Professional Development

On Oct. 30, Leslie attended a webinar hosted by OCLC, detailing OCLC’s preparations for the soon-to-be-released new cataloging rules, RDA (Resource Description and Access), which will succeed AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules), the standard that has been in place for the last 30 or so years.

A poll of webinar attendees, posing the question “How is your institution responding to RDA?”, produced the following responses: 200+ are presently reading material and attending sessions on RDA; 85 are waiting to see how others proceed; 3 are currently changing their cataloging practices; and a small number do not plan to implement RDA.

An attendee asked: Will libraries be forced (by OCLC) to adopt RDA? The answer: No, we can continue to enter data in AACR2 for the forseeable future. The presenters noted that, while RDA has proven controversial in the United States, it has been received more positively in the UK and Australia — prompting OCLC to proceed early with RDA development, to meet the demand of its international clientele.

The planned release date of the RDA online manual is November of 2009 (http://www.rdaonline.org/). In the six months following the manual’s release, a project to test the new rules will be conducted by the three U.S. national libraries (LC, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agriculture Library). A group of test participants, representing libraries and archives of all types, as well as cataloging agencies (firms that provide cataloging for other institutions), will work with a core set of materials, representing all the major categories, plus other materials usual to the participating institutions, cataloging them in both AACR2 and RDA. Qualitative and quantitative feedback will be solicited, and the test results will be made public. OCLC presenters noted that, since the testers will be working in OCLC’s live production mode, we will see RDA records contributed to OCLC products such as WorldCat.

Catalogers will no doubt already be aware of the planned changes to the MARC21 record format, in preparation for RDA (http://www.loc.gov/marc/formatchanges-RDA.html). OCLC plans to make the new fields, codes, etc. available in Connexion (OCLC’s input interface for catalogers) before the testing period. Connexion users will be alerted in a future Technical Bulletin.

A webinar attendee asked if OCLC would be providing a new data-input template for RDA. While OCLC is currently working on an interface that incorporates RDA’s controlled vocabulary, the presenters noted that participants in the testing project would be working primarily with MARC21 records, and that “most of us will be working with MARC for some time to come.” They recommend that we follow the test reports, and wait for the results, before jumping in and implementing RDA.

A recording of the webinar will be posted on OCLC’s website (http://www.oclc.org/us/en/default.htm).

Redesigning Technical Services Workflows, Saturday morning, July 11, 2009:

Here are some brief highlights — please feel free to chat with me if you want to know more. Please note that these speakers are both from much larger libraries than ZSR.

Arlene Klair, Adaptive Cataloging & Database Mgmt Group Leader, University of Maryland Libraries

• Original catalogers now primarily work on high value gifts and special collections since implementing shelf ready with the main domestic book vendor.
• A product called OCLC Classify helps copy catalogers do “nasty cuttering” that was previously done by original catalogers. The product hyperlinks to other library catalogs that hold to the title to be able to see how they cuttered and then you can link to your own catalog to see how it fits your collection.
• They use Connexion for batch loading, using save files on a shared drive.
• They use a commercial service called Bibliographic Notification to upgrade bibs (especially CIP); an internal study conducted some time ago showed that the lag for the upgrades with this service was only about 3 months and Arlene suspects that now the lag might only be 2 months.

Rick Anderson, Associate Director for Scholarly Resources and Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah

Rick indicated immediately that he was repeating much of his earlier talks in other venues, but I thought it was worth hearing again because he’s making good points for consideration. You’ll notice that he frequently repeated a couple of themes:

There are 4 areas where “Technical Services needs retooling.”

1. Books
2. Serials
3. Cataloging
4. Collection Development

• Consolidation — put staff together for serials and monographs into one organizational unit [ZSR is already there in the sense he meant it.]
• Simplification [of processes] — use shelf-ready, don’t examine every book, duplicate call numbers don’t cause the patron to fail in retrieving the right book
• Simplification — drop check-in, binding, and claiming for print journals and focus on doing things that get the patron access when the patron needs it
• Outsourcing routine items and redirecting in-house catalogers to special items — Marriott Library has all monographic purchases shipped to OCLC first to be cataloged and to make them shelf-ready; catalogers at the library now spend time on the library’s own digital and special collections.
• Simplification — completeness and accuracy of the records in the OPAC is not the point; connection of the patron to the item is the point. The OPAC is now mainly the means of retrieving items instead of discovery. Look at your catalog logs and see if known item searches are the most frequent type of search
• Use patron-driven selection. “Patrons know; librarians guess.” We now have tools and ability to supply the patron needs quickly instead of having to guess ahead of time. Pay the $20 for overnight Fed Ex of the $18 book in Amazon that was requested by a patron instead of spending the money on things that will never circulate. Circulation rate is down 53% and reshelving is down 73% since 1997, at U. of Utah. 50% of librarian-selected titles never circulated. (This was calculated with student enrollment factored in.) Purchase ILL requests instead of borrowing the items. Buy on-demand (as with e-books). Marriott Library purchased an Espresso Book Machine to do print on demand (through Baker & Taylor’s Lightning Source) and patrons have the option to buy a print-on-demand item to keep or the library will add it to the collection.

