Days of swim or sink

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

Trying hard not to get too obsessed with it

At the end of February, a post to the BIBFRAME listserv linked to an essay by Jeff Edmunds that enumerated the reasons why the author believes that the standard will not be widely adopted by the GLAM community. There has been much conversation in various parts of the cataloging community about the merits of the arguments that Edmunds lays out in the essay.

Throughout the essay, Edmunds suggests repeatedly (and in various ways) that those who are engaged in the work of developing BIBFRAME have gotten so in the theoretical weeds that they have lost track of the realities of resource description in the modern age. Toward the end of his essay, Edmunds suggests that the greatest challenges facing metadata creators today are:

"the utterly unwieldy immensity of the bibliographic universe, the ongoing and accelerating decline in the quality of bibliographic metadata, competition for the organization and delivery of information by non-library entities (Wikipedia, Google, Facebook)"

I should say that while I wasn't a fan of this essay, I don't actually disagree with Edmunds' assertions about the challenges facing metadata creators. I think he does a fine job of surveying the current landscape. What was apparent to me when reading this essay was that it points to a growing rift in the cataloging community that will only continue to grow as we move toward a crisis point related to the adoption of BIBFRAME as a standard. And as one side on that growing rift, it's representative of an argument that I've heard being made in the cataloging community.

There seems to be a growing tension between those engaged in the theoretical work of developing BIBFRAME as a standard and those who are still currently working on describing the resources their library owns in MARC. And in some ways, I think his boils down to a tension between those who have the means to innovate and those who don't.

There is a large contingent of the metadata creation community that has invested resources in the development and modeling of BIBFRAME as a standard. This work is ongoing and while I understand very little of it, if we're being honest, it seems like this work is driven by a belief that there is a future for BIBFRAME as a standard within our community. I think it's important work, but I also think it's worth being transparent about the fact that this type of work requires material resources. And those institutions who have stepped into the role of early adopter are often entities with the ability to devote those material resources to standards development.

For other libraries, there are simply not enough material resources to devote resources to standards development. There are too few staff and not enough money to devote to both the quotidian work of resource description and the theoretical work of standards development and modeling. Because choices must be made strategically about how to spend resources, these libraries find themselves on the outside of the theoretical work of standards development and modeling looking in.

There is a very real tension between these two sides, which leads to each one being defensive and suspicious of the other. And it is easy to see the other side and not find value in their work. Those who are invested in BIBFRAME development see people who are suspicious of it as change averse and negative. People who are suspicious of BIBFRAME development see those who champion it as being too caught up in the theoretical and divorced from the practical.

One thing I have grown more certain of as I have seen BIBFRAME development is that I am out of my depth. While I am on the younger end of those who are currently cataloging, my education was based in the AACR2 environment and sometimes I have a hard time pulling myself out of the quotidian work of metadata creation to find the value in the development of future standards. But I make myself do it, because I don't want to be the person who is so stuck in way of thinking that I outlive my professional usefulness.

I think that, as a community, we have to have a conversation about the merits and drawback of making the intellectual shift from a siloed past to an interoperable future. And there's room for people on both sides of this conversation. But the longer we allow this rift to grow, the less likely it will be that such a conversation will be able to happen respectfully and with acknowledgement of the value of both sides of the conversation.

Stay positive,
Erin

Waging wars to shape the poet and the beat

In 1994, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging emerged from the work of a group called the Cooperative Cataloging Council. The founding documentation of this movement toward a national-level cooperative cataloging initiative came as the result of the work of a group called the Cooperative Cataloging Council. This group identified potential goals of a cooperative cataloging program and then charged task groups with writing recommendations in each of these areas. A short monograph, Towards a New Beginning in Cooperative Cataloging, includes both background documents and the final reports of each of these tasks groups. The six task groups reported on record creation and reuse, availability and distribution of records, authorities, standards, cataloger training, and foreign MARC. At 76 pages, it's a quick read. And one I would recommend if you're curious about the history of the PCC. It felt especially timely to look at the PCC's original strategic plan in light of the fact that the group will soon be embarking on a new strategic planning cycle.

Task Group 1's final report, titled "More, Better, Faster Cheaper," proposed a new model for the cooperative cataloging of non-serial materials. The group contextualizes its argument by stating "they [current cooperative cataloging efforts/models] fail because they are based on the belief (or hope) that any library can, and will, create a cataloging record that will be fully usable by other libraries. In fact, no single library can create such a cataloging record. Or, perhaps more accurately, it won't-nor should it be expected to" (30). Task Group 1 goes on to argue that the non-serial cataloging community should see the cataloging process as iterative in the way that, at the time, the CONSER program did. "Rather than focusing on cooperative cataloging, CONSER has focused on cataloging cooperatively, if you will: on cooperative creation and maintenance of cataloging records" (30). Task Group 1 then went on to propose that the cataloging community "should be putting its efforts into fostering an environment in which cataloging records are 'vouched for' or 'authenticated' and made part of the national database for subsequent use and emendation as necessary" (30). One can imagine that Task Group 1's report served as the foundation for BIBCO. And it gives us the basis for our current understanding of the record creation and reuse model that we know and love today.

