The relevance of quality cataloging

Software developer from Harvard's Library Innovation Laboratory, Paul Deschner, writes about the importance of quality cataloging for the development of new library applications.

One of the primary challenges in this work is getting data describing books and periodicals (catalog records) to relate to data from non-library sources, such as data about book talks on YouTube or to NPR broadcasts of author interviews or to archival collections. It’s all about connections in the data. The barer the data, the less describedit is, the more it falls flat.

On the bibliographic side, every new Library of Congress subject heading a cataloger adds to a record creates a rich set of connective possibilities downstream for people like me. Likewise, every uniform title entry inserted into a record allows us to show users of our software another edition of a given work in the context of all its editions — a crucial feature for any discovery service in the library materials space.

No software can create these connections if the underlying data hasn’t been carefully composed into richly structured records, based on solid analysis and comprehensive description. The difference is like that between reading a newspaper consisting of headlines only and reading one which also has accompanying articles. It is dramatic.

I hope in moving forward that we don’t lose sight of the importance of this kind of quality analysis and description.

He goes on to describe the essential contribution that catalogers make to the development team:

At the Law Library, the catalogers are a few hallway steps away, and are as crucial to my being able to create smart software as anyone on my development team. I’ve spent countless hours, regularly throughout the years, with my cataloger colleagues exploring the complexities of MARC data structures, uniform title rulesets, authority record uses, holdings data locations, and much much more. Having them as a co-located resource has been crucial to my being able to get my software written.

h/t @john_overholt

Comments

[Bradley P. Allen]

Christine- Your (and Paul's) point is well taken, and given this and your previous post, I wonder if what this implies is that the social contract associated with librarianship is changing in a way that is not quite yet fully expressed or acknowledged.

A key aspect of the mission of the library is make its resources freely accessible and discoverable to the community it serves. Cataloging specifically focuses on the task of ensuring discoverability through careful characterization and indexing of those resources. Paul highlights the fact that the value in cataloging is shifting from the characterization of the work at hand to the elaboration of the network of relationships between the work and the rest of the world, a point elsewhere made by David Weinberger (also of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab) in his recent book. Making this network rich, expressive and of the highest quality is a necessary condition for reducing the effort needed to get machines to effectively use these resources.

But we seem to be making the assumption that reducing this effort is simply a means to the end of better library applications for human consumption. Another perspective is that the community served by the library increasingly includes not just humans, but machines as well. As machines become increasingly autonomous, their activity will become both less distinguishable from that of other online library users and increasingly dependent on robust library services for access to knowledge about the world at large.

Perhaps it is a bit premature to consider this as an argument for robot rights, but if the library considered its mission as one to serve both machines and humans equally well, I would bet that would lend some clarity to current debates around cataloging standards and best practices.

[StacyJo]

The minute we start thinking that machines should be served in the mission right along humans . . . "Houston, we have a problem!"