ALCTS Governance

The majority of my conference was confined to ALCTS governance.

I participated in my last ALCTS Budget & Finance (B&F) meetings and related Continuing Resource Section Executive Committee meeting. I was required to resign from this early since I won the election for Chair of Acquisitions Section. It looks like ALCTS is on track to end the Fiscal Year in the black. Some good decisions to steer towards webinars and online continuing education courses (such as the Fundamentals of Acquisitions and the Fundamentals of Electronic Resource Acquisitions) are paying off. Final figures will be late due to ALA Annual Conference being later than usual, which leaves some degree of uncertainty, but at least the budget is on track at this point. B&F discussed how to determine pricing for the electronic version of Library Resources and Technical Services (aka LRTS, the research journal of ALCTS) - discussion to be continued with expertise from the LRTS board and the Continuing Resources Section.

At the request of the current leaders of Acquisitions Section (AS), I stepped in ahead of my assumption of duties as Vice Chair/Chair Elect of AS and helped run the All Committee meeting on Saturday afternoon. I learned that the section doesn’t have many long-timers who know the ropes right now and that many people need to be helped with understanding their roles within the section. I started talking with section members who aren’t currently involved, hoping to get a head start on the appointment process. Starting in the fall and continuing through March, I’ll be learning where committee vacancies are and making appointments.

Big changes are happening in the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) Division of ALA. ALCTS is introducing a New Members Interest Group for those who have been members 5 years or less to have an opportunity to learn more about participation in ALCTS. ALCTS will be doing strategic planning in synch with ALA and internally is interested in reorganizing to fit today’s needs. For example, there will now be a Continuing Education Committee (to instigate design of more courses like the Fundamentals of… mentioned above). These agenda items will impact the work in the individual sections in the coming year. For example, each section has an Education Committee that needs to realign it’s work to fit with having a Division-level Continuing Education Committee comprised of members-at-large instead of the chairs of the section committees. There was quite a bit of discussion about continuing to have a Midwinter Conference or not and the impacts if there were not a meeting in January.

Looks like I’m embarking on an interesting 3 year odyssey in the leadership of Acquisitions Section.

I’m back from this year’s annual conference of the Music Library Association, held in Chicago (during a snowstorm) Feb. 17-21. This year I also attended the pre-conference hosted by MOUG (Music OCLC Users Group). Some highlights:

Sound Recordings and Copyright

Tim Brooks of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections described the ARSC’s work lobbying Congress to reform US copyright law on pre-1972 sound recordings. These recordings are not covered by federal law, but are often governed by state law, which tends to give copyright holders, in Tim’s words, “absolute control.” Tim cited some startling statistics: of all recordings made in the 1940s-70s, only 30% have been made available by the copyright holders; of recordings made in the 1920s-30s, only 10% are available; and of the enormous corpus of ethnic and traditional music from all over the world that was recorded by Columbia and Victor in the early years of the 20th century, only 1% is available. Because US copyright law for sound recordings is the most restrictive in the world, early recordings of American artists are currently legally available in other countries but not in the US — which means that American libraries and archives are unable to preserve this portion of our own heritage.

In response, the ARSC has made the following reccomendations:

• Place pre-1972 recordings under a single federal law.
• Harmonize US copyright law with that of other countries.
• Legalize use of “orphaned” works (whose copyright holders cannot be identified).
• Permit use of “abandoned” works, with compensation to the copyright holders.
• Permit “best practices” digitization for preservation. Libraries and archives are the most likely to preserve early recordings (they have a better track record on this than the recording companies themselves) and the least likely to re-issue recordings (so they’re no financial threat to copyright holders).