As a serials cataloger, I feel really connected to the idea that cataloging is an iterative process. Because a serial record covers the entire life of the publication, our work on a record representing a serial title is not done as long as the serial continues to be published. And I like that other communities took seriously the idea that it makes more sense to build upon the work done by others rather than continue to duplicate their work. The current record creation and reuse model is a smart one, built on collegiality and on enhancing the work of others.

I'll be honest, though, I bristled a little when I read the title of Task Group 1's report. And it's the same reason that I struggle to accept the current record creation and reuse model. If our motivation for accepting this model is for cost savings and efficiency, how much does the cataloging community truly build upon the work done by others? How often do we accept the records we find as being good enough for our local context when our local context might vary significantly from the one where the record was originally created?

And this, I think, is where I find myself feeling stuck when it comes to thinking about the current catalog record creation and reuse model. I don't think it would be a wise use of our resources to go backwards in time to a place where catalogers at many libraries created records for the same title. I think that thinking of cataloging as an iterative process where one cataloger enhances the record created by another, leveraging each one's strengths makes much more sense. But our motivation for cataloging cooperatively in any format should be to create records that others can not only reuse but can also enhance.

I also think that part of the record creation and reuse model has to incorporate a consideration of the context of users in any given library. Records downloaded from a bibliographic utility or purchased from vendors should be evaluated to ensure that their metadata reflects the needs of a particular user community. This may mean enhancing those records in any number of ways, including additional access points or additional subject analysis. This requires a commitment to well-formed metadata that goes far beyond a more/better/faster/cheaper way of thinking.

I felt grateful to read this book because it helped me understand the ideas that undergird so much of our modern ideas about catalog record creation and reuse. And it helped me better understand and articulate my feelings about that process. I think we should continue to think of the cataloging process for all formats as iterative, and think about how our local processes could change as a result.

Stay positive,
Erin

Works cited:
Towards a New Beginning in Cooperative Cataloging. Washington, D.C. : Library of Congress Cataloging Distribution Service, 1994.

It's gonna have to get a little bit heavy

I didn't submit this anonymous tweet to the LIS Grievances bot, but I could have.

Our obsession with linked open data, despite the fact that we've been outsourcing our cataloguing for years and now have garbage metadata.

— LIS Grievances (@lis_grievances) November 2, 2016

There is an oft-quoted aphorism about metadata: Metadata is a love note to the future. It's a great idea, right, that the metadata you create will help future generations access information? But I think that we do ourselves a great disservice when we don't acknowledge that well-formed metadata is really the best kind of love note to the future.

I think the problem with not being able to see the future is that it can lead us to make choices that make sense in the moment. It's easy to say that the feelings that catalogers have about poorly-formed metadata spring from a misguided place filled with artisanally created catalog records. It's easy to say that catalogers are perfectionists who have trouble accepting "good enough" records that get the job of discovery done. It's easy to say that the catalog is a place where we can cut corners because the catalog has less to do with the library user's experience than, say, the physical space. But saying all of those things can be problematic in the long run.

When decide that metadata creation isn't a task worth doing well, we're not writing a love note to the future. We're writing it a passive-aggressive note.

When we place value on quantity over quality or bottom-line over long term investment, we're making it more difficult for those future generations to access information in our libraries.  When we accept poorly-formed metadata into our systems, we are creating a future where people we will likely never meet will have to remediate our metadata in order to make it usable. We are suggesting that it's fine to kick the can down the road, as the saying goes, to let someone else deal with it rather than taking the time to do things right the first time.

I should be clear about one thing. Vendors aren't inherently the villains in this story. Sometimes because of lack of staffing or money or expertise, a library has to outsource some of its cataloging to someone else. And whether we like to acknowledge it or not, those records we download from our bibliographic utility of choice are technically from a vendor. So whether you're downloading records from a bibliographic utility, sending pockets of your collection to be cataloged, or receiving MARC record with your newly purchased material, the fact that you're getting your metadata from a vendor isn't the problem. The problem comes when the records we receive have poorly-formed metadata and we either don't remediate it or don't demand that vendors create metadata that is up to our standards.

So it's time to acknowledge that simply creating metadata to describe a resource alone isn't a love note to the future. If we truly want to write a love note to the future, we should decide in the present that well-formed metadata is something to which we're willing to dedicate sufficient staff and financial resources.

Stay positive,
Erin

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:

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

No firm ground, but we ain't sliding

The Policy and Standards Division of the Library of Congress decided for a second time to reject white privilege as a subject heading. You can read their decision here. The part of their argument that is most salient to this blog post is: Numerous works about white privilege have been assigned the headings Race discrimination and Whites--Race identity, and the meeting wishes to continue that practise.

It is both completely understandable and completely perplexing that the PSD would reject this heading despite the fact that literary warrant exists. On the one hand, if the PSD believes that a combination of existing subject headings is sufficiently describes a concept they can make the argument against adding another subject heading to the thesaurus. On the other, it seