Two things happened this past week that got me thinking about technical services workflows--a scintillating topic to be sure.
The first thing that I noticed this past week is the program for the ALA Midwinter meeting of the ALCTS Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group. Three of the four presentations address how members of technical services units in academic libraries evaluated workflows and redesigned them in order to improve efficiency within their units.
The second thing was more a thing that happened to me than a thing that I noticed. When I was cataloging something this past week, I happened upon a record in Ye Olde Bibliographic Utility that seemed to have been created by a vendor. Stop me if you've heard this one before: it had many obvious errors, incomplete description, and sub-par subject analysis. I spent a lot of time working on this record in order to make it worth importing into my local bibliographic database. Though many people have griped about the issue of incomplete vendor records in public venues and listservs, I didn't necessarily mind doing the work because improving upon the work of others is at least one the purposes of a universal bibliographic utility. It did, however, get me thinking.
As the resources (both financial and personnel) of technical services units have dwindled, those who staff them have had to make choices about how to accomplish the nearly impossible task of doing more with less. And one obvious way that libraries can do more with less is to outsource the creation of metadata either to a metadata creation vendor or by using records provided by vendors. But, maybe now is a good time to ask ourselves that question that Rachel often poses to us: What is it we're trying to do here?
It isn't so much that I think that vendor-created metadata is universally bad. I don't. But I do think that the leaders of libraries who have chosen to move large portions of their collections off-site in an attempt to transform their spaces have to consider the fact that without the ability to browse, catalog records become the only means of discover for a large portion of a collection. And yes, while some disciplines have moved from monographs being the main way information is disseminated to serials being the information vehicle of choice, there are still those who find books a meaningful component of their research.
I can imagine it feels daunting to have the kinds of conversations that lead to the kind of workflow changes that the three libraries featured in the ALCTS Technical Services Workflow Efficiency IG program. People can be territorial about the processes that they manage and it's hard to give up the workflows that have become worn into our institutional memories over time. But it's the hard conversations and difficult introspection that comes with workflow evaluation that leads to real, lasting, and meaningful changes within organizations.
Technical services units and those who lead them are not doing their patrons any favors by choosing to pick off the low hanging fruit of metadata creation when it comes to reducing cost and increasing efficiency. The myth of the catalog as a useless and outdated relic of years past is perpetuated when the newly created metadata added to it is not useful or meaningful within the context of a user community. Sure, library leaders, you've save money buy accepting metadata of a lower quality that those who are trained in cataloging would have created. But you've also made more work for your public services staff and your users.
I propose that 2018 be the year that we in technical services librarianship stop choosing the lowest handing fruit. Instead, I propose that we embrace hard conversations, workflow evaluation, and identifying what we can let go of to take on the tasks that matter.
Stay positive,
Erin
Showing posts with label metadata. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metadata. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
It's like a dead-end when a road map is useless
One thing I like to talk about over here at Unified Library Scene headquarters is the value of well-formed metadata. Because I'm a cataloger, I'm often looking at the idea of well-formed metadata as it relates to the library catalog. But I think that well-formed metadata has value outside of the cataloging department as well. I was interested to read this post on OCLC's Hanging Together blog about how the changing landscape of metadata creation and remediation requires an emphasis on new skill sets for both early career and incumbent metadata creators.
I was especially interested to think about the Hanging Together blog post in relationship to this post from Ithaka S+R which highlighted aspects of their 2016 US Library Survey. Figure 1 of this post addresses the functional areas of the library to which library directors at baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral academic libraries indicated they would add positions over the next five years. At doctoral institutions, nearly 70% of respondents indicated they would be adding positions related to "specialized faculty research support (digital humanities, GIS, data management, etc.)." At masters institutions, this functional area was significantly smaller at about 25%. At those institutions, the area that stands to see the greatest amount of growth in the next five years is "instruction, instructional design, and information literacy services" at nearly 40%.