Of ARSC’s experiences lobbying Congress members, Tim reports that many were simply unaware of the situation, but were sympathetic when informed; that libraries are seen as non-partisan and a public good, “the guys in the white hats”; and that there is now much “soft” support in Congress. Other ARSC activities include a “white paper” for the Obama administration, and the establishment of an organization called the Historical Recording Coalition for Access and Preservation (HRCAP) to further lobbying efforts.

In another copyright session, attendees and speakers offered some good tips for approaching your legal counsel re digitization projects:

• Present your own credentials (copyright workshops you’ve attended, etc.) pertaining to libraries and copyright.
• Cite specific passages of the law (section 108, 110, etc.)
• Show you’ve done due diligence (e.g., you’ve replaced LPs with CD re-issues where available; you’ve determined other LPs are in deteriorating condition, etc.)
• Try to persuade counsel to adopt a “risk assessment” approach (i.e., just how likely is it that a copyright holder will challenge you in this case) versus the more typical “most conservative” approach.
• File a “contemporaneous writing” — a memo or other document, written at the outset of a digitization project, in which you explain why you believe that you are acting in good faith. This will go a long way towards protecting you if you are in fact challenged by a copyright holder.

Is the Compact Disc Dead?

This was the question addressed by a very interesting panel of speakers, including a VP of Digital Product Strategy at Universal Music Group; the CEO of the Cedille recording label; a concert violinst (Rachel Barton Pine); a former president of the American Symphony Orchestra League; and a music librarian at Northwestern U.

The panel quickly cited a number of reasons to believe that the CD remains a viable format: among these, the universal human desire to own a physical artifact “to give and to show”; the ability to listen on room speakers, not just earbuds; violinst Pine noted that she sells and autographs some 40-70 of her CDs after each performance, that people enjoy the personal contact with the artist, and relish being able to take home a souvenir of the concert. Flaws of downloadable releases were cited in comparison: garbled indexing, making identifying and retrieving of classical works difficult; frequent lack of program notes to provide historical context; the inferior audio quality of compressed files. Changes in student behavior were also noted: in online databases, students tend to retrieve only selected works, or excerpts of works; there doesn’t seem to be the inherent incentive to browse like that offered by physical albums, with the result that students don’t develop as much in-depth knowledge of a composer’s works. On the other hand, the reduced cost of digital distribution has enabled smaller orchestras and other groups to reach a larger audience.

Concern was expressed over an increasing trend among major labels to release performances only in the form of downloadable files, often with a license restricted to “end user only” — preventing libraries from purchasing and making available these performances to their users. The panel proposed that performers and IAML (the International Association of Music Libraries) put pressure on the record companies. Alternative approaches? CDs-on-demand: Cedille’s boss sees this as a growing trend. Also, consortial deals with individual record companies: OhioLink has recently done one with Naxos.

Finally, a concern was expressed about the aggregator model of audio-steaming databases: that these hamper libraries’ responsiveness to local user needs, and the building of the unique collections important for research. The music library community needs to negotiate for distribution models that enable individual selection for traditional collection development.

How Music Libraries are Using New Technologies

• Videos demonstrating specific resources, such as composers’ thematic catalogs (similar to Lauren’s Research Toolkits).
• “Un-associations,” in informal online forums like Yahoo or Google groups. There are currently groups for orchestra libraries, flutists, etc.
• Use of Delicious to create user guides.
• Meebo for virtual ref.
• Twitter for virtual ref and for announcements/updates.
• Widgets and gadgets to embed customized searches, other libraries’ searchboxes, and other web content into LibGuides, etc.
• ChaCha (a cellphone question-answering service) for virtual ref. Indiana U is partnering with ChaCha in a beta test.

JSTOR

A JSTOR rep presented palns to add 20 more music journals to the database, including more area-studies and foreign-language titles. Attendees pointed out that popular music serials (Downbeat, Rolling Stone, etc.) are becoming primary source material for scholarly research — would JSTOR consider including them? The rep replied that JSTOR originally required that journals be peer-reviewed, but had recently begun to relax this rule. A dabate ensued among attendees as to whether the pop publications were sufficiently relevant to JSTOR’s mission — some believed that JSTOR should stick to its original focus on scholarly literature, and that others could preserve the pop stuff.

