Yearning for the Good Ol' Days

There’s a discussion on Autocat about interfaces and how they are all different, and basically mourning the loss of the totally-standardized card catalog. Yes, back in the day, a person could roll into a library and go to the card catalog and they would know exactly what they were looking at, and how to use it (if the already knew how to use it). Today, you roll into the library and sit down at the terminal and (these Autocat people say) you will have to “re-learn” the catalog in order to do any research.

I have a very basic and negative reaction to this kind of thinking. Okay, yes, it would be great if all the library catalogs everywhere in the world looked the same (I guess? I don't know if I really care that much). However, luckily, we are human beings with the ability to adapt our learning behaviors to fit the task at hand based on past experiences. So while I may not know the catalog I see before me from past experience, I *can* use my past experiences to tell me which searching behavior has worked in the past in my former libraries. And since we catalogers all use the exact same method for creating library metadata, the chances are good that my searching behavior (which was successful before) will succeed again. Maybe the online interface looks different, but there’s still a search box there, and I still see titles and authors when I do a search. I’m still using a qwerty keyboard and a mouse and it’s on a windows operating system (probably), using Chrome (hopefully! I’m biased).

In addition, users *expect* a learning curve when they access an unfamiliar website. If I need to find a tire place, and I see that there is one near me but I have never gone to their website…do I hide under my blankie and say “oh, but I've never been there before, so I will probably mess it up”? No. I click on the URL and I go there and I cast around for a bit and find what I need.

The internet and web-based catalog interfaces have been around for about 15 years now. After all that time, I think our users deserve a bit more credit and a bit more trust.

Alternative subject classifications

So I was cataloging a book on the theory of integral equations (don’t all great stories start this way?), and I had to read the introduction because I love books about math, and the editor mentioned the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) (developed by the American Mathematical Society).

The what now?

So I obviously Googled it. And not only did it lead me to a fascinating system of subject classification for mathematics, it also led me to a sister-classification scheme put out by the ACM, the Computing ClassificationSystem (CCM), and to the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) (released by the American Institute of Physics).

Now, all of these were developed at different times. The PACS was not developed until 1975, but the CCS was released in 1964. It’s unclear, from just a cursory search through the internet, when the MSC was developed, but someone wrote “It’s been around almost as long as the AMS.” The AMS was begun in 1888, so that would be a LONG time.

So what do they do? Well, fair reader, they are used to classify academic papers so that poor researchers can make heads or tails of what the author wants their work to relate to. I personally think this is genius. Let the author tell you what their work is about! There is only one primary subject class allowed per paper (for the MSC, I don’t know about the others), but there may be several secondary subjects assigned if the author feels that it is pertinent.

I cannot believe I’ve never heard of these systems before, but I am thoroughly fascinated. The whole idea behind allowing, or even *requiring* the author to classify their own research is such a good one. I used to do that, when I was an original cataloger and was doing original cataloging for professors at the university. I would just email them, tell them what I was doing, and ask if they had any special requests for the subjects of their books. First, it generated a ton of good will from the faculty, but it also helped me, because we had a lot of philosophy faculty and no matter how good of a cataloger you are, it's hard to figure out what they're talking about sometimes. 

Anyway, these schemes are something interesting and useful and different.

Cataloger's Judgment Gone Awry?

While working today, a reference librarian handed me a problem. She had a patron come up to her and ask for the "Sacra Pagina." He was not talking about the Bible, but rather an 18-volume commentary, prepared by an international group of scholars, of the New Testament. When the reference librarian looked online at our catalog, she first searched by "title keyword". Eleven titles came up. And not the specific one the patron was looking for (he was looking for the Gospel of Luke). So she did a series keyword search. All eighteen records came up, including Luke.
So she sent me an email, asking if this problem was "worth fixing?".

I hate it when local practice gets tied up in OCLC. At our institution, since we are relatively small, we do not do a lot of cleanup to the MARC that comes down to us from OCLC. We check for subject headings, good call numbers, and sundry, but our copy catalogers do not typically check for the appearance of 830s when they see a 490, or check to see if it's appropriate that there be an 830. We do rely on OCLC and "good" copy to get the records we need.