If you go back to the 2016 US Library Survey, you can see a table that corresponds with this one. In this table, library directors at masters and baccalaureate institutions indicated which functional areas they would be reducing employee positions. It will probably not surprise you to learn that technical services, metadata, and cataloging was the highest vote getting functional area at about 25%. In fairness, this was down from close to 30% in 2013.
While it's worth noting that the responses for added and reduced positions aren't exactly one-to-one since there isn't data on which functional areas library directors at doctoral institutions would target for position reduction. But I suspect, anecdotally anyway, that technical services would be what they chose were they to have been queried.
The Hanging Together blog posts indicates that managers are looking for people to work with metadata who understand how information is organized rather than being skilled at working with a specific schema. The post also suggests that those of us who are interested in helping to recruit and retain the next generation of metadata creators "should promote metadata as an exciting career option to new professionals in venues such as library schools and ALA's New Members Roundtable." The author goes on to state that "emphasizing that metadata encompasses much more than library cataloging can increase its appeal, for example: entity identification, descriptive standards used in various academic disciplines, and describing born-digital, archival, and research data that can interact with the semantic Web."
While some of the tasks the author outlines in their post can be directly mapped to the faculty research support described in the Ithaka S+R survey, much of it still maps directly into functional areas of the library that may be cut in the next five years. And while many of the respondents to the Ithaka S+R survey indicated that they have a commitment to reskilling staff and reallocating them to different areas of the library, it's no wonder that people who understand metadata concepts and have technological skills are choosing careers in industries outside of librarianship--a problem that the Hanging Together post points out.
The disconnect between the need to recruit and retain people who can create well-formed metadata and the fact that these positions are some of the first to be targeted for elimination in academic libraries is one that needs to be addressed. After all, some of the emerging faculty support services rely upon well-formed metadata to be successful. I hope that connecting the dots is the first step in facilitating this difficult but necessary conversation.
Stay positive,
Erin
I was especially interested to think about the Hanging Together blog post in relationship to this post from Ithaka S+R which highlighted aspects of their 2016 US Library Survey. Figure 1 of this post addresses the functional areas of the library to which library directors at baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral academic libraries indicated they would add positions over the next five years. At doctoral institutions, nearly 70% of respondents indicated they would be adding positions related to "specialized faculty research support (digital humanities, GIS, data management, etc.)." At masters institutions, this functional area was significantly smaller at about 25%. At those institutions, the area that stands to see the greatest amount of growth in the next five years is "instruction, instructional design, and information literacy services" at nearly 40%.
If you go back to the 2016 US Library Survey, you can see a table that corresponds with this one. In this table, library directors at masters and baccalaureate institutions indicated which functional areas they would be reducing employee positions. It will probably not surprise you to learn that technical services, metadata, and cataloging was the highest vote getting functional area at about 25%. In fairness, this was down from close to 30% in 2013.
While it's worth noting that the responses for added and reduced positions aren't exactly one-to-one since there isn't data on which functional areas library directors at doctoral institutions would target for position reduction. But I suspect, anecdotally anyway, that technical services would be what they chose were they to have been queried.
The Hanging Together blog posts indicates that managers are looking for people to work with metadata who understand how information is organized rather than being skilled at working with a specific schema. The post also suggests that those of us who are interested in helping to recruit and retain the next generation of metadata creators "should promote metadata as an exciting career option to new professionals in venues such as library schools and ALA's New Members Roundtable." The author goes on to state that "emphasizing that metadata encompasses much more than library cataloging can increase its appeal, for example: entity identification, descriptive standards used in various academic disciplines, and describing born-digital, archival, and research data that can interact with the semantic Web."
While some of the tasks the author outlines in their post can be directly mapped to the faculty research support described in the Ithaka S+R survey, much of it still maps directly into functional areas of the library that may be cut in the next five years. And while many of the respondents to the Ithaka S+R survey indicated that they have a commitment to reskilling staff and reallocating them to different areas of the library, it's no wonder that people who understand metadata concepts and have technological skills are choosing careers in industries outside of librarianship--a problem that the Hanging Together post points out.