Bibliographic Control and the LC Working Group (or: Music Catalogers Freak Out)

The MOUG plenary session gave catalogers a forum to discuss ramifications of the LC Working Group’s recommendations on bibliographic control (see my blog posting for RTSS 08). Concerns expressed:

If collaboration is properly defined as “doing something together for a purpose,” then the disparate (and sometimes opposing) purposes of publishers, vendors, and libraries means that LC’s vision of collective responsibility for metadata and bibliographic control will not constitute true collaboration, but merely exploitation.

The Working Group appears to some to harbor a naive faith in digital architecture to meet all discovery and retrieval needs (it reminded one attendee of predictions that microform would solve all our problems). This is perceived to cultivate a gobal, generalist, one-size-fits-all outlook divorced from existing patterns of scholarly communication and “communities of practice” (e.g., the subject specialist and the community of practitioners that he/she serves). Bibliographic control should be “a network of communication between communities of practice.” An MLA liaison to ALA’s RDA committee noted that the RDA folks expected local catalogers to help fill in the gaps in the currently-vague RDA code — but when specialist communities actually propose details (such as a list of genre terms for music), they’re “dissed.”

Others fear that if LC backs away from its historical role as national library, relying on the larger community of publishers, vendors, and libraries to collaborate in bibliographic control, the actual effect will be that library administrators will think: “If LC isn’t doing this work, then we don’t have to either” — and collaboration will disappear.

Yet others fear the “commodification of cataloging.” With the increasing availability of MARC records and other metadata from third-party sources, there seems to be a growing perception that all metadata is the same — and a concommitant decline in willingness to investigate its source and quality. Administrators increasingly speak of metadata as a commodity.

Remember Katrina?

I’ll close with an item from the business meeting of SEMLA (the Southeast chapter) which was a cause of great celebration: our colleagues from Tulane University in New Orleans, whose music collection was flooded in Hurricane Katrina, announced that 70% of their collection has successfully been restored, and the last portion of it recently returned to them. They brought along a few representative items for show and tell — including a score died pink by its red paper covers. Recalling photos of the original damage, a 70% recovery rate seems a miracle!

ALA Midwinter 2009, Denver,Lauren Corbett

CONTENTS

• Committee work for Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) division of ALA :

oContinuing Resources Section (CRS)

oBudget & Finance Committee (B&F)

oAcquisitions Section (AS)

• Time in the exhibits to meet with vendors, foreign in particular

• Forum on WorldCat Records Transfer Policy and Guidelines

Fulfilling CRS and B&F Committee Responsibilities

For those who aren’t familiar, ALA has Divisions such as Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) and Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).Then within the ALCTS Division are numerous sections, including Continuing Resources Section (CRS) and Acquisitions Section (AS).Some committees operate on behalf of the entire division and members of such committees are designated from each section.I’m working with the Budget & Finance Committee (B&F), at the ALCTS Division level, liaising from and to the CRS.This work took the majority of my time.

The CRS meeting was information sharing about association activities and goals, supportingthe ALCTS Strategic Plan, and program/preconference planning for ALA Annual in 2010.Program planning for conferences begins 18 months in advance and includes the vetting of the program topics, coordination between different sections to eliminate overlapping content in programs and to make agreements to co-plan programs.

B&F meets two different times during the weekend in order to review the fiscal year that just closed (FY 2008), to examine the first quarter reports from the current fiscal year, and to vet and approve a budget plan for the next fiscal year (FY2010) to be presented to the ALCTS Board at their Monday meeting. We squint at lots of spreadsheets with tiny print since the level of access by the Executive Director of ALCTS doesn’t let him manipulate them.

Acquisitions Section and Becoming Chair

I also attended the All Committee meeting of the ALCTS Acquisitions Section, since I learned that I’m running unopposed for Chair of the section in the spring election.All committees of a section meet at the same time in a single room, allowing the section leaders to talk with each committee by moving from table to table.I took the opportunity to get acquainted with each committee in Acquisitions Section, since I have primarily worked with the CRS in the past.I learned that Bill Kane is the new Chair of the Policy and Planning Committee of the Acquisitions Section.

Unless a write-in campaign defeats me, I’ll serve as Vice Chair of ALCTS Acquisitions Section starting in July of 2009, which means in the fall I’ll be reviewing large numbers (I hope) of volunteer forms and try to make the best possible appointments to committees, replacing members who are rotating out.Then in July of 2010, I will become Chair and will plan and lead meetings of the Executive Committee of the section at Midwinter and Annual Conferences as well as attending ALCTS Board meetings.Being an ALCTS Board member and Chair of a section usually eliminates time for visiting vendors in the exhibits.

