Kate drones on about cataloging

RLG Annual Meeting MP3s and notes are up, with tons of interesting stuff as always. The keynote speech by Dylan Tweney of Wired is really thought-provoking. All kinds of ideas in there about web history, 2.0 functions, and the (potential) role of libraries and librarians in the 2.0 universe. To wit:

By 2012, the demand for speed will have turned all publishers into de facto bloggers, and all search engines into Google.

There is an opportunity for librarians on the internet, but the window is closing.

What the information universe wants: a hackable library database.

read read read read read! Don’t miss his suggestion at the end:  create a books-digitization site similar to YouTube and let users digitize books themselves. Work out the copyright issues later. Wow!

MP3 of the follow-up Q&A session is also online.

I have to confess that I was totally rolling my eyes about Twitter as being another flash-in-the-pan geekfad, but this nice presentation by David Free and David Lee King from the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase is both brief and informative, and has some great examples of how libraries and librarians can actually use twitter.  Still of limited usefulness for someone like me, who (*gasp*) doesn’t own a cellphone and therefore can’t go around texting and tweeting left and right, but well worth a look-see.

Other presentations from the BSSS covered LOCKSS, folksonomy, and LibraryThing for Libraries.

Thomas Mann (the LC guy, not the Magic Mountain guy) has written previously about the “crisis in cataloging” these days and the apparent attacks on controlled vocabulary and full cataloging, and he seriously rocks.  Library Juice points to his latest effort, “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries.” The whole essay is great and while it covers what is familiar territory for Mann–the difference between scholarly research and “quick information seeking” and the tools needed for the former, and value of traditional library strengths such as controlled vocabulary, high-quality cataloging and reference, patron education–one especially nice touch is the inclusion of specific examples of these concepts in action.

There’s so much information in this essay I really can’t do better than recommend that everyone read it, including library administrators, reference librarians, catalogers, digital librarians, advocates of faceted searching and tagging, etc.  Here is my favorite snippet to pull out, however:

If our goal is to promote scholarship, then “least effort” on the researchers’ part means “most effort” on our part, in our acquisition efforts, in creating high quality cataloging, in providing proactive reference service, and in assuring the long-term preservation of our material.

THANK YOU, THOMAS MANN.

I hope that this will be as widely disseminated as Karen Calhoun’s and Deanna Marcum’s recent reports which completely ignore Mann’s points about the very complex searching needs of scholars, which are entirely different from the (also legitimate) needs satisfied by sitting down and typing a couple of keywords into a “single search box.”

Nifty little new feature in worldcat.org : the ability to select records to add to your personal lists–a very cool LibraryThing-like way to make something like a bibliography.  I like a lot of things about this feature.

What I don’t like is not knowing how to get to other people’s lists to look at them–I guess you go to Lists and choose Search for Lists, but what if you don’t know what to search for, but want to browse?  Or what if (gasp) people didn’t use controlled vocabulary when they named their lists?  There needs to be some function that just gives links to the lists so you can click around and find them serendipitously.  But, it’s an exciting little feature, and you can export your list as a comma-delimited file, hmm!

Here is my list of lists. Not much in them yet; will have to play around more.  Say hello to professor P. V. Glob.

Saw an announcement about this service on the handy Library Technology Guides blog. Community Reserve (could they have come up with a clunkier, less exciting name?) is “a digital resource sharing service within the Digital Library Reserve platform that enables participating libraries to manage and share download audio books, eBooks, music, and video in supported formats. Use it to distribute locally produced, non-commercial content and share digital materials across OverDrive’s library network at no added cost.”

A handful of public libraries have signed up and the vendor’s FAQ notes that Community Reserve contains “over 100 titles” (I’m underwhelmed, but it is pretty new). I’m not quite sure I get the purpose of this product given the market strength of YouTube, but perhaps it allows a sort of inventory control (use statistics, etc.) and does it allow you to add these locally-produced digital things into a database that includes your paid digital materials? Or is Community Reserve a separate entity altogether?

The University of Washington Libraries have a neat experiment with WorldCat Local going on, at least for as long as their “Search UW Libraries and beyond” beta test is up. I haven’t had time to play with it much, but became curious about it following a discussion about it on the RADCAT list. Some people in that discussion cited difficulties with being able to perform a traditional “browse” on an author’s name, and pointed out how important that is for humanities research (among other things). So I played around with a little author searching.

Here’s what I don’t like about it. A plain old search for “pam allen” (no quotes) brings up several options in the “Refine your search” sidebar. One of these is “Pam Allen,” so I click on it (that part is pretty cool). I get results for several different Pam Allens, one of whom is the Interweave Knits editor I’m interested in. But there’s no way to differentiate her from the other Pam Allens, I think? And when I go into a record for one of her books, clicking on her name in the record doesn’t lead me to a list of only *this* Pam Allen’s publications; it performs an author search for Pam Allen, bringing up a whole lot of other Pams and Allens. I’m not even getting Pam Allen the Knitter in the first three pages of results (horrors!).

So I’d love to see this search interface tied to the authority file (remember that thing, guys?) so the searching is more sophisticated. It’s fine for the search interface to be made simpler, but why make the functionality so much less?

heh, too busy to blog for a while. A quick note about something in a recent Library Journal:

…Jill McKinstry of the University of Washington commented that her colleagues have begun to populate Wikipedia entries with links to the university library’s previously underused collections of digitized photographs. “Needless to say, our usage skyrocketed.”

