Process v. Product

Cataloging is changing, there is no doubt about it. Even as we hold on more tightly by writing rules and guidelines and more theory and more rules and more guidelines, it seems to be slipping through our fingers. Some of the change is coming simply because of globalization. OCLC is not just for American libraries with the money to afford to share data and train catalogers anymore. I work within a department that is traditional (by traditional I mean wealthy, with time to train catalogers, and the resources to keep them, and the culture to respect their contribution to the library world), and one that prides itself on its thorough and thoughtful cataloging. I’m a very lucky cataloger indeed, to work at a place like this. I know that very well.

But we talk a lot about the degradation of cataloging “standards” here. I use quotation marks because I’m not quite sure what that even means anymore. For the purposes of our conversations, of course, it means that what we see in OCLC (or other record clearinghouses) is not what we used to see. Missed punctuation, missed fields, misspellings. Things that, in the heyday of the marriage of MARC and AACRII, would never be missed.  We have a system of hierarchy here, where we hold DLC to the highest standard, and have several libraries we hold as almost as trustworthy, and we turn to those libraries as our trusted sources of cataloging copy. Things are not so clear now, and more work is required all the time to turn OCLC records into records we can use in our catalog.

Now, I think we all realize that we are paddling against the current on this particular problem if we think that we can control the changes that happen all the time in cataloging (and libraries generally). Most of the catalogers here are resigned to it, and we slowly change our own standards so that we don’t have to put as much time into our own work (because there’s always a backlog and it never ends).

My question, though, is…is this a value-neutral change that is occurring? Are we actually losing anything by becoming more lax in our standards? And I do think we’re becoming more lax generally. New metadata standards do not even come *close* to the kind of thoroughness that MARC contains, because they focus on a streamlined feel. Even big metadata standards tend to streamline themselves. I don’t know if this is good or bad or even something that terms like “good” and “bad” should be applied to. We *are* sliding away from strict control of our metadata though, out of necessity and out of a different idea of what we need in order for our metadata to work for us.

I’m interested in where cataloging is going, and technology has always been an aid to a cataloger, but I hate to think that we might lose our dedication to good description because we've committed ourselves to productivity.

PDA

I was posting yesterday about public libraries, and I've been reading about the Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA) model. Apparently this model is kind of a huge and headachey success, and so it's sort of a problem to figure out how exactly libraries want to proceed with it. It's expensive on the one hand, and also so wildly successful that it sort of defies any attempts to get rid of it once it's in place.
For the project I'm working on, we're talking about building libraries in third world countries, in places where there is not a book culture already present. Or at least not for many people. In this kind of scenario, I think that the PDA model will actually work very nicely. You don't have thousands of undergrads, or even hundreds of public library patrons, banging down the door for their chance to print out their own books. I imagine that the acquisitions would happen more slowly, as people get used to the idea that it's even possible to have on-demand books streaming to you on the web.
I'm not an acquisitions librarian, nor a reference librarian, and so I'm not really very knowledgeable about this aspect of libraries. Catalogers usually just take what we're given, and we make it available and hope for the best. This is definitely a new adventure.

Two Things

1.
If you are in the United States, GO VOTE ALREADY.

2.
Someone came to this blog yesterday through the google search "Sirsi sucks" (I'm on the first page!). I find this both amusing and comforting. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who gets a little frustrated with Sirsi.

Drowning

I am drowning in original cataloging. I may not survive. If I'm not back in a week, just assume that the LCSH has finally taken me to the Big Library in the Sky.

Save yourselves!

S56 is Singh

I have been cataloging a lot of books by Indian authors lately. So many in fact that I now know the cutter code for the last name Singh by heart. BY HEART, PEOPLE.

Luckily I am in the home stretch, the last two books of the 40-odd that I have been set to original-catalog.

It says something about the things I get assigned to catalog that I do not know the cutter code for Smith or Johnson or Baker. Nope. No idea. However, I now know Singh and I also know Werner (W47). There are a lot of German authors named Werner.

Another new thing

I'm mostly a cataloger, and sometimes I'm an archivist, and I'm always into structuring organization. And now, let's add to the list: marketing/training.

What?

Yes. I've been put on a team to write manuals, set up trainings on new search tools, and set up usability testing. We're getting one of those new-fangled research discovery tools and I'm apparently going to be part of the implementation, because my "skills" would be useful. I know I shouldn't deride myself, but honestly and truly, even though I'm excited as hell to be included on this, I know nothing about usability testing or training.
I do know something about writing procedures and manuals, though (I've rewritten the procedures and policies at every job I've ever done)....maybe they'll let me take a stab at that. Subtext: please don't make me do statistical analyses. That will end in heartache for everyone.

Information literacy

I read The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship by Merrilee Proffitt and Jennifer Schaffner.