In this particular case, I could see the multi-volume set being cataloged as one work, with 18 items attached, and no series entry. Or it can go the other way: 18 works, all with 490s and 830s, and one item apiece. In OCLC, both options are represented. However, whether or not there is actually an 830 depends on who created the record. DLC definitely put in the 830, but they only created three of the eighteen individual-volume records. The only reason I see for not putting in the 830 in this case is that some institutions felt that they needed 830s and others felt that they didn't need anything beyond the 490. And then OTHER institutions decided that it should be cataloged as a multi-volume set under a single title. For the record, when I did some research on when it's appropriate to use an 830, it became clear to me that this multi-volume work definitely merits an 830. As is often the case, Library of Congress was correct in its assignation of MARC fields.

"Cataloger's judgment" does not do justice here. I feel that this is has to be a case of local practice influencing the judgment of catalogers. And I get it. If you are an academic library at an institution that does not do a lot of theology, you would be much more likely to catalog this thing as a multi-volume work with a single bibliographic entry. Who needs lots of records for this one thing? However, if you are at an institution where theology is relatively important, you are more likely to make each volume its own record, since a researcher looking for the Book of John would probably search for Book of John, not Sacra Pagina, no matter how famous the Sacra Pagina is. Unless you happen to work for an institution where theology is very important, and the researchers know exactly what the Sacra Pagina is, and if you have unreliable 830-placement it means that they can't find what they're looking for when they do a title keyword search.

And other librarians here wonder why I claim to have such a very long training period for my copy catalogers.

What my reference librarian found this morning

So this morning I come walking into the library, coffee in one hand, prepared to walk right back to my desk and commence the wonderful and magical work of fixing something in the ILS. The reference librarian on duty (and in fact, the head reference librarian) yells at me. Yes, she yelled. Yes, I went over and said "Ma'am, we are in a LIBRARY." We both laugh.
Anyway, she directs my attention to this subject heading, and asks "what the heck is this? It's just a number. And there's a whole bunch of them."

651 $7 $a7.150.$2gtt

Yeah. There it was. The dreaded $2gtt marking on that 651. "Gemeenschappelijke Trefwoordenthe-saurus (GTT)" (Joint Subject Headings Thesaurus). In other words: the Dutch.

I'll admit it: I badmouth the GTT like nobody's business. Mostly because I find it to be horrible. What kind of subject heading is "History"? I know that you catalogers out there are with me. It's ridiculous. This is the Dutch National System, not Jan's World of Paperbacks. Surely they can do better? I mean, this is the country that built the dykes, that produced the Dutch Masters, held England and Spain at bay while they built one of the greatest international corporations in the world. Subject headings should be a breeze, am I right?
Anyway, this was a new one, but I wasn't surprised. A number for a subject heading? Why not? Why not just move on to pictograms, GTT?

But really, I am just poking fun at what is really a system that is not designed to be the LCSH. Yes, I made a joke of it to the reference librarian, but at least now when she sees something like that, she will know from whence it came. If you, gentle reader, are interested in knowing more about the GTT, which is really just an index of very general terms and not like the LCSH in either form or function, there's a good article here.

A Loaded Question

From Autocat this afternoon:
"Some staff here are convinced that "you
can't find anything" in our catalog. That it has become an unnecessary
expense since most patrons browse the collection anyway. If so, is it
the fault of the catalog, or the untrained user? Or both?"

What a huge question to just post nonchalantly on a listserv. What amuses me, though, is that this is the question at the heart of all the new-fangled discovery tools like Aquabrowser and iBistro and all that nonsense. This is a HUGE QUESTION, Palm Beach County Library System, and no one really knows the answer to it. In fact, I would argue that these questions are the very core of all the changes going on in the library world right now. I wonder if she'll get any responses. I certainly do not have the finger endurance to type out the kind of response that she needs....although, to be fair, probably no one does. But if I did, it would start out with "When Yahoo and Google started creating their own search engines in 1996..." and we'd just go on from there. My response would probably end with "and no one knows, even to this day, if the problem is the catalog or the untrained user, or both. Although I figure it's both."

Mapping thoughts

It's been a long time, blog. No, really, like 2.5 weeks! In my defense, I'm coming up on 4 months pregnant and have been feeling "under the weather" (an understatement) for some time. It's hard to think about libraries and metadata and whatnot when I want to throw up all the time.

ANYWAY.

One of my reference librarian peeps introduced me to a website the other day: Mindomo. It's a way to map research, or brainstorm, or just organize information. It uses Flash (of course) because nothing is simple these days, but it does allow you to put links and documents and graphics all into your map of whatever it is you want to look at. You can even make your maps public for others to reference...if you go to the browse tab at the top of the site it takes you to where the public ones are located.

