Stuck in the middle of a silly little riddle

It was announced today that the Program for Cooperative Cataloging has established a Task Group on Identities Management in NACO. The task group is made up of a lot of very smart people who will, I'm certain, come to very smart conclusions about identities management and the Name Authority Cooperative Program.

The work of the task group is informed by a white paper written by the Program for Cooperative Cataloging Advisory Committee on Initiatives. This paper, titled Name authorities in transition: implications for the PCC, was published in June 2014 and considers what role the Program for Cooperative Cataloging should play in the creation and management of authorities data. The white paper made four recommendations:

1. Develop guidelines for the use of VIAF vocabularies to authorize name entities
2. Develop a process for evaluating, endorsing, and providing guidance for the use of name vocabularies beyond VIAF
3. Significantly expand the ranks of those who can create identifiers/contribute authority data
4. Develop a testbed infrastructure to evaluate the intricacies of statement­based identity management

I reread this white paper today and recommendation #3 stood out to me as something I wanted to think about a little bit more. Before we proceed, I should say that while I am a NACO-trained cataloger, my understanding of authority data is hazy at best.

The text of this recommendation acknowledges the fact that there has been a relative lack of engagement in the metadata creation community. I went to the NACO site and counted the number of participating libraries--185. The number seems both very low and very high to me. One of the barriers to participation has been the quota of member contributions. The program requires that libraries contribute between 100 and 200 authority records depending on size and, let's be honest, many libraries do not do enough authority work on their own to meet that quota. The program established NACO funnels in order to bring together libraries who may not on their own generate enough authority work to meet the quotas. These funnels are arranged in a variety of ways including geography, subject matter, and language. That has helped to increase participation somewhat, but there are still wide swaths of the metadata community who aren't participating in the program.

The text of this recommendation also acknowledges that the emphasis of traditional authority work on the proper construction of headings is philosophically incompatible with the linked data environment where the emphasis is on establishing identifiers for named entities. Basically, it seems like traditional authority record creation is running parallel to existing identifier-creation services like ISNI and ORCID. And in many cases, identifier-creation services allow people get to be in control of managing their own identities.

The authors of the white paper conclude recommendation #3 by offering two solutions for expanding the ranks of people creating authority data. One is to have two separate encoding levels for authority records, one for full-level records and one created using a NACO-lite template. The second is to have a second authority file running parallel to the Library of Congress Name Authority File where non-NACO members can contribute headings. Both of these solutions address the fact that libraries are hesitant to devote the resources to doing the work to become NACO members, but neither seems ideal.I guess if I had to choose, I'd got with the former solution where libraries create authorities using a NACO-lite template. CONSER, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's serials cataloging program, already follows this model. When a CONSER library finds an unauthenticated serial record in Ye Olde Bibliographic Utility, that library upgrades the record.

For whatever you can say about the utility (or futility, I suppose) of metadata creation, it seems clear that we're standing at a critical point in its history. As more libraries choose to devote less resources to the creation of metadata to describe their resources, it seems increasingly likely that library administrators will also think critically about the value of belonging to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. While participation in PCC programs is incredibly important, it's also costly in terms of both financial and personnel resources. In this do more with less world, it seems likely that the Program for Cooperative Cataloging will need to demonstrate its value beyond a standardized and orderly bibliographic and authority files. Especially when our ways of constructing bibliographic and authority records are increasingly siloed and not at all interoperable with the open web. Since many top-tier libraries are Program for Cooperative Cataloging members, it seems to me that many of the right people are in the room to have a frank and productive conversation about what the metadata creation community can do to move itself forward into the 21st Century. I think that the Task Group on Identities Management in NACO is a good first step in that direction and it will definitely be interesting to see what conclusions this groups comes to.

Stay positive,
Erin

Which describes how you're feeling all the time

I am slooooooowly making my way through Hope Olson's The power to name. In Chapter 6, "Ite/arating Women"Olson reviews catalog records that represent books that have intersectional feminist themes.

Olson's intellectual exercise in "Ite/arating Women" points out the limits of Library of Congress Subject Headings (from this point on, referred to as LCSH) as they existed in 2002 when she wrote the book, as well as exposing the places where LCSH does not have language to express a particular concept. It also points out the limits of Dewey Decimal Classification in addressing materials with intersectional themes.

What I found shocking about Olson's critique, though, was what happened when she put the Library of Congress Subject Headings Manual (from this point on, referred to as SHM) into conversation with these catalog records and points out the ways in which existing LCSH are misapplied or, in some cases, not applied at all. In doing so, Olson makes the point that while proper subject analysis of certain materials will not solve the "inadequate language" problem entirely, it would certainly help increase access.

When creating subject access, metadata creators are asked to distill complex texts down to their essence and then assign subject headings and classification numbers to describe that essence. It is a difficult task when the book being described is on a single topic or represents a single point of view. It becomes much more difficult when multiple themes are thrown into the mix. Often, an aspect of the book is ignored or omitted due to time constraints on the part of the cataloger or because a cataloger doesn't have experience with a subject.