It was good, I recommend anyone interested in the connections between special collections and users check it out. But it has this fatal flaw that made me, at the end of the article, just sigh. Why is it always the librarian's fault that faculty don't care about teaching their students to be researchers? Why do we have to make sure that we "don't embarrass" the faculty? I've never seen a faculty member go out of their way to keep from embarrassing a librarian (or anyone else, for that matter). I suppose I'm jaded, but it always gets me that we're supposed to treat PhDs like they're made of glass. Yes, I understand that we are a service industry, but in reality, so are teachers of all kinds. The quote from the faculty member at Temple, at the beginning of the article, was what really got me thinking--they said that it's a waste of time to teach information literacy. Really? What if I called it "research skills"? Would that make a difference?

The article didn't talk at all about how librarians might get faculty to start learning about research strategies to pass on to their own students. Maybe this is like the medical profession's problem: experienced doctors are unwilling to allow new doctors to have normal hours, because the experienced doctors didn't get any breaks when they were new, so why should these young whippersnappers. I feel like many faculty members are perfectly willing to let their students flounder about in a sea of information, without teaching them a thing about doing research. All the while, the students are floundering way more than their teachers ever did, because we are, at present, drowning in information.

In my last job, the information literacy librarian was starting to tackle this problem, by training the faculty in new research strategies and how to teach others how to use the technologies that now exist. She realized that she couldn't get to every student, and that having one hour per semester with one class to talk about library resources wasn't helping anyone. You can't teach that many students when you have a small staff. But you CAN teach the faculty, which represents a much smaller population. She also embedded herself in one class, but that took probably 10 hours of her weekly work, which is not really viable for most libraries. Her work with the faculty was by far the most promising, but I'm sure that somehow she "embarrassed" some of them. Quel horreur.

Anyway, it's an interesting article, and I guess since it got me thinking about all of this information literacy stuff, it did its job.

The career question

I think the hardest thing about having a career is not letting it define your life. I'm pretty young, but have had a good career so far. I like where my career is going. But. If I were to have a child, I think I would leave my career to "take care of the kids." I know that this sounds crazy to at least some people (judging from the looks of thinly-veiled horror on their faces), but for me it makes a lot of sense. I just know that I would rather raise my kids myself than hand them over to anyone else (no matter how awesome they are).

But this puts me at an odd crossroads as to my career. If I define myself by the work I do, then leaving my career is basically to put my entire life on hold for a child. I think I need to tweak that mentality, though. My life isn't on hold. It's still happening, whether it's being recognized in the workplace or not.

I don't like the idea that the only way to live a meaningful life is to have a career and become well-known in my field. I don't like the idea for men anymore than I do for women; I think both are wrongheaded. Why is someone like Ronald Reagan considered more successful than my grandfather, who ran his own farm for 50 years?

The problem, of course, is taking all that societal training and throwing it away. Finding a way to define myself without the need to have a "career" or something else that puts me on the map as a "successful" person. It's just a hard thing to do. But really, if I were to still be a busy person, who has a garden and takes care of children and is happy and productive and can still find time to learn and participate in society, isn't that enough for the world to recognize that I'm contributing to society?

These questions are tough to answer.

I'm Out

Dear Blog,
I'm going away for a week. Don't cry! I promise to be back in the land of the electronic very soon. If my parents' house had any kind of internet connection (or computer), this scenario would look very different.
Keep your chin up,
Scribe

A Fork in the Road

I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't a fundamental difference between scholars and practitioners that has always been there, and I have been denying.
When I started my post-high-school career as a "scholar" (I use the term loosely, since I was after all but a humble undergraduate), I put my professors up on a pedestal. That was wrong of me, of course, because scholars and professors are certainly respectable, but they are not Gods. They are just people who happen to do very well at analysis of different kinds of data, who also happen to be very good at writing papers and books. A small skill-set, to be sure. The other thing that characterizes these educated souls, is that they are, at core, not interested in practice.
That's a not a pejorative statement, by the way. Why? Because when you spin it the OTHER way, and say that most practicing librarians are not interested in creating theory, no one seems to mind.
Anyway, while I was in undergrad, I put these people up very high, and I put practitioners at some sort of "lower" rung. When I got to graduate school, I finally started seeing that it wasn't a hierarchy, but rather a difference of opinion about how it was best to spend one's time.
The longer I work with "academics", the more I see that this basic divide is a real problem for any kind of project between practicing professionals and the theoreticians. Why? Because the theoreticians say "we want X" and the professionals say "Oh. Well, X isn't actually possible." And the theoreticians say "but you asked us what we wanted!"
Now, I don't think that either side is "right" in this particular debate, because on the one hand, you can say that the theoreticians aren't grounded enough to see that what they desire and what they can have are different, but you could just as easily say that the practitioners aren't allowing themselves to dream enough in order to innovate.
So the two sides are constantly at loggerheads, and it takes some very adept people to keep them both happy and productive and working towards a common goal. And it's so, so easy to put these two groups against each other. "Their heads are in the clouds!" "They just don't want to change!" And neither of those mentalities are constructive, and neither of those mentalities are true.
I think we see this all the time. The Working Group for the Future of Bibliographic Control is a great example. Well, not them, per se, but the response to them. We have the very, very practical side saying that we need to scrap RDA and just focus on cataloging, and we have the extreme other side who are completely content to just "try it out" and let things run their course, because hey, why not?
There are more examples out there. They're always there.