At any rate, I think that it's a very cool take on the "brainstorming" maps we used to draw in middle school. And certainly useful for information professionals who have lots of information to organize and who would prefer to create a digital map of their stuff rather than just one in their head, or in a finding aid or something. I certainly hope to use it for future projects--maybe it could help us determine what kind of practices we're going to impose on materials before we start working on them, in a more intuitive and visual way. Or maybe I'll just finally get around to creating a map of the relationships between early modern philosophers. Whichever.

Searchability

Interoperability is a buzz word. A really, really important buzzword (unlike, say, "paradigm"). And I feel like I'm banging my head against it. I know the old saying: "There's the right way, and then there's our way." I think that this applies to this institution's approach to digitization projects.
Now, don't get me wrong: this place is the most awesomely together place I've ever worked with regards to digitization projects. They have very clear projects and expectations, if perhaps not quite enough staff to go around. But that's a common problem everywhere, and we all know it.

But the more we talk about this new project, the less happy I am with the way we're communicating. The TEI initiative isn't meshing with the metadata initiative, and I feel like, while they're not exactly working at cross-purposes, they're certainly duplicating work and ultimately making things harder for a user. The TEI people have no concept of controlled vocabularies, and the metadata folks are certainly not going to give into the natural language camp, and the more I think about it, the less I like the idea of one side doing their thing and the other side doing their thing, isolated.

So how do we get ourselves out of this predicament?

I'm teaching a class soon on the basics of cataloging for non-librarians. I'm hoping that this helps to clarify, for these natural-language people, just where we metadata folks are coming from in our need for controlling everything, and also how beneficial it can be to control terms and names and places. I think that many users never really understand how much controlled headings help them. Someone the other day asked me why we "bother" with controlling names or subjects, "when Google is right there and you can just let the software do that stuff for you." I think this person didn't really know what he was suggesting. THe beauty of the controlled heading is that I can put in something like "Dostoevsky" and get all the OTHER versions of Dostoevsky's name as well. Or that I can type in "New Amsterdam" and get the references to New York City. These are things that people think "software" can do, but in reality, it can't. Someone still has to map these things out in order for the references to exist.

So when the TEI people say "well, can't we just put Emperor Maximilian" and everyone will know what they're looking at?" I can honestly say "No--because what about the people who just write Maximillian, or the people who are looking for the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, or the people who are looking for the "emperor" of Mexico? Or the prince of Baden? Or Maximilian the saint?"

 If there's an easy way to solve the problem of searchability...I can't wait to learn about it. But for now, we're going to have to settle for interoperability, and making our metadata and TEI mesh in very concrete ways. And we're not at that point yet, unfortunately.

I Know What [Boys] Want

While reading the intrepid Cataloging and Classification Quarterly this quarter (which is an awesome one, by the way), I was intrigued by the first article, and the recapping of a report by Karen Calhoun (the recapping was done by Deanna Marcum). Two things really caught my eye.

Now, let's be fair; I didn't read Calhoun's report, because I was reading what Deanna thought of Karen's report. But it seems pretty fair, all things considered. Oh, but first, the title of the report is "The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools."

So, moving along, I thought two things were interesting enough to make little comments in the margins.

The first thing that caught my eye was her assessment of the hurdles to expansion of library catalogs. Calhoun says that the obstacles to expansion are actually coming from the unwillingness of catalogers to change. Apparently we're resistant to simplifying cataloging procedures, and administrators have an "inability to base priorities on how users behave and what they want."

Ouch! We sound like Luddites.

The other thing that I found interesting was her analysis of Google's relation to cataloging. She sees a huge opportunity for things like Google Book to integrate catalogs with open Web discovery, but then says that "finding and obtaining items from library collections on the open Web is not a practical alternative for students and scholars."

I think this is hilarious. Now, I'm keeping firmly in mind that this report was written almost a full 2 years ago. However, I think most librarians probably still feel this way. That online search engines just couldn't possibly be good enough for users to find online books and such. But this is contradictory, because she just said up at the top that cataloging departments could really benefit from "simplifying" their cataloging. So we have to ask ourselves, do we really know what users will and will not use? Students especially will go to the ends of the digital Earth to find something online rather than physically walk into a library. It's like when I was starting college back in the late '90s, and the thought of using a paper periodical was like the most horrifying thing I could imagine. I would do anything to avoid making copies of dusty old bound periodicals.