The disconnect between the need to recruit and retain people who can create well-formed metadata and the fact that these positions are some of the first to be targeted for elimination in academic libraries is one that needs to be addressed. After all, some of the emerging faculty support services rely upon well-formed metadata to be successful. I hope that connecting the dots is the first step in facilitating this difficult but necessary conversation.
Stay positive,
Erin
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Mountains grow from just one stone
One of the things that I talk about over and over (and over and over) again on the blog is the idea of imagining what it would be like to center the lived experiences of our user communities when it comes to creating metadata to describe our collections. I was thrilled when a friend, Anna-Sophia, sent me a link to the transcript for a 2015 talk by Sara Wachter-Boettcher called "Everybody hurts: content for kindness."
The talk centers around this idea:
I was struck by something that Wachter-Boettcher referenced early in her talk. She made mention of an address given by Paul Ford, in which he states:
I worry that we take for granted that users will spend their heartbeats using the collections and services that we offer. I especially worry about this in academic libraries where students and faculty require access to scholarly resources in order to conduct research and create scholarly works. As this applies specifically to metadata creation, I worry that we take for granted that user communities will have to use the library catalog in order to access our collections. As many people wiser than I have pointed out to me when I try to reckon with this mindset, it's a direct holdover from the time when our collections were kept in closed stacks and library workers were the gatekeepers to these collections. It's also a significant conflation of the catalog as both the content and the carrier--a thing that I do all the time and which my wise friend, Kyle, regularly holds me accountable for.
So what would it look like for those of us who create metadata to describe collections to choose to put kindness at the center of our work? First and foremost, I think that we should stop taking our user communities for granted and create software systems and rules for description and encoding that respect the lived experiences of our users. While I don't agree with the idea that people in Technical Services are change averse, I do think our public services colleagues have been quicker to see the ways in which the needs of our user communities are changing and then responding. Second, I think it means evaluating our local policies for metadata creation and remediation and amending them in ways that have the biggest impact on our user communities.
I don't think that evaluating our metadata reuse policies means we have to stop reusing metadata. For some materials, records don't need a significant amount of customization. And for smaller libraries, metadata reuse is the only way that their cataloging operations stay afloat. But I do think it's worth considering which types of material and which subjects are important enough to your users to provide the extra care of customization. Especially if the library for which you are describing collections has made diversity, equity, and inclusion a priority.
I think that many people who create metadata would tell you that the work they do is a public services. I think what is important for us to be explicit about is that we have the choice to treat our work as an act of care for the user communities we serve. I think it's time for us to think more about what it would mean for metadata creators if we thought about making sure that our user communities were using our heartbeats wisely when they accessed the metadata we create.
Stay positive,
Erin
The talk centers around this idea:
And what I've come to is there's an opportunity that we have to make every decision an act of kindness. Make sure everything we write, everything that we build, come from a place of kindness at its core.Wachter-Boettcher goes on to talk about how this mission of centering kindness can be lived in when it comes to better understanding both the needs and the triggers of our user communities. While the audience of this talk wasn't those engaged in the work of libraries or librarianship, I can get behind this premise for librarianship in general and metadata creation more specifically. I spend a lot of time wondering how metadata creation would be different if those of us who create metadata saw it as not just an act of service, but also as an act of care for the user communities that we serve and support. And then I wonder why we don't.
I was struck by something that Wachter-Boettcher referenced early in her talk. She made mention of an address given by Paul Ford, in which he states:
If we are going to ask people in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats--if we are going to ask them to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?And I think that this quote is at the center of why we don't always see metadata creation as an act of care, and why we should.