Newsflash: libraries aren't cool

I want to explore an idea.

I've read about four blog posts in the past week that talk about how libraries are going to manage to keep our users "interested" in libraries (of course, there was also a nay-sayer who remarked "they're already uninterested"). We want to make our catalogs more like Amazon, encourage social tagging, et cetera et cetera. But WHY?

If we've already resigned ourselves to the idea that not everyone in the world, or even most people in the world, care about libraries, why are we fighting so hard? Libraries have never ever been for everyone. They've been for scholars, for researchers, for the rich (who, subsequently, have lots of free time to be scholars and researchers). Why is this a bad thing? Is it because we're disenfranchising people? Do the people feel disenfranchised when they're denied access to a college library? They already don't want to come in, but I suppose people feel like they just need to go somewhere when they're not allowed. So keeping all these libraries open to the public is probably only keeping people away. They'd be banging down the doors if they felt like their rights were being infringed upon and we were trying to keep them out.

Anyway, that's not my point, really. My point is that we're trying to make libraries the coolest place around, where everyone will flock and love books and reading. But libraries have NEVER been that way, and the majority of people have NEVER been that keen on reading. I feel like we're trying to make people think that the library is something it isn't. At the core, libraries are about providing knowledge to a group of people (be it the public or a select group). But as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him read.

Why are we trying to be like Amazon? Because people like Amazon better than they like libraries? Is this a popularity contest? I've never really found Amazon's search interface any more efficient than anyone else's--but people like Amazon because it allows them to buy lots of useless junk for themselves. A library will never offer that kind of service. A library, even with a cool interface and lots of gadgets, will still just offer you books and multimedia, for 2 weeks. Sure it's free, but you still go to a library to LEARN. No one goes to Amazon to learn, they go there to shop.

I know that public libraries were started as a means of "educating" the people of the nation who were not "privileged" enough to get education on their own. But no one asked the people if they wanted it. And since all things are self-selecting, libraries will continue to have problems with attracting patrons because people self-select themselves out of going to the library, or learning, or being engaged in their world, or doing research. Knowing what's best for people isn't always enough to get them to come to the library. And I'm sorry to say, adding folksonomies and social tagging and bright lights and chat windows isn't really enough to get them to come to the library, either, because you can't play video games, shop, or eat food at the library.

Don't get me wrong, I know that libraries serve a very unique and important role in our world--the preservation of knowledge is one of the most needful things, especially in today's society where we throw everything away. And if we're going after new search strategies and technology for the pursuit of that knowledge, then I'm all for it. But...if we're pursuing this new technology just so that we can feel like we're "cool", then I think we're doing it for the wrong reasons, and in any case, that technology will probably fail to do what we want it to. I hate to break it to everyone, but libraries just aren't cool. Important, yes; cool, no.

In Which I Ramble A Lot

I've been really busy these past few days....you know, cataloging everything. I've been cataloging a lot of German-language material, which you might find laughable once you hear that I don't actually speak German. Not very well, anyway. It's gotten to the point where I sigh in relief when something crosses my desk that is in French. FRENCH. So you know how desperate my situation has become.

Really, though, this is a great exercise in cataloging. It's very hard, but it forces me to understand the book in my hand thoroughly before attempting to do analysis of it. Luckily for these books, I've been cataloging in German for awhile, ever since my first professional library job, in fact. Again, let's recap: I don't speak German except in cases of ordering Turkish kebabs at the Christmas market in Aachen. Since that went well, though, I figure I'm good.

So besides the cataloging, I've been simultaneously working on creating html versions of our cataloging manual, and continuing to sit in on the class that's teaching TEI, and working on that metadata project that at one point ate my entire professional life but has since calmed down a little.

I used to think library work was boring, can you imagine? Funny story: when I started college, "they" wanted me to work in the archives of the college, because I had worked in a state historical archives in high school. What "they" didn't know was that I spent my entire volunteer time alphabetizing request forms by patron name, and shelving microfilm. I actually said to my mother, "I would rather do dishes than work in a library. Libraries are like math--they make my head hurt."

But since I am a conflict-avoider, I went ahead and did what "they" told me to do, which was to work in the archives. And sooner or later I learned that only student workers shelve microfilm, and by my sophomore year I was actually the "senior" worker in the archives, because the archivist moved away. And then I realized that I really liked organizing things. The End.