Cataloging Futures

Progressive Bibliography: Catalogers, Curators, and Crowdsourcing

Interesting article: “Progressing Toward Bibliography, or, Organic Growth in the Bibliographic Record,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 10I, 2 (Fall, 2009): 95-110.

It will be the focus of today's discussion session at the 51st Annual RBMS Preconference. Here's a description from the EXLIBRIS-L list:

Hello Conference Bound, or not, Librarians:

Jennifer Schaffner and I are hosting a discussion session in Philadelphia on Wednesday, June 23rd at 4 pm, about issues in progressive description, cataloging, curating, and crowdsourcing. We want to talk about such broad questions as: Who is allowed to describe our cultural heritage? Should we let outside scholars add to the catalog? And How do we collaborate with users to create better descriptions to serve outreach and research needs?

As part of this exercise, we've created a parallel blog for comments. If you attend, or would like to follow along, point your browser at http://progressivebibliography.org/

I look forward to seeing you in person or having the conversation virtually.

Best,
-James P. Ascher

James Phillip Ascher
Assistant Professor and Rare Book Cataloger
Univ. of Colorado at Boulder Libraries

Thanks to one of my RB librarian friends for pointing this out!

Content curation and cataloging

A hot topic on the web among publishers and business types is content curation. So, is anyone making the connect of content curation with cataloging and metadata? I found a couple of posts that do:

• Why Content Curation Will Soon Be as Familiar as Googling
• Curate th Content, not Just the Container

Why is this trend important to the future of cataloging? Because, once again, it's another sign that there is a future for cataloging and metadata work. Far from becoming obsolete, the cataloger's ability to organize, tag, and curate library data will be crucial for any library's future.

Crosswalks to the Future: Library Metadata on the Move

Lots of good PDFs and PowerPoint presentations from the New England Technical Services Librarians (NETSL) Annual Spring Conference 2010: Crosswalks to the Future: Library Metadata on the Move.

Haven't had a chance to read them yet, but Jennifer Eustis provides a nice summary over at her blog, Celeripedean.

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.

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

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.

Allyson Carlyle announces 2010, the year of cataloging research

Unfortunately, I don't have a subscription to the excellent journal, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. But found that the latest issue has a new editorial by Allyson Carlyle freely available online. 

Allyson Carlyle is Associate Professor and Chair of the Ph.D. Program at the University of Washington’s Information School. She is heading up an ALCTS Implementation Task Group on the Library of Congress Working Group Report, On the Record.

 Professor Carlyle is also developing a website: 2010 Year of Cataloging Research.

Bibliographic control webinar Q&A

Interesting Q&A follow-up from last month's NISO webinar: Bibliographic Control Alphabet Soup: AACR to RDA and Evolution of MARC. Barbara Tillett and Diane Hilmann weigh in on a variety of questions.

Barbara Tillett: RDA is not a format. It's a set of cataloging instructions on the identifying characteristics for the things we wish to control in the bibliographic universe. If you still are using an ILS when you start describing things according to RDA, you'd still be using MARC bibliographic records and MARC holdings records (and MARC authority records) for the foreseeable future. [emphasis added]

Looks like the immediate future's not so scary, changey after all!

h/t Notatu Dignum

New LC future of cataloging reports

It's been almost two years since the Library of Congress report, On the Record, was presented to the cataloging community. You may recall that LC established the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control to study the future of cataloging and LC's role in it. (By the way, search the Cataloging Futures categories "WoGroFuBiCo" and "WGFBC" for a whirlwind tour of this issue!)

Yesterday, LC released a new, related report and study:

On the Record Report Recommendations the Library of Congress Should Pursue Over the Next Four Years: Report to the Associate Librarian for Library Services, OTR Report Implementation Working Group, Regina Reynolds and Bruce Knarr, co-chairs (09/15/09)

Read final report [PDF, 142 KB]

Library of Congress Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace, R2 Consulting LLC (www.r2consulting.org), Ruth Fischer, Rick Lugg (October 2009)

Read study [PDF, 723 KB]

h/t ResourceShelf

What library cataloging on the Web might look like

Check out Alexander Johannesen's post: On identity. Johannesen is a technologist who has experience working in a library. Here he shares his vision of how library cataloging could be done in the future:

Let me exemplify with how I would like to see future library cataloging being done ;

I have a resource of sorts at hand, it could be a book or a link or a CD or something. Doesn't matter, but for the example it's written by Frank Herbert, apparently, and is called "Dune Genesis." It's an eBook. I pop "Frank Herbert" into a textbox of sorts, the system automatically does some searching, and finds 5 URIs that match that name. One of those URIs are WikiPedia and another is The Library of Congress. That means LoC has verified that whatever explain the subject of "Frank Herbert" is at the URI at WikiPedia, and that there is a reasonable equality between the two; one WikiPedia page, one authority record at LoC. The other URIs more or less confirm it (and this speaks to trust and government) I choose to accept the LoC URI as a author subject URI. Nothing more needs to be entered, no dates, no names, no nothing. Just one URI.

Now I pop the name "Dune Genesis" into by tool, and it does its magic, but it return only a WikiPedia URI, and because it's tradition not to "trust" WikiPedia it means I have a "new" record I need to catalog. However, the WikiPedia URI contains RDFa, so my tool asks if I want to try and auto-populate meta data, and I choose yes. Fields gets populated, and I go over them, controlling that they are good, add some, edit some, delete some, and hit save.

Two things now happen; the system automatically create an URI for me, a subject identity URI that if resolve will point to a page somewhere on our webserver with our meta data. That URI is fed back into whatever loop that tool uses for federated URIs, it could be library custom-made (see EATS below, or look to the brilliantwww.subj3ct.com website for federated identity management) or something as simple as Google (for example, I use Ontopedia a lot, so if I do do "Alexander Johannesen Ontopedia", I will get as a first result a page representing an URI I can use for talking about me). This creates a dual system of identity, one for the subject, one for the meta data about the book, both using the same URI.

Do you dig it? Can you see it? Can you see the library world slowly using such a simple mechanism for totally ruling the meta data and identity management boulevard, or what? I pointed to Conal Tuohy's EATS system. Make him give it to you, collaborate to make this just work, open-source and make make it a tool for librarians to automatically create, use, harvest and share identities and resources using the same URIs, and you've got what you need.