Hmm will have to look into this. Wonder what rights issues would arise.  Well, here’s some more info about it because it turns out that Jessamyn blogged about this, too.

OK, so I have to admit that sometimes OCLC likes to share, after all. From Jessamyn’s Pimp my Firefox handout I finally found out about Link Evaluator, a really nifty little tool you can run to check the links on a webpage to see if they are still valid. It is shared by Openly Informatics, now part of OCLC (who isn’t, these days?). (The sharp eye of the cataloger notes a presumed typo on their “about” page: “At the beginning of 2006, OCLC was acquired by OCLC.” Uh huh.) [ETA: I will undoubtedly discover that this post is riddled with typos as soon as I put it up on the web.]

My initial response: Wow, what a great idea! And it’s free!

My response after trying it: Gee, I wish the link status indication didn’t go away after you click away from the page and then click back. I guess if you set your browser to open all links in a new window, this wouldn’t be a problem?

Further response: Another great example of what automation and can can’t do. Let’s try evaluating the links on a page, say, something vitally connected to the world of librarianship like Yarn Harlot’s post on thrummed mittens. (Catalogers are not the only ones who use a lot of jargon.)

So I pop into Tools, and down to Evaluate Links, and watch Link Evaluator perform its colorful magic. Here’s where automated tools are great: it’s fast. It’s easy. Here’s where automation is not so great, or at least can’t stand on its own without human intervention: it’s not always accurate. I am dying to know what Stephanie meant by “not traditional, but devastating,” but the link to the devastating mittens only goes to a “page or resource not found” page. Yet the link highlight is green–admittedly, a slightly pale green, but still green.

It may be that tinkering with the settings of LE will allow it to pick up more problem pages, and no tool is perfect…especially one that is free…but it’s another example of how automated tools can’t replace human intervention and quality control.

The nice people at LibraryThing (or maybe it’s just one nice person, I’m not sure) have a great post up on their blog about OCLC’s recent WorldCat Local announcement.

 

They’ll make one big silo and set the rules for access. The pattern is already clear. MIT thought that its bibliographic records were its own, but OCLC shut them down when they tried to act on that. The fact is, libraries with their data in OCLC are subject to OCLC rules. And since OCLC’s business model requires centralizing and restricting access to bibliographic data, the situation will not improve.

 

I really agree with this, and also with LT’s point that OCLC is full of good people doing really good work.  But it seems that OCLC has a business model which allows it to own the data that libraries create about their collections.  How much is this limiting access on the Web?  How much is it limiting access by small libraries who can’t afford OCLC membership?

Also, love the graphic.

New standards draft here

1. 130 uniform title: apparently they are doing away with the “distinguishing” u.t. altogether? (except for the 2 minor exceptions noted). Interesting! I think this is a terrible idea for newspapers, among other things–a u.t. is so helpful when you are looking at 15 records for the “Morning star” and trying to tell which one came from Wilmington without having to open all the records and examine multiple fields.

2. 246 indicators: wow, doing away with the indicators that tell if it is a cover title, running title, etc. On the one hand: yay, this will make it easier to catalog. And maybe serials allow their titles to hop around so much it doesn’t really matter to catalogers where you transcribed it from for one issue (if the running title turns up again as a spine title later, etc.). On the other hand: the indicators are such an elegant way of communicating information concisely. Also, knowing the source of an alternate title might really help a cataloger identify what they have in hand (esp. if it’s an isolated issue). Catalogs are for catalogers, too! And is it really that hard to code the indicators correctly if you have a little cheat sheet tacked up on the wall in front of you? I think not.

3. 362 capitalization/abbreviations: I’m not too het up about standard AACR2 abbreviations/capitalization being abandoned. Though I wonder if there are future searching/data manipulation needs that could be compromised by less standardization here.

4. DBO note: “Description based on” now required for all records! This doesn’t seem like a bad idea–you can look at the record and not have to *infer* that the description was based on the first issue. (Though I still think it would be better to keep uniform titles, if we’re concerned about helping catalogers work efficiently…)

5. 538: wow, 538 now optional for CDROMs in some cases. Wish this was clearer–maybe there will be examples that make this clear. I forsee this becoming a “Well, should I include it in this case or not??” headache.

6. 546 is replacing 041 for some purposes.

7. 550 not required simply to justify added entries. Hmm–not sure how I feel about abandoning the “justify added entries” thing. Might be more efficient, might be a pain down the road when we wish we understood where that entry came from. But I guess we would have to include 550s if there aren’t existing authority records, since we aren’t NACO members and wouldn’t be able to create the auth recs, and thus would need either 245$c or 550?

8. Linking fields: wow, prefer linking fields to notes that duplicate them–776$i instead of 530. Probably a positive thing if we can all remember what the subfields mean.

9. 856: “Local URIs or password-protected URIs should not be recorded in the national-level record” which means the hassle of either a) adding the url in the local catalog only or b) putting it in the MFHD or something like that instead. And how exactly do you distinguish between a “local URI” (why do I always read that as “UTI”?) and a “trusted archive”? Is our site a “trusted archive”? Maybe. But state agency sites might not be.

I can see arguments either way for this. Fewer dicey urls: less maintenance, fewer annoying dead links down the road. But also: less access in the short term (for all but users of the local catalog), plus the aforementioned difficulty on the part of catalogers in making the decision. Hmp.

10. p. 16: does this mean that the “create a new bib record when the body in 110 changes name” rule is gone? I’m not quite clear on this.

Interesting!