Cataloging Futures

Barbara Tillett's RDA webcasts

I always blog about "essential reading," well here's some essential watching.

Barbara Tillett, Chief of the Cataloging Policy and Support Office, Library of Congress, speaks about RDA in these two new webcasts:

Resource Description and Access: Background / Overview

RDA (Resource Description and Access), the next generation cataloging code designed for the digital environment, is under development. This presentation provides background on its development and a general overview of the conceptual models, international principles, and structure of this new code.

Cataloging Principles and RDA: Resource Description and Access

The second in a series on RDA: Resource Description and Access, the next generation cataloging code designed for the digital environment. This presentation deals with the cataloging principles that have influenced the development of RDA; the challenges they present to the international sharing of bibliographic and authority data; and the challenges they present to the developers of RDA.

Cataloging conversations in Canada

I'm in Ottawa for the American Theological Library Association Annual Conference. The theme of our technical services discussion last night was--Why be a cataloger? We focused on the personal and professional rewards of cataloging in a period of rapid change and "vocational angst."

One of my ATLA colleague, Blake Walter, did a nice write up of this discussion over on his blog, Views on Theological Librarianship. Check it out.

Karen Calhoun's new cataloging and metadata blog

Exciting news. Karen Calhoun, Vice President of WorldCat and Metadata Services at OCLC, has just started blogging at Metalogue: New Directions in Cataloguing and Metadata from around the World.

Metalogue is a forum for sharing thoughts on all things related to knowledge organization by and for libraries, hosted by Karen Calhoun, Vice President, WorldCat and Metadata Services for OCLC. Karen is joined often by friends and colleagues from all over the globe, who contribute perspectives and experiences about the current and future state of cataloguing and metadata.

Via Lorcan Dempsey's weblog

Catalogers' futures - still a conundrum

So, the current state of affairs seems to be that catalogers are still getting mixed messages. On the one hand, we're told that there's exciting and interesting things happening on the Web and that all librarians need to embrace this change and adapt. On the other hand, we're told that cataloging is obsolete. And let's be clear about this, the message we're hearing is that AACR2/ISBD, the MARC format, Library of Congress Subject Headings, and Library of Congress Classification (Dewey also?)--all our structures and standards-- are obsolete and in major need of an overhaul.

This is a hard thing to hear when you've developed your professional skills over a number of years. It's also tough because we thought we were providing a service to the users who rely on us for access to library resources. Most of the catalogers I know have a deep commitment to and passion for their work. In my local catalogers' interest group we've never run out of things to talk about--for years!

I feel like over the last several months I've been rather negative about the cataloging community. I am mostly addressing these criticisms to myself first. I am a traditional cataloger who has great respect for our work. In fact, I am very much a cataloging standards geek. But now working almost exclusively with digital collections and non-MARC metadata I'm being stretched to think and work differently. It's really interesting, but in many ways non-MARC metadata creation and the issues involved are more complex than traditional cataloging. We are trading one set of complexities for another. Now more than ever we need to respect professional catalogers and the contribution they are making and will continue to make to libraries' metadata future.

New book: Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front

I've been waiting for this one. Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front edited by K.R. Roberto is now available in paperback.

This collection of critical and scholarly essays addresses the state of cataloging in the world of librarianship. The contributors, including Sanford Berman, Thomas Mann, and numerous front-line library workers, address topics ranging from criticisms of the state of the profession and traditional Library of Congress cataloging to methods of making cataloging more inclusive and helpful to library users. Other essay topics include historical overviews of cataloging practices and the literature they generate, first-person discussions of library workers' experiences with cataloging or metadata work, and the implications behind what materials get cataloged, who catalogs them, and how. Several essays provide a critical overview of innovative cataloging practices and the ways that such practices have been successfully integrated in many of the nation's leading libraries.

An important opportunity

Last week on the cataloging lists, Barbara Tillett writes:

As Chair of the IFLA Meeting of Experts on an International Cataloguing Code (IME ICC) I am pleased to invite comments from the worldwide library community on the final draft of the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles and its accompanying Glossary.

In order to provide the appropriate review period and to schedule adequate time to cumulate, analyze, and incorporate comments before the General Meeting of IFLA in August, the Statement is being posted today on a public Wiki. The IFLA Headquarters Office is closed for holiday April 30-May 5th, but as soon as they return we will move the files there and redirect from the Wiki. In the meantime please link to: http://catprinciples.pbwiki.com/ and view and/or download the Statement for your review; and please use the accompanying voting document for your response. [emphasis mine]

UPDATE: The draft and voting form have been moved to the IFLA website.

You might want to take a look back to a post I wrote last year on the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles. I'm looking forward to reviewing and commenting on this important document before the June 30th deadline.

Martha Yee's new article - cataloging et al.

Martha Yee has a new article available at the UC eScholarship repository, Cataloging, Compared to Descriptive Bibliography, Abstracting and Indexing Services and Metadata.

Cataloging is compared to descriptive bibliography, to enumerative bibliography and abstracting and indexing services as well as to metadata created by Web search engines or by nonprofessionals at sites such as Amazon.com. These four types of metadata are compared with regard to object of the description, functions, scope, number of copies examined, collective vs. individual creation, standardization, authority control, evidence, amount of descriptive detail, degression, time span the data is intended to last, and degree of evaluation.

