How to catalogue a beer can

Documentary heritage is far more than just books. Working in a local history library, I come across a wide variety of items that help record the history and culture of my town. We tend not to collect realia (the local museum takes care of that) but occasionally some items are too good to pass up. Like a selection of beer cans and beer bottles! Craft breweries have really taken off here over the last few years, and there’s no better way to record that heritage than with the cans and bottles themselves.

No taxpayer money was spent on our beer collection—I personally drank every drop from these cans and bottles in order to catalogue them. How I suffer for my art.

This guide shares a few similarities with my recent post on cataloguing board games. Again, I’m assuming a basic familiarity with MARC, RDA, and the principles of cataloguing. This is also not an exhaustive, official, top-cataloguing-body-sanctioned guide. It’s simply how I would do it, and your mileage may vary. I hope you find it useful!

Fixed fields

For my collection of beer cans, I decided not to create a MARC record for each individual can in the interests of time and usability. So I’ll need a collection-level record for this group of objects that I, the cataloguer, have brought together. I’ve chosen to create one record for each brewery. Leader/07 is ‘r’ for realia (or ‘Three-dimensional artifact or naturally occurring object’ if you want to get personal) and Leader/08 is ‘c’ for collection. If I decided to create item-level records instead, I would use the far more common ‘m’ for monograph/item.

The 008 field uses the Visual Materials specifications. The important field here is 008/33 Type of Visual Material, which again is ‘r’ for realia. Code the date, government publication, etc fields as appropriate. Most other fields will either be blank or ‘n’ for not applicable. You can code 008/22 Target Audience as ‘e’ for Adult if you want a laugh, but I don’t think simply viewing an empty beer can is innately harmful to children, so feel free to leave that one blank if you wish.

Access points and title

Generally-speaking, collection-level records don’t come with a ready-made title, so be prepared to invent one. Something along the lines of ‘[brewery name] can and bottle collection’ is appropriate.

I thought long and hard about whether to use the brewery as a 110 or 710 (i.e. main or added entry), considering the collection is made up for cataloguing convenience. In the end, I figured the brewery is responsible for both the content of the resource (the beer) and its manifestation as a physical object (the can), so I decided to give the brewery the 110 and use the relator term $e creator (because $e manufacturer wasn’t quite right). There’s probably something in the RDA Toolkit about this, but I don’t have access to it so I didn’t read it! If you feel a 710 would be more appropriate, or if you want to slide into my Twitter DMs and tell me I’m totally wrong about access points, go right ahead 🙂 NB: This does not negate the need for a suitably descriptive collection title.

If using item-level records, put the beer’s name (if it has one) in 245 $a and the variety in 245 $b, as in 245 $a Forty acres : $b pale ale. If the beer doesn’t have a specific name, put the variety in 245 $a. This is another reason to use the brewery as the main entry, as the authorised access point will then include the brewery: $a Frogstomp Brewers. $t Imperial stout.

Optionally, you could create a 490/830 series entry, if you expect to have multiple collections of this type and feel it would be useful to bring them all together. Suggestions include ‘[library name] beer can and bottle collection’ or ‘Breweries of [place] realia collection’.

Descriptive cataloguing

This is where the fun happens! You’ll want to be as descriptive and detailed as possible, given that these beer cans and bottles may well be unique to your library.

Start off by describing the cans in a 300: how many you have, what they look like, and how big they are. For example: $a [number] cans : $b various colours, $c 7 cm diameter x 13 cm.

While I am usually the sort of cataloguer who hates using 500 General Note fields, for special collections like these 500s are where it’s at. All the interesting little details will go here: things like additional can or bottle text (that isn’t clearly a title or variety), logos, motifs or other graphic design elements, and/or a short blurb about the collection itself.

Record the beers’ titles and varieties in a 505 Contents Note, like a table of contents. If it’s useful, consider including the colour or other identifying detail of the can or bottle in square brackets (to clarify that this information is not derived from transcribing the can itself).

As mentioned above, the brewery produces both the beer and the cans, so record details of manufacture in 264 #3, much like you would the publisher of a book.

