Cataloging Futures

Catalogers, metadata librarians, digital humanists and coding

I'd like to revisit a recurring theme for this blog — catalogers and metadata librarians learning to code. It's a topic I think about a lot — especially with regard to the direction our profession is going in and the skills we're expected to have.

Recently, digital humanists have helped me fine-tune my understanding of this issue. I think digital humanists and catalogers have a lot in common because, at heart, many catalogers are humanists — our background is often not computer science, but the humanities. I know that's true for me. At college, I majored in art and fashion design before switching to religion and theology.

The most insightful post I've found so far is The Code Problem written by Rafael Alvarado, Associate Director of SHANTI at the Unversity of Virginia. He addresses the question — Why should digital humanists code? — and talks about the assumptions swirling around coding that often cause anxiety and hold people back from learning what's becoming (in both our fields) an essential skill.

CatalogingPractices website

At a time when we're awash in theory, it's nice to find such a practical project, the CatalogingPractices website. Marielle Veve briefly described the project in a recent issue of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly:

CatalogingPractices (http://catalogingpractices.wikispaces.com/) is an open database started in Feb. 2012. Its purpose is to serve as repository of current cataloging practices of university and college libraries inside and outside the United States. It is open to everybody and is created for the benefit of the whole cataloging and technical services community. If you know the current practices of your institution's Technical Services Department, please provide them below by answering the following ' or by filling the online form at http://catalogingpractices.weebly.com/.

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

Interesting post: CodeYear Catalogers

If you're interested in learning programming, check out Shana L. McDanold's blog post: CodeYear Catalogers.

CodeAcademy is offering an excellent opportunity for anyone interested in getting started with coding: Code Year. Each week they'll be emailing out to anyone that signs up an interactive lesson on coding. Code Academy offers some fantastic interactive courses, so you learn in a supportive environment.

Naturally this has piqued the interest of a number of catalogers that have been interested in learning to code or want to brush up or learn new code languages, myself included. Catalogers work with massive amounts of curated bibliographic data, and being able to manipulate it in new and different ways and in ever increasing amounts is key as we move forward into the bibliographic future and the world of linked data and the semantic web.

Cataloging at its core: the minimum viable record

Cataloging simplification. It's a gospel I preach for a lot of reasons (which I won't tackle here). We can struggle with this issue in the isolation of library land or get out and see what others think. For me, nothing beats listening to those who work with library metadata from the outside. A fresh set of eyes on a perennial cataloging issue.

Here's a post from the lead developer at the Internet Archive's Open Library, George Oates. She's been wrangling with a wide variety of library metadata and lives to tell about it. Her recent post, Minimum Viable Record?, is a must-read for all you catalogers and metadata librarians who think (like me) that in order to more forward, we need to cut back.

h/t Reading 2.0

Update: See also Saskia's posts: Simplification as an opportunity and Simplification as an opportunity - redux

The cataloger-programmer continuum

Earlier this month, Diane Hillmann gave a keynote address at the Code4Lib 2011 conference [archived video] where she suggested that catalogers and programmers are on a continuum. Well, recently I've moved further down that continuum toward programming and away from cataloging. My supervisor asked me to focus on the programming side of metadata work (and application development) and train one of my colleagues to do the more traditional metadata work, editing by hand, authority control, etc.

Eric Hellman, who also presented at this conference [archived video], said something that sounds like my personal mantra: "the power of a little bit of code." So far, my metadata work has benefited over the last three years from the power of a little bit of code (using XQuery and regular expressions). Simply put, things that would have been tedious drudgery if done by hand became fun programming challenges for a coding newbie.

So, as I move along the cataloger-metadata librarian-programmer continuum, I'll continue to share my experience here and on Twitter.

And I suppose I should get myself to a Code4Lib conference one of these days :)

Cataloging: what's the core?

Back in November we started using the project management system called Scrum for our work in Digital Collections. It requires that you work in designated time periods called "sprints" and at the end of each sprint you complete a deliverable product. Anyway, we've done four sprints, each in a two-week period, since then.

I really like this agile methodology and our digital team is adjusting to Scrum pretty well. But I've found it requires the same kind of intensity and focus that's also need for persistent blogging. So, blogging has gotten off-track at bit, but hopefully I can do a little catching up.

For starters, I really liked this post from last month by Roy Tennant: The Core of Bibliographic Description. Over the years, I've always been interested in this question of what are the core elements for bibliographic description. OCLC Research has been doing some evidence-based work in this area and the results are quite helpful.

RDA test, OCLC, and the opposing petition

Last month a Memorandum Against RDA Test was posted to the web and a call for signatures was put out on the cataloging discussion lists. As of this writing there are 298 signatures.

So, what's the complaint? There is concern that the RDA test records being input into the OCLC WorldCat database are going to cause problems for local libraries' cataloging workflows and systems.

There is particular concern about the authority records and the new headings created using RDA as the cataloging code instead of AACR2. People are concerned that the new headings being used in the test bibliographic records (when there is already an established AACR2 form) will cause a lot of conflict and, if RDA is implemented, a lot of authority changes will need to happen in local systems.

Since this is only a test that's adding a limited dataset in WorldCat, it does not seems like an insurmountable problem in the short run. If we're going to be practical when implementing RDA, however, we should just pick a date, stop using AACR2 rules to establish headings, and start using RDA rules for anything new. The problem the test has revealed (and why catalogers are so upset) is that it makes no sense to use new headings when, they argue, there's a perfectly good heading already established.

Another cataloging blog: Scarlettlibrarian's Blog

I've really enjoyed reading the recents blog posts at Scarlettlibrarian's Blog. Two in particular are worth reading:

• I am Metadata Management. What can I do for Subject Librarians?
• What will happen to cataloguing and catalogers?

I think the author accurately describes the kind of changes that are happening in our field.

The case for catalogers

Again found via Twitter: A cogent argument for why we still need professional catalogers. Database Librarian, Esther Arens writes this guest post at the Voices for the Library blog: Guest post: Do we need cataloguers?

Lots of good points. Well worth reading (comments too).