Cataloging Futures

Changing our thinking about bibliographic records

One of my favorite blogs to check in on is Dodie Gaudet's QUICK T.S. Her most recent post, Perpetual Beta & Bibliographic Records nicely describes how catalogers have thought about bibliographic records in the past and suggests how we might want to change our approach.

Check out: March metadata madness!

Over at The Desk Set blog, Amber Billey, who was recently named one of Library Student Journal's Emerging Leaders for 2009, is working on a series of posts on cataloging and metadata. Check out the first one: March Metadata Madness!

Hello catalogers, content strategists, information architects, knowledge organizers, metadata librarians, metadata specialists and all those who love and appreciate our kind of librarianship. December was a busy month and I didn’t post nearly as much as I should have, so the kind folks at Desk Set have invited me back for some March Metadata Madness! Over the coming weeks I will be discussing emerging standards, professional development, and perhaps a special interest or two. I invite you to send questions concerning cataloging, metadata, and all things technical services. But for now, let’s get back to basics.

It's really great to see librarians younger than my gray-haired self embracing cataloging and metadata as an exciting area in our profession. I'm encouraged.

Twitter cataloging sensation: FakeAACR2

New Twitter sensation, FakeAACR2, gently (and not so gently) pokes fun at our beloved Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2). The brainchild of library student, Alexandra Beaton. She was recently interviewed by American Libraries.

My favorite tweet so far:

1.0A2b) when a resource is in more than one part, issue, or iteration, determine the basis of a description with Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Publishers metadata more important than ever!

For the past week or so, the cataloging discussion lists conversations have focused on publishers metadata, ONIX, and how to crosswalk it with MARC and RDA. So, it was timely to find this post on the importance of metadata from the publisher's viewpoint. 

Laura Dawson, publishing industry consultant, writes in Metadata! More Important Than Ever! about the expanding need for good, accurate metadata in the web environment and how the publishing industry has fallen short in the past.

h/t ResourceShelf

Webinar: Cataloging: Where are we now? Where are we going?

Wow, I feel like I hit pay dirt. Here's a link to the College of DuPage Press webinar that I really wanted to see:

Cataloging: Where are we now: Where are we going?

Broadcast date: Friday, February 19, 2010

Presenters: Renee Register and Karen Coyle

Librarians are justly proud of their accomplishments in organizing the world’s published information through the use of standard subject headings and the ubiquitous, demanding MARC record. But, with the explosion of more information stored electronically, are our old standards still relevant today? Has keyword trumped the subject heading? Librarians also see their roles changing as more information description and metadata production are handled by other professionals. Will online tagging or vendor descriptions diminish the need for librarians? Questions are rife on what exactly are the thrust of RDA and the new AACR2?

Renee Register, Senior Product Manager at OCLC and Karen Coyle, noted consultant and leader in the area of digital libraries will review current cataloging practices and discuss the future of metadata, the MARC record, the Resource Description and Access standard, and the librarian's place in online information organization and access.

This teleconference is 90 minutes in length--Noon to 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

h/t Library Information Technology Blog

Jennifer Bowen on the new metadata environment

Here's a must-read: Focus on Metadata: Jennifer Bowen on the New Metadata Environment. 

Found at the ALA TechSource blog via Twitter (where the library conversation is really at :)).

This is what cataloging is all about....

I love this post. In Success Story from the Back Room, John Kennerly, library director at Erskine College and Theological Seminary, describes the quiet, unassuming work of the cataloger and how their retrospective project provided access to a rare volume needed by a user at a large university library:

The praised cataloger, while working on the retrospective cataloging project, added a particular 1901 publication to our online catalog at some point during the project. At that moment, our copy of the book was exposed to the world through the miracle of the Internet. The staff member who sent me the email told the story of how our copy of that 1901 book had recently been requested through interlibrary loan by the library at Princeton. In the interlibrary loan system, only two U.S. libraries were shown to own the book: Harvard and our library. After the initial shock wore off, this realization offered a beautiful success story of the value of cataloging librarians and their efforts. On an average day in the back room with no one around, our cataloger clicked the save button to add a record to our online catalog. Little did she know at the time that because of her unobserved efforts our library was positioned to connect a library user a thousand miles away with a book not widely held in libraries. [emphasis added]

We may not know where cataloging and catalogers will end up in the future. It's nice to know in the present, we're still providing access to what users want and need.

JSC Chair answers RDA questions

Over on the AUTOCAT discussion list, Alan Danskin, Chair of the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA answers several questions regards some of the contentious issues swirling around RDA development and implementation. Worth reading.

RDA Toolkit webinars now available!

If you missed last week's RDA Toolkit webinars, no sweat. The two video presentations from ALA Publishing are now available.

h/t Blog About Technical Services

Karen Coyle's Cataloging Horizons column

Looking for a non-technical description of linked data, the Semantic Web, and cataloging? Check out this American Libraries Magazine column, "Cataloging Horizons" written by Karen Coyle.

This new data organization will permit users to navigate the bibliographic space by following connections between resources and individual elements in resource descriptions, such as authors, publishers, and dates. Curious as to what else was issued by the publisher that year? Want to see how Romeo and Juliet has been adapted through the years? The catalog based on linked data technology will be able to lead users to answers. It will also allow library data to interact with the larger web of information. This means that web pages and information resources such as Wikipedia can have direct links to library data, and users will be able to move easily between the web and library resources.