My takeaway from "Ite/arating Women" is that catalogers need to do a better job of understanding subject analysis--especially important when analyzing texts about people whose stories get pushed to the margins of society. While controlled vocabulary is often woefully inadequate to describe both intersectionality and issues related to marginalized people, there is controlled vocabulary that we could use more thoughtfully. The SHM provides a significant amount of guidance, but that's only if we choose to acquaint ourselves with it as part of our training (or growth) as catalogers and would be an excellent place to start. I know that I plan to spend more time understanding how subject headings are put together and how I can construct them differently to provide better access for users.

Stay positive,
Erin

Everything is fine, fine, fine

Library Journal and Gale/Cengage produced a report called "Bridging the Librarian-Faculty Gap in the Academic Library" which documents the results of a survey sent to a pool of academic faculty and academic librarians. The purpose of the survey was to identify where faculty and librarians are in agreement with regard to what constitutes an essential library service and what can be done to increase communication and understanding. An executive summary can be found here.

The most interesting part of the summary is the set of bar graphs in the middle of the document. The first bar graph notes the percentage of faculty respondents and librarian respondents who considered a particular service essential in academic libraries. The second bar graph indicates the percentage of faculty respondents and librarian respondents who rated their library "excellent" when it came to providing the services referenced in the first bar graph.

There are a handful of services on the first graph that a higher percentage of faculty consider essential than librarians: supporting faculty research, coordinating research data services, adding faculty articles to the digital repository,  text and data mining, parceling course materials from separate texts, and managing research grants. Interestingly, faculty also gave librarians higher marks on providing those services than the librarians gave themselves.

It is worth noting that the faculty respondents came from private, college or universities and that many of the respondents came from the sciences and the humanities. It is also worth noting that every individual library operates in a different context. So what this report says on a macro-level might not scale down to your individual library.

On Thursday, Rachel wrote about how the best way to understand our undergraduate users is to engage with them and then provide them with the services they want. She wrote:

There is a simple solution, you know. We can get comfortably uncomfortable and ask students what they want out of interactions with librarians and libraries. We can ask students what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like throughout their college career. We can listen seriously to what they say, and try to be exactly who and what they need and want.

The report from Library Journal and Gale/Cengage gives us a place from which to start the conversation. Asking what we can do to support faculty research is a good place to start the conversation about what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like. But let's not stop there, assuming that's all they want. And when we ask faculty what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like, let's ask because we really want to know and not because we want faculty to take us seriously or see as as equals.

Ultimately, I think that coming into agreement about which services are essential for each of our user groups is the most important thing we can do to succeed. There are some library services we will never be able to jettison, and that's not a bad thing. But there are some services we offer our users that made sense at the time, but which have been rendered obsolete by the passage of time. It isn't that those services never had value--they did. But now they don't, and those services (and the people who provide them) can be transformed into something new and even more useful for users. We just have to be open to having the conversation and open to accepting the feedback even when it makes us uncomfortable.

Stay positive,
Erin

Innovation and being brave

In an attempt to make this blog accessible to all types of Libraryland people, I rarely dive deep in the minutiae of cataloging. But I have something I want to say about the Future Of Cataloging.

cue the ominous music

Even if cataloging is not your jam, I think there's something in here for you about the bravery that innovation requires.

There is quite a buzz online this morning as word reached Twitter that the Oslo Public Library implemented RDF linked data as its "core metadata format." The fine print on this decision is that RDF linked data will replace MARC for description of traditional library resources. This blog post from June 2014 lays out some of the reasoning behind the change, including the fact that describing both physical and digital resources using RDF linked data provides continuity in description between physical and digital collections.

After reading what other people had to say about this decision, I tweeted:

At some point, there will be a tipping point of libraries jumping out of the MARC boat & into the post-MARC ocean. #HotLibrarylandTakes
— Erin Leach (@erinaleach) January 13, 2015

As with the jump from using AACR2 as a descriptive standard to using RDA, there will come a point where more libraries will move from using MARC as an encoding standard to using whatever replaces it. It's already starting to happen at the bleeding edges with the development of use cases for BIBFRAME  and with the momentum that LibHub seems to be generating.

And while the future that's being built is exciting, it also feels a little bit scary sometimes.

I think that in some bleeding edge folks, the reaction to hearing people admit to being a little afraid of the post-MARC future is to call catalogers change averse. But I don't think that the fear is a symptom of change aversion. Not entirely, anyway. For many catalogers, MARC is the only encoding standard we've ever know. And even though we can rationally agree that MARC is antiquated and needs to be replaced, considering the post-MARC future means learning new skills and creating new workflows. I don't think it's wrong to feel afraid of letting go of something old, even as we embrace something new--in cataloging or any other area of librarianship.

I am here to tell you that it's okay to be scared, as long as you don't let that fear keep you rooted in the past instead of embracing the future.

Choosing to innovate means choosing to be brave. For catalogers, it means learning more about the post-MARC world and finding your voice in conversations you don't entirely understand. It means learning to code so that catalogers can speak the same language as the people who design the systems and services that use the metadata we create.

Being innovative means sitting with our discomfort and moving forward, not in spite of it but with it.

Stay positive,
Erin