Meeting Foreign Vendors

Since I’m not yet on the ALCTS Board, I did schedule meetings with two vendors in direct response to inquiries from our faculty.First, Latin American Studies would benefit from a steady source of reliable information regarding new scholarly publications in Spanish that would be of interest to us.I met with a vendor to discuss starting an electronic notification service. Second, Romance Languages would benefit from an approval plan, which has been of interest to Spanish in particular for many years. I met with a European vendor to discuss parameters to start a notification plan.After refinement we may be able to arrange some automatic shipments for new academic publications and give firm order attention to more specialized items.The trick is to set very narrow parameters when working with a small amount of money.This is why it became very important to use the opportunity to discuss back and forth with the vendors in person.

Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records

I attended a forum early on Monday morning, which was advertised like this:

ALCTS Forum: Creating and Sustaining Communities Around Shared Library Data: the OCLC Record Use Policy and Libraries

In November, OCLC announced OCLC’s proposed “Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records.” This announcement was greeted with criticism and concern from the cataloguing and library communities. The main issue, among others, has been the “reasonable use” clause, seen as restricting the rights to use records, including ones libraries added. Karen Calhoun of OCLC, Brian Schottlaender, Peter Murray and John Mark Ockerbloom will discuss the background and implications of the change in relations to shared library data.

Library Journal.com has already published a good summary ( http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6632413.html ) but the three presenters have all posted content online and you can go to the primary sources, all linked from the last paragraph of the blog from Murray (aka the Disruptive Library Technology Jester) at http://dltj.org/article/oclc-records-use-policy-2/.

Briefly, Karen Calhoun of OCLC made a presentation clarifying the need and intent of the update to the Policy, the first update in 21 years, followed by presentations by two librarians who were concerned that the updated guidelines would stifle creative use.One primary impetus for the updated guidelines, protecting the WorldCat records as a financial asset of the Cooperative (OCLC members), was briefly touched upon in multiple presentations.Brian Schottlaender was not actually a presenter, but a facilitator and summarized the main points of the three speakers with some commentary and then facilitated questions and answers.Most of the librarians present, speakers and audience members alike, had a lot of questions about who really owns the records.

If you really want to pursue one more perspective on this later, eventually there should be a post-conference report from an attendee in the ALCTS Online Newsletter (ANO) http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/resources/ano/index.cfm .

Denver airport around lunchtime on 1/26/09 — see how short the visibility range is?

Cincinnati airport midmorning on 1/27/09 — see how the snow followed me eastward?

At ALA, I attended several sessions on cataloging and the future of the catalog. The liveliest session was a debate titled “There’s No Catalog Like No Catalog: The Ultimate Debate on the Future of the Library Catalog.” Below are some of the questions Roy Tennant, Senior Program Officer for OCLC Programs and Research, posed to debaters, Stephen Abram, Karen Coyle, Joseph Janes, and Karen G. Schneider as well as the debaters’ responses. The debate has been made available as a podcast on LITA’s blog.

