Jay Weitz

Senior Consulting Database Specialist

Home movies from the mid-1950s show a toddler Jay Weitz stamping his Little Golden Books as though he were checking out books from his personal library. Although about two decades later, he ended up as a cataloger in the library of Capital University in Bexley, Ohio, his mother-in-law believed until the day that she died that he stamped books for a living. Since 1982, Jay has been at OCLC where he is currently a Senior Consulting Database Specialist in WorldCat Quality Management. Among Jay’s responsibilities are database quality control for bibliographic records in the visual materials, musical scores, sound recordings, and computer files formats.

He also serves as the OCLC liaison to numerous organizations, including the Music OCLC Users Group (MOUG), Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC), the Cataloging and Metadata Committee (CMC) of the Music Library Association (MLA), the Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA) of the American Library Association (ALA), the MARC Advisory Committee (MAC), and the Standing Committee on Standards of the national Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC). He also sits on the Bibliography Standing Committee of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), represents the IFLA Cataloguing Standing Committee on CC:DA, and is Vice-Chair of IFLA’s Permanent UNIMARC Committee.

He is the author of Cataloger’s Judgment (2004), both editions of Music Coding and Tagging (1990 and 2001), and the cataloging Q&A columns of the MOUG Newsletter and the OLAC Newsletter. Since 1992, catalogers throughout North America and Japan have been subjected to dozens of his workshops. In his vivid fantasy life, Jay has been program annotator for concerts of Chamber Music Columbus since 1981. With Arthur D. Efland, Jay co-authored the history of the organization, Between the Notes: A Sixty Year Journey from Prestige Concerts to Columbus Chamber Music Society to Chamber Music Columbus, published in 2007.

Jay has been a performing arts critic in Central Ohio public radio, print media, and on the web since 1985. He has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, an MLS from Rutgers University, and an MA in Education from Ohio State University. Jay was the recipient of the MOUG Distinguished Service Award in 2004 and OLAC’s Nancy B. Olson Award in 2005. In 2019, he was the recipient of the Music Library Association’s lifetime achievement award and highest honor, the MLA Citation, for reasons that remain mysterious.