So do we know what users want? Or do we just know what we think they want? Is this one those "father knows best" scenarios, where we deride new technology (again) while we continue to push our own ideas of what "searching" is supposed to be? It's discouraging that even the people who study the most about user behavior and organizational theory...are subject to their own biases about what constitutes "good" and "bad" and "real" search strategies. Our users will just push on without us, you know. And someday, even the Great and Powerful Google will be left in their dust.

The "serious" researcher

"...All books are written to express man's ideas and libraries are formed because other men wish to read and study those ideas. The cataloger's main business to make the collection of books and materials accessible to all who have a legitimate claim on its resources."--ALA Cataloging rules, 1949.

One of the old cataloging manuals here at the university has that quote on the very front page; a reminder of the goals of a cataloger. Considering that even in the 1950s, the department used students to do the cataloging work, its very interesting what this quote represents. The cataloger who put that in there wanted to give his workers a sense of the purpose of cataloging, not just the drudgery of filing catalog cards. "men wish to read and study": yes, that's why we're here. To serve them.

Ah, but now the tricky part comes in! The cataloger is supposed to serve "all who have a legitimate claim on its resources."
In the research I've been doing on early-20th century libraries, this idea of legitimacy comes up all the time. In 1930s statistics for one special library, the librarian only reports the statistics of "serious" researchers. He never defines what that means, of course, so I am left to speculate wildly on what that might mean. What constitutes serious research? Is an undergraduate student "serious"? In other words, does this 20-year-old have a "legitimate" claim on resources?
While I suppose that when I was 18, I was hardly worth any librarian's time, I do like to snuggle myself to sleep at night thinking that librarians are no longer like this. We no longer assign value judgments to our users' intentions or skill level. But guess what? I totally did that JUST YESTERDAY.
To set the stage: one of our reference librarians called me up, and asked me to come out to the desk. She asked me to put on my "archivist" hat. So out I come, and she shows me what she's been working on. It's a "currency" progression (currency as in whether or not something is out-of-date, not whether you can spend it), and archives of course falls to the back of the pack. Then she shows me a "reliability" progression, and archives are just one step up from gossip! I am taken aback. We discuss this for some time, and it becomes clear that all she's trying to do is help the students understand how subjective archival materials can be, especially when they are manuscripts. But what about business records! I want to shout. Anyway, I think over the problem, and we talk some more, and we decide to remove archives entirely from both of her progressions. Why? Because these students that she will talk to, because they are not as advanced as we great librarians, will be confused and will make bad value judgments on archives if we leave it in the list.
Who am I to say that all of these students are idiots? Or worse, uncaring of their ignorance? Surely they would like to learn all about archives? Or am I just superimposing my own love of archives onto them?
I don't know where I meant to be going with this, but it troubles me that while I talk about how "backwards" librarians used to be, with their notions of the serious or un-serious researcher, I myself make value judgments on our users all the time.

Networking and Subject Headings

I got to meet some new people yesterday. All of them were technical service librarians/digital librarians. And twice I heard the same comment/question: "What do you think about folksomonies?"
Um...?
I think that they're a fad? I think that people only use them because they have no idea that other subject searching is available? I think that LCSH needs to stop being a browsing list?
I got the feeling, though, that the idea of controlled language "death" is very scary for librarians.
And then TODAY, I see this:
University of Chicago Libraries

Which is EXACTLY what I've been thinking about! Do a search in the UC catalog now, and you get not only the list of things the catalog thinks you might want, but the ability to refine that search within the LC classification schema. We have the classification scheme already laid out for us, which roughly corresponds to the LCSH , and why not use it to help make LCSH more hierarchical? I've been gushing over AAT since as long as I can remember, because it takes the headings and makes them hierarchical. I can actually use the headings to help me find more headings! What a concept!
Now, obviously LCSH hasn't always been this way. The books are actually pretty useful when it comes to finding other headings that might be useful. But when everything went online, we really lost that ability. There aren't nearly as many cross-references anymore, or see alsos.
We need to reclaim that heritage, and make our LCSH work FOR us again, instead of against us, and I think that folksonomies will end up following. All people really need is a way to understand a system for them to use it.
I mean, if enough people adopt it, everyone knows what "h8r" means, right? Why not understand subject headings?

Functions of Cataloging

What do I believe a cataloging department is charged to do?