1. What are library catalogs good for and not good for? As expected, views and responses varied. Negative comments included library catalogs are rotten for patrons, they don’t enhance learning, they don’t create good user experiences, and there is no sense of community. The catalog is a dead end repository; it is the beginning of where data starts, but it shouldn’t be the end. One person used the analogy of the old Raid bug spray commercials that it’s a roach motel, lots of easy ways in, but no way out.
One person posed the question with the catalog as an inventory manager, should it be helpful to users as a tool? It is this for library staff, but maybe something else is needed for our users. We should be trying to figure new ways to get users what they really want, not what we have in our collection that may or may not meet their information needs.
Another comment made was that we were better off with the card catalog. If one failed, one could turn around and get help. If one’s in the middle of nowhere using a digital library, getting help is not necessarily an option; there maybe nowhere obvious to go.
Start with Wikipedia or Google even though libraries have these enshrinements of what they own.
The catalog is an 18th century metaphor. How can it be stretched to fit the 21st century meaning.
2. Could one big catalog do it for everyone (i.e. World Cat)? Some of the comments generated by this question included that’s nonsense to libraries shouldn’t be place oriented, but information oriented. Making a catalog bigger doesn’t necessarily make it more desirable. Libraries have to let people do things with data even though we may not like it. Free the data; stop locking it up in arcane proprietors. There was two opinions about World Cat expressed; one, it is not a catalog, but a registry file for data, and two, it is so a catalog.
Google is taking catalogers and they’re making information usable as opposed to catalogers taking information and making it useful for OPACs. A new set of ideas is needed to connect people in a thoughtful way with the resources they want, and the MARC record may be incapable of doing this. Librarians should ask themselves is what they are doing serve us today? Give up the idea of a system and sameness; look towards experimentation. We need to bust data out of silo and move seamlessly across a data network. The usability and value of local enhancements added to a catalog record, are they worth the time and cost?
Any transition must make sense to librarians and our users. Some of our users are proficient at using our systems. Because we are hemmed in by past traditions, change may annoy some of our users/supporters and thrill others.
Two questions were posed by one debater; how does a book get better every time it’s read and how does a library get better every time it’s used? This somehow should be traceable without compromising users’ privacy concerns. Catalogs should have something like Netflix cues in them; people add value with personal comments and reviews. Libraries need research on where does metadata help users be better discoverers. We are behind in approaches with collecting and using data.
3. Do open source solutions offer a compelling option, either now or in the near-future? Libraries should be helping to design systems they use. Librarians need to look at what open source software does and its quality; it must be good and needs to be auditable.
4. What changes do you see coming in the library software market and how will those changes affect options for libraries? Mergers with ILS vendors was one response.
One person mentioned the economy and budgets. These two factors will affect how people get books in our libraries. With gas at an all time high, purchasing a book on Google for $.99 may become an alternative option for some. With times being tight, this is also when people turn to libraries as an alternative for entertainment; it’s a good opportunity for libraries to shine. Are we going to have a marketing campaign? We should be clear that we’re not the choice for bad times only, but for good times as well.
Print on demand. With the many options of technology, what is the cost in relation to the benefit must be determined. Can libraries quantify the benefit of cataloging? Cost will ultimately show things need to work differently. If ILL costs $30, why not purchase the book on Amazon used books for $5 and ship to the patron?
Libraries need to be statistically literate and evidence-based as opposed to barking dogma said one debater.
5. If you could snap your fingers and do one thing to the current library software market, what would it be? Everything will be open source. Get on cycle of normal technology profession; don’t get behind six generations by not upgrading software.
Separate library management systems without hindering good user services.
Larger library software market; a sense of greater demand may merit major software companies wanting to develop software products for libraries.
Libraries can provide people the intelligence of other users.
Everybody gets their own personal Nancy Pearl.

Some final thoughts expressed included:
1. A tremendous amount of information can be learned by new graduates and the expertise and tradition of those working in trenches.
2. Give up dogma, reanalyze our practices. Some are based on older technologies. If you don’t want to kill dogma at least put it in a kennel long enough to reanalyze practices.
3. Engage with non-librarians who are creating bibliographic records; let them into our environment.
4. Trust our users and make use of them.
5. Marriage of traditional metadata and tagging.
6. Take advantage of leaner times to market what libraries do.

From June 5 to 8, Chris and I attended the 2008 NASIG Conference in Phoenix, Arizona at the Tapatio Cliffs Resort, which sounds nice until you account for the fact that Arizona is a sun-blasted hellscape unfit for human habitation. Nevertheless, I attended a number of useful sessions at the conference. Highlights included:

Real ERM Implementations: Notes from the Field - a panel discussion including Ted Fons of Innovative Interfaces (moderator), Karl Maria Fattig of Bowdoin College, Jeff Daniels of Grand Valley State University, Paul Moeller of University of Colorado, and Toni Katz of Colby College. The panelists discussed their experiences implementing an ERM at their library. The libraries ranged in size of staff, size of collection, timeline and preparation of implementation, and in their staff’s enthusiasm for the process. However, a few common concerns and observations emerged. Far from reducing the amount of work performed by Technical Services, the implementation of the ERM meant that staff spent more time working with the knowledge base and link resolver, rather than doing copy or original cataloging. The ERM allowed information regarding terms of use and other acquisition information to be consolidated in one generally accessible location, and allowed for the divorcing of content from the management of that content. In order to implement the ERM, huge flows of communication had to be maintained among all parties involved and, in at least one case, a long, often painful process of re-working and re-designing all workflows and responsibilities had to be performed, with a goal of designing the system as if it were a new start-up (a process that included three consecutive all-day meetings, with the director present forcing the process along). It was difficult to figure out the workflow and procedure consequences of implementing the ERM, and was made more difficult by the fact that there were no standards for data entry into the ERM. All recommended that planning for ERM implementation should be thorough, have sufficiently long timelines, should bring in all stakeholders (including public services), and should encompass widespread training among the staff in accessing the ERM.