Interesting cataloging/metadata links

Back when I was a kid, Alvin Toffler's Future Shock was the book to read. One of the concepts he wrote about was "overchoice." This seems to have come true with the Web. It's hard not to feel overwhelmed with the amount of information out there concerning library issues. I hope this blog continues to help focus in on some of the important cataloging/metadata blog posts, papers, articles, etc. as I start a 2nd year of blogging (yesterday was the blog's 1st birthday!).

Here's some things I've found interesting lately:

• Karen Coyle's presentation from the recent Code4Lib Conference, R&D: RDA in RDF, or: Can Resource Description Become Rigorous Data? [PDF]. Slides annotated with notes. This is excellent.
• Lorcan Dempsey points out an article, Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search? [PDF] One intriguing conclusion from this study of user assigned tags: "It may be more efficient to train librarians to label domains than to ask users to tag." Hmm.
• On one of my very favorite blogs, repositories for the rest of us, Laura Smart mentions Diane Hillmann's trainer screencasts for the LC workshop she developed Metadata Standards and Applications. Slides with voice-over from Diane Hillmann.

Library 2.0 in the backroom: catalogers implementing wikis

I've been wanting to highlight one of my favorite new cataloging blogs, The Cataloguing Librarian. Yesterday, Laurel Tarulli, the blog's author, writes about her cataloguing department's wiki which she just got up and running:

Although not fully implemented, my first step with our Wiki was to introduce the cataloguers to its possible functions and uses. I put up many of our cataloguing “cheat sheets”, links to relevant cataloguing sites, department announcements and recent cataloguing decisions from LC and LAC. Sending them the link to the Wiki, I asked them to have a look around, get use to the navigating aspects and layouts. Upon reviewing the site, I asked for their feedback: What did they like? Dislike? Ideas for adding new content?

With my excitement in this project and by taking the time to answer questions and explain the possibilities of the Wiki, all of the cataloguers began suggesting ideas or providing me with feedback. One of the most rewarding moments was when one of the cataloguers suggested we put our “working” New Lists on the Wiki.

Another example of using wikis in technical services is described in a PowerPoint presentation by Jennifer Lang, Creating a Technical Services Wiki: Improving Communication and Increasing Productivity:

The Electronic Resources Cataloging Committee (ERCC) at Princeton University Library created an internal wiki in order to improve its effectiveness. Since its implementation, the ERCC wiki has not only introduced staff to a new technology, it has also reduced the number of committee‑related emails, provided a one‑stop place for drafting and revising policies, helped the committee be more timely in making decisions, and has encouraged more widespread participation among all committee members. This presentation demonstrates the process of setting up a wiki and covers some of the benefits and drawbacks of using a wiki to facilitate group work.

And last (and definitely least!) is the technical services wiki, that I'm putting together at work. It's a work in progress, so please be kind with comments. I am trying to re-write our old documentation in a more web-friendly style and still have a lot more to add. I'm loving the wiki--it's so well suited for documenting local procedure, etc.

RDA development: An iterative process

The cataloging discussion lists were all a buzz last week with opinions about the future cataloging code, Resource Description and Access (RDA). This was spurred on by the perfect storm: the LC working group's recommendation to halt work on RDA; Martha Yee's new cataloging rules, an alternative to RDA; and Michael Gorman's scathing criticism of RDA in his new, yet to be published article.

It seems the defenders of RDA are in the minority, but if I had to weigh in I'm with them. The RDA drafts do have problems. But I agree with Shawne Miksa, who said on AUTOCAT:

How about a reality check? RDA is not scheduled to be released until 2009. It is not going to be released tomorrow and it certainly is not going to be implemented tomorrow. The library community doesn't seem to be ready for a lot of things, but a lot of things happen regardless. If we don't actually take a step forward, then we don't actually move forward.

And I think Laura Smart has it right also:

All I really know is that RDA will be an imperfect work-in-progress for quite a long time. We all have to accept that we will have a release-refine-release cycle and that we won't get perfection the first time out. Otherwise we'll wait forever.

Diane Hillmann thinks we should look at RDA development as an iterative process:

I think that, should the RDA process stumble along and a few checkbooks open to provide some money for the DCMI/RDA work to get started soon, what we'll end up with is something that is a decent first iteration of what we want to do. If you think, as I do, that we MUST move to a process of iterative development and experimentation (and then back around again) in order to move sufficiently swiftly to play in a world with Google, Amazon and that mob, then what we end up with at the end of the process (rocky as it is) has to be good enough to start with, and we'll work on it to make it better. Because, frankly, we don't have the time to go through something more ponderous and stately to come up with a perfect standard. It's no longer that kind of world. To some extent, it never has been--those with long memories will recall how long it took to get AACR2 off the launching pad, and what we have now is quite a bit different than what we started with.

So, here's my two cents. A lot of work has go into RDA to develop a cataloging code that will provide us with a standard for a digital and print collections in a Web environment. That is where we need to be because that's where our users are. So, let's trust the process, roll up our sleeves, and continue on with the tedious, but essential task of studying and commenting on the RDA drafts.