If I were feeling cheeky, I might consider a 541 Immediate Source of Acquisition Note, if only so I could record 541 0# $a Cataloguer's fridge $c donated privately after responsible drinking. (Probably a good idea to keep in-jokes of this kind for your local system, not the union catalogue.)

Use the 336 Content Type / 337 Media Type / 338 Carrier Type combo of ‘three-dimensional form’ / ‘unmediated’ / ‘object’, respectively, and a 043 geographic indicator if appropriate.

Subject indexing

You’ll almost certainly be including one or both of the topical terms Beer bottles and Beer cans. For these, you’ll need to include the form subdivision $v Specimens at the end of the string. Geographic subdivision is optional.
For example: 650 #0 $a Beer cans [$z Queensland $z Townsville] $v Specimens.
I would also recommend Breweries and Beer industry as a catch all, with geographic subdivision recommended. (I’m including both with an eye to broadening our collection to include distilleries of various kinds, where it would be helpful to disambiguate, say, Distilleries and Gin industry. Feel free to leave out the industry heading if you don’t feel it’s relevant to your needs.)

I really wanted to use a genre heading of some kind. Fortunately Getty’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus provides the terms Aluminum cans and Bottles. Sadly there is no narrower ‘beer bottle’ term (for a usage example, see this item from the Scott Polar Research Institute).

Examples

NB: these are fictional entities and collections, do not search the ANBD, do not pass go, do not collect $200

Collection-level record

000 01078nrc a2200265 i 4500
008 171003s2017    neannn e          rneng d
040 ## $a ABCD $b eng $e rda
043 ## $a u-at-ne
110 2# $a Three Cheers Brewing Company $e creator
245 10 $a Three Cheers Brewing Co can collection.
264 #3 $a Gosford, N.S.W. : $b Three Cheers Brewing Company, $c 2017.
300 ## $a 3 aluminium cans : $b chiefly silver with coloured elements ; 
       $c cylindrical, 7 cm diameter x 13 cm each.
336 ## $a three-dimensional form $b tdf $2 rdacontent
337 ## $a unmediated $b u $2 rdamedia
338 ## $a object $b nr $2 rdacarrier
490 1# $a Breweries of the Central Coast realia collection.
500 ## $a Title devised by cataloguer.
500 ## $a Collection of empty beer cans from Gosford-based brewery 
          Three Cheers.
500 ## $a "Proudly brewed in Gosford"--can.
505 0# $a Forty acres : pale ale [red can] -- 
          The penguin : cool lager [blue can] -- 
          Riptide : IPA [green can].
541 0# $a Cataloguer's fridge 
       $c donated privately after responsible drinking.
650 #0 $a Beer industry $z New South Wales $z Central Coast
650 #0 $a Breweries $z New South Wales $z Central Coast
650 #0 $a Beer cans $v Specimens.
655 #7 $a Aluminum cans. $2 aat
830 #0 $a Breweries of the Central Coast realia collection.

Item-level record

000 01078nrm a2200265 i 4500
008 171003s2017    neannn e          rneng d
040 ## $a ABCD $b eng $e rda
043 ## $a u-at-ne
110 2# $a Frogstomp Brewers $e creator
245 10 $a Imperial stout / $c Frogstomp Brewers.
264 #3 $a Gosford, N.S.W. : $b Frogstomp Brewers, $c 2017.
300 ## $a 1 glass bottle : $b brown with purple label and grey motifs ; 
       $c cylindrical, 6 cm diameter x 23 cm.
336 ## $a three-dimensional form $b tdf $2 rdacontent
337 ## $a unmediated $b u $2 rdamedia
338 ## $a object $b nr $2 rdacarrier
490 1# $a Breweries of the Central Coast realia collection.
500 ## $a From a collection of empty beer bottles from Gosford-based brewery 
          Frogstomp Brewers.
500 ## $a "Darker than midnight"--label on neck of bottle.
541 0# $a Cataloguer's fridge 
       $c donated privately after responsible drinking.
650 #0 $a Beer industry $z New South Wales $z Central Coast
650 #0 $a Breweries $z New South Wales $z Central Coast
650 #0 $a Beer bottles $v Specimens.
655 #7 $a Bottles. $2 aat
830 #0 $a Breweries of the Central Coast realia collection.