When Did (E)-books Become Serials? - a panel discussion including Kim Armstrong of CIC, Bob Nardini of Coutts, Peter McCracken of Serials Solutions and Rick Lugg of R2 Consulting. The gist of this presentation was that the similarities in the management of e-books and e-serials are becoming greater than the similarities that e-books share with print monographs in terms of management. The primary similarity is that e-books and e-journals share similar deliver systems. Also, e-books are like e-journals in that they are available by subscription, and they are acquired primarily by pre-defined publications from the publisher or by self-selected collections by subscription. However, e-books are not like e-journals in that there are many more individual titles that require many more individual decisions, they have less granular content, there are questions of long-term ownership, their purchase may include platform or maintenance fees, monographs have a strong tradition of expert selection, monographs tend to have more data in their bibliographic records than serials which creates metadata issues, they are discovered traditionally by the OPAC and MARC records, and linking and aggregation are less developed. The acquisition of e-books is based on inventories of individual titles and selections are decided by the library/customer. There is often coordination with print access in acquiring e-books. And e-books make possible acquisition on demand (bibliographic records for e-books are loaded into the catalog, and if a customer selects the book for access, it is purchased at that point). The acquisition of e-books also raises the issue of whether to subscribe to e-books or purchase them, if purchasing them is even possible. Libraries generally say they don’t like subscriptions, but they have a history of purchasing subscriptions, so it’s very likely that publishers will continue to offer e-books by subscription. The management of e-books is complicated by the existence of multiple editions with many different ISBNs, making it difficult to collate editions of a single title (although the xISBN may help here). Different editions in multiple languages also add problems with efficient discovery of the e-book you’re looking for. Serials Solutions announced at the conference that they have added e-books to their knowledge base, and will now be providing management and tracking resources for e-books.

MARC Holdings Conversion: Now That We’re Here, What Do We Do? - a panel discussion including Steve Shadle of University of Washington (moderator), Frieda Rosenberg of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ted Schwitzner, Illinois State University, Sion Romaine of University of Washington, and Naomi Young of University of Florida. This panel discussion covered the experiences of various libraries in implementing full MARC format holdings records in their catalogs. The benefits include establishing prediction patterns for claiming, allowing for automatic update of holdings summaries, and the ability to upload holdings records directly to OCLC’s Union List. However, the planning for the conversion and the amount of work required is large and daunting. Here at Wake Forest, we use only a couple of fields in the MARC holdings records and have other means of establishing claim patterns, updating our holdings summaries and Union List records, which do not require very much work. Or, at least not enough work to make it worth our while to fully implement the MARC holdings record. It may become an issue when we are preparing to migrate to another system, but I recommend that until then we leave our current system in place.

RTSS 2008 - The Future of Bibliographic Control

At NCLA’s Resources & Technical Services Section’s Spring workshop, held this year on May 22 in Raleigh, the keynote speaker was Jose-Marie Griffiths, Dean of the Library School at Chapel Hill, and also a member of a working group charged by the Library of Congress to:

(1) Explore how bibliographic control (formerly known as cataloging, also including related activities) can support access to library materials in the web environment;

(2) Advise the Library of Congress on its future roles and priorities.

The group published its report, titled “The Future of Bibliographic Control”, in January of this year. It’s available on LC’s website: http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/

Concerning the web environment, Giffiths began by noting that many users nowadays turn first to Google or some other web browser for their information needs; that despite the number of web-based library catalogs, there are still many separate library databases that are not accessible by a web search; that, due to the web’s worldwide reach, our users are increasingly diverse, using multiple venues (vendors, databases, social networking, etc); also, that bibliographic data now comes from increasingly diverse sources via the web; and that, as a result, bibliographic control must be thought of as “dynamic, not static”, and that the “bibliographic universe,” traditionally controlled by libraries, will in future involve “a vast field of players” (including vendors, publishers, users, even authors/creators themselves).

As for LC’s role, the report reminds us that LC’s official mandate is to support the work of Congress. It has never been given any official mandate — and most importantly, the funding — to be a national library, providing the kinds of services (cataloging, authority control, standards) for the nation’s other libraries that national libraries typically do. Of course, over the years LC has become a de facto national library, providing all the above services, upon which not only American libraries but libraries worldwide rely heavily. As this unfunded mandate is rapidly becoming unsustainable, pressures are building to “identify areas where LC is no longer the sole provider” and create partnerships to distribute the responsibility for creating and maintaining bibliographic data more widely (among other libraries, vendors, publishers, etc.); also, to review current LC services to other libraries with an eye to economic viability, or “return on investment.”