I worry that we take for granted that users will spend their heartbeats using the collections and services that we offer. I especially worry about this in academic libraries where students and faculty require access to scholarly resources in order to conduct research and create scholarly works. As this applies specifically to metadata creation, I worry that we take for granted that user communities will have to use the library catalog in order to access our collections. As many people wiser than I have pointed out to me when I try to reckon with this mindset, it's a direct holdover from the time when our collections were kept in closed stacks and library workers were the gatekeepers to these collections. It's also a significant conflation of the catalog as both the content and the carrier--a thing that I do all the time and which my wise friend, Kyle, regularly holds me accountable for.
So what would it look like for those of us who create metadata to describe collections to choose to put kindness at the center of our work? First and foremost, I think that we should stop taking our user communities for granted and create software systems and rules for description and encoding that respect the lived experiences of our users. While I don't agree with the idea that people in Technical Services are change averse, I do think our public services colleagues have been quicker to see the ways in which the needs of our user communities are changing and then responding. Second, I think it means evaluating our local policies for metadata creation and remediation and amending them in ways that have the biggest impact on our user communities.
I don't think that evaluating our metadata reuse policies means we have to stop reusing metadata. For some materials, records don't need a significant amount of customization. And for smaller libraries, metadata reuse is the only way that their cataloging operations stay afloat. But I do think it's worth considering which types of material and which subjects are important enough to your users to provide the extra care of customization. Especially if the library for which you are describing collections has made diversity, equity, and inclusion a priority.
I think that many people who create metadata would tell you that the work they do is a public services. I think what is important for us to be explicit about is that we have the choice to treat our work as an act of care for the user communities we serve. I think it's time for us to think more about what it would mean for metadata creators if we thought about making sure that our user communities were using our heartbeats wisely when they accessed the metadata we create.
Stay positive,
Erin
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
Oh what a wonder, oh what a waste
Last week, I read an article in the most recent issue of dh+lib that presented the idea that the development of metadata standards for a particular project can, if we let it, be a kind of outreach. Emma Annette Wilson and Mary Alexander write, "DH projects require high-quality metadata in order to thrive, and the bigger the project, the more important that metadata becomes to make data discoverable, navigable, and open to computational analysis." The article goes on to urge that metadata librarians emerge from the back room in order to build relationships with digital humanities scholars. Wilson and Alexander write, "it is time to leave the backroom and partner with faculty and students on the frontiers of DH research, introducing them to metadata best practises and innovations, and sharing with them the creativity required to produce flexible, sustainable, and robust data for their projects."
I like the idea of including metadata librarians in the development of digital humanities projects. As the authors point out, digital projects require well-formed metadata in order to do the things scholars want to do. Inviting metadata creators into the conversation early on in the process will (hopefully) lead to decisions being made that don't end up with a library's metadata creation team remediating a significant amount of metadata later in the project.
I also appreciate the range of projects that Wilson and Alexander discuss in their article, as I think they show the range of digital humanities work and the metadata that supports it. From using a controlled vocabulary to describe fabric swatches in a fashion industry publication to contextualizing marginalia in digitized texts, the authors demonstrate the value of well-formed metadata across a wide variety of digital projects. The projects outlined in this article show what digital scholarship can be when metadata is considered early and often.
One thing that Wilson and Alexander don't explicitly address in their article is how the additional labor of consulting on digital projects from outside the library is accommodated within the existing workload of metadata creators. And, ultimately, this is the part of the situation that I find myself feeling concerned about. I have mixed feelings about asking metadata creators who are already taxed working on homegrown library initiatives to take on the work of instructing digital humanities scholars about well-formed metadata. On one side, I think it it's important to leverage the expertise that librarians have to provide the services that our users need. And if digital humanities scholars need help with metadata in order to create meaningful digital projects, then metadata creators should be in the middle of things helping them. On the other side, I think that we risk having our metadata creators suffer from burnout if we're not providing additional resources to help those metadata creators balance the demands from within, and outside, the library.
