Children's Literature Team of the Cataloging Directorate at the Library of Congress. If you're like most librarians today, chances are you have an online catalog, perhaps even an integrated library system. If you were fortunate, your library or school system had enough money for you to automate the bulk of your records painlessly, either by sending your shelf list to a vendor who performed the conversion, or by accessing a database and converting the records yourself. By now, you've grown used to the online catalog, and find it easy to add records for new books as they arrive.
Life is good.
You may try to forget about them, but you know they're there. First of all, know that you're not alone. There are a lot of people who are paid to do nothing but catalog who wouldn't know where to begin when it comes to cataloging a computer disk. Nonbook cataloging is a specialized area. But that doesn't mean you can't learn it, and learn it easily.