Call me a product of my environment (and people do!), but I do not think that new technologies are dragging cataloging departments away from their primary responsibilities. As an information organizer, I see my role in any place to be one of facilitation. Although cataloging departments are not traditionally known for their social and outgoing ways, cataloging itself is about serving the user. Of course, all departments of a library are about serving the user: we are a service industry. And I think that cataloging is no different. All of our systems, all of our rules and notations, are about serving the user and helping him or her to find what they need with as little trouble as possible.

Now, that is not to say that the library catalog is good at this. In fact, I think that in many ways its not that good at all. When even reference librarians complain about the Library of Congress Subject Headings, something is definitely wrong. When I would rather use Google than a library catalog, something has to be wrong. So we're at an intersection—the intersection between traditional cataloging tools, users, and emerging technologies. Because I do not think that our mandate as catalogers has changed; rather, I think that the user has always been at the center of what we do. It’s the technologies that are starting to fall in our laps that will really make a difference in the next few years, and how flexible we can be in response to those.

Some scholars say that libraries have already missed the boat. RDA (Resource Description and Access) is dead before it ever lived, because it is going to be too much like AACRII and not enough like Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Some of the same people have given in to quiet resignation over LCSH, which, because it of its basic opposition to clustering, should have died a long time ago. MARC is too clunky, authority records are useful but may not be widely known enough to make the leap from libraries to other users in the digital world who might find them useful, too.

Other problems also arise as we start to imagine how a library might better use the new resources at hand in the form of metadata schemas. One is that there aren’t that many people in the library world who are thoroughly familiar with all the available resources for digital organization. Unlike traditional cataloging, which has produced thousands of people versant in AACRII and MaRC, there are so many different metadata standards and technologies blooming all the time, that there is very little knowledge transfer in the typical mentor-mentee model. This leads to a lot of reinventing the wheel. Listservs have become the standby community for many of us (I subscribe to at least 7), but so many social networking utilities are clunky and not conducive to actual substantive conversation in the way that typical workshops and classroom environments offered with ease.

Another issue is that the Web has simply not developed along the lines of creating machine-readable documentation. Tim Berners-Lee said “The web has developed most rapidly as a medium of documents for people rather than data and information that can be processed automatically,” and he is absolutely right. Even now, some 4 years after his statement, the semantic web is still growing. Most users notice it only when they type in “real estate” into the google search engine and get maps of all the real estate in a given area, or when they search for a person and get their phone number. These are the beginnings of the semantic web, but so much is left to be done that it seems, at times, insurmountable, especially when one thinks of all the published resources that are out there, unused because they are not accessible via the web. The Principle of Least Effort is alive and well in the Interwebs, and it is not going away anytime soon. The mandate to librarians is to make the numerous diverse collections of materials into one coherent and searchable whole. Although daunting, the institutions that do this (like NCSU’s catalog) will find they have happier and better informed users (not to mention MORE users).

I do think that the role of catalogers is changing, though, even though the mandate remains the same. As we inevitably move away from books and move past other forms of media into more raw data, our means of making it available are changing.

The Rise of the "Web 2.0"

I hate to start talking about the "generation gap", but sometimes it becomes increasingly obvious. I'm not an undergrad anymore, but I still use the tools that lots of undergrads use: blogs, facebook, text messaging, online document handlers, etc etc. I like technology, and I like knowing about the newest things to come out and how people are using them.
But many people insist on using software to do things that could be done so much more effortlessly through the web. They call it "web 2.0" and seem not to understand that it's the same thing as it always was: social interaction. People find the path of easiest communication and then use it until something even more useable comes along.
Why use Blackboard technology when you could be using blogs? Forget emails; use RSS feeds, or even pinging products to send out text messages. This stuff isn't hard; in fact, it's ridiculously easy, because people are thinking of things all the time. Why use a paper or email survey when you can just put a poll into your website that generates automatic results that users can see? Or why use Java-enabled chat rooms when you can use an embedded widget?
The opportunites that are out there, and are free, are amazing, and yet I feel like many people aren't seeing that these are awesome solutions. I blame Windows operating systems on this, because people believe firmly that software is designed to crash. It really isn't, you know. It's supposed to be designed NOT to do that, but Windows probably WAS designed to mess up a lot, so you'd continue to buy the new, "better" version (Java, anyone?).
At any rate, I think it's kind of sad that people feel like they're trapped in boxes of software and ownership, when the web is exploding with things that make ownership and licenses basically irrelevant.