When considering how to balance competing interests in the area of metadata creation, two possible solutions come immediately to mind:
1. Allocate positions (or portions of positions) to digital projects that come from outside the library. By including this work in the position description or job duties of a metadata creator, a library acknowledges both the importance of supporting user-created digital projects and the labor necessary to do this work.
2. Embed a metadata creator in the library's digital humanities program. By doing this, you not only address the importance and the labor of supporting user-created digital projects, but you give the metadata creator the space and time necessary to collaborate with both the digital humanities library and the user community. The metadata creator has time to answer question and give their full attention to the project at hand without significantly compromising the progress on in-house digital projects.
In the end, I am not against the idea that metadata creation can be an outreach tool. Digital humanities research provides an opportunity for academic libraries to engage with our users and that opportunity can't be ignored. But I do think that we have to take seriously the question of labor and of workload when we ask metadata creators to add consultation to their already full plates. If well-formed metadata is as important as the authors of this article suggest that it is, we have to ask ourselves at what point the challenge we've placed in front of metadata creators is no longer sustainable. Ultimately, I don't think academic librarianship can support digital humanities work while also applying the 'do less with more' tactic to metadata creation. Our metadata creators, and our users, deserve better.
Stay positive,
Erin
I like the idea of including metadata librarians in the development of digital humanities projects. As the authors point out, digital projects require well-formed metadata in order to do the things scholars want to do. Inviting metadata creators into the conversation early on in the process will (hopefully) lead to decisions being made that don't end up with a library's metadata creation team remediating a significant amount of metadata later in the project.
I also appreciate the range of projects that Wilson and Alexander discuss in their article, as I think they show the range of digital humanities work and the metadata that supports it. From using a controlled vocabulary to describe fabric swatches in a fashion industry publication to contextualizing marginalia in digitized texts, the authors demonstrate the value of well-formed metadata across a wide variety of digital projects. The projects outlined in this article show what digital scholarship can be when metadata is considered early and often.
One thing that Wilson and Alexander don't explicitly address in their article is how the additional labor of consulting on digital projects from outside the library is accommodated within the existing workload of metadata creators. And, ultimately, this is the part of the situation that I find myself feeling concerned about. I have mixed feelings about asking metadata creators who are already taxed working on homegrown library initiatives to take on the work of instructing digital humanities scholars about well-formed metadata. On one side, I think it it's important to leverage the expertise that librarians have to provide the services that our users need. And if digital humanities scholars need help with metadata in order to create meaningful digital projects, then metadata creators should be in the middle of things helping them. On the other side, I think that we risk having our metadata creators suffer from burnout if we're not providing additional resources to help those metadata creators balance the demands from within, and outside, the library.
When considering how to balance competing interests in the area of metadata creation, two possible solutions come immediately to mind:
1. Allocate positions (or portions of positions) to digital projects that come from outside the library. By including this work in the position description or job duties of a metadata creator, a library acknowledges both the importance of supporting user-created digital projects and the labor necessary to do this work.
2. Embed a metadata creator in the library's digital humanities program. By doing this, you not only address the importance and the labor of supporting user-created digital projects, but you give the metadata creator the space and time necessary to collaborate with both the digital humanities library and the user community. The metadata creator has time to answer question and give their full attention to the project at hand without significantly compromising the progress on in-house digital projects.
In the end, I am not against the idea that metadata creation can be an outreach tool. Digital humanities research provides an opportunity for academic libraries to engage with our users and that opportunity can't be ignored. But I do think that we have to take seriously the question of labor and of workload when we ask metadata creators to add consultation to their already full plates. If well-formed metadata is as important as the authors of this article suggest that it is, we have to ask ourselves at what point the challenge we've placed in front of metadata creators is no longer sustainable. Ultimately, I don't think academic librarianship can support digital humanities work while also applying the 'do less with more' tactic to metadata creation. Our metadata creators, and our users, deserve better.
Stay positive,
Erin
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