To achieve these aims (exploiting the web environment, and sharing responsibility), the working group offers 5 recommendations:

(1) Increase efficiency in producing and maintaining bibliographic data. Griffiths noted that duplicated effort persists not so much in creating bib records nowadays (thanks to OCLC and other shared databases), but in the subsequent editing and maintaining of these records: many libraries do these tasks individually offline. Proposed solutions: recruit more libraries into the CCP (Cooperative Cataloging Program, those other large research libraries that contribute LC-quality records to OCLC). Convince OCLC to authorize more libraries to upgrade master records (the ones we see when we search) in the OCLC database. Also, exploit data from further upstream: Publishers and vendors create bib data before libraries do. Find more ways to import vendor data directly into library systems, without library catalogers having to re-transcribe it all. (This may cause some of us who’ve seen certain vendor records in OCLC to blanch; however, the Working Group’s report adds: “Demonstrate to publishers the business advantages of supplying complete and accurate metadata”[!]). Similarly, recruit authors, publishers, abstracting-and-indexing services, and other communities that have an interest in more precisely identifying the people, places, and things in their files, to collaborate in authority control. Team up with other national libraries to internationalize authority records.

(2/3) Position our technology, and the library community, for the (web-based) future. We need to “integrate library standards into the web environment.” Proposed solutions: Ditch the 40-year-old MARC format (only libraries use it), and develop a “more flexible, extensible metadata carrier [format]“, featuring “standard” “non-language-specific” “data identifiers” (tags, etc.) which would allow libraries’ bib data to happily roam the World Wide Web, and in turn enable libraries to import data from other web-based sources. Relax standards like ISBD (the punctuation traditionally used in library bib records) to further sharing of data from diverse sources. “Consistency of description within any single environment, such as the library catalog, is becoming less significant than the ability to make connections between environments, from Amazon to WorldCat to Google to PubMed to Wikipedia, with library holdings serving as but one node in this web of connectivity.” Incorporate user-contributed data (like we see in Amazon, LibraryThing, etc.) that helps users evaluate library resources. Take all those lists buried in library-standards documentation - language codes, geographical codes, format designators (GMDs), etc. - and put those out on the web for the rest of the world to use. Break up those long strings of carefully-coordinated subdivisions in LC subject headings (”Work — Social aspects — United States — History — 19th century”) so they’ll work in faceted systems (like NC State’s Endeca) that allow users to mix-and-match subdivisions on their own. (This is already generating howls of protests from the cataloging community, with counter-arguments that the pre-coordinated strings provide a logical overview of the topic — including those aspects the user didn’t think of on their own.) The Working Group supports development of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, a proposed digital-friendly standard), but like many in the library community, remains skeptical of RDA (Resource Description and Access, another proposed standard meant to bring the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules into the digital age) until a better business case can be made for it: “The financial implications … of RDA adoption … may prove considerable. Meanwhile, the promised benefits of RDA — such as better accommodation of electronic materials, easier navigation, and more straightforward application — have not been discernible in the drafts seen to date…. Indeed, many of the arguments received by the Working Group for continuing RDA development unabated took the form of ‘We’ve gone too far to stop’ or ‘That horse has already left the barn,’ while very few asserted either improvements that RDA may bring or our need for it.”

(4) Strengthen the profession. Griffiths noted that in many areas we lack the comprehensive data we need for decision-making and for cost-benefit analysis. We need to build an evidence base, and “work to develop a stonger and more rigorous culture of formal evaluation, critique, and validation.”

(5) Finally, with the efficiencies gained from the above steps, LC and other libraries will be able to devote more resources to cataloging and digitizing their rare and unique materials. The Working Group feels that enhancing access to more of these “hidden materials” should be a priority.

Griffiths shared with us LC’s immediate reactions to the Working Group’s report. The concepts of shared responsibility, and of accepting data from multiple sources, were “expected.” More controversial were the shifting of priorities to rare materials; the relinquishing of the MARC format; and the focus on return-for-investment in assessing standards, such as RDA.

LC’s final decisions regarding the Working Group’s recommendations are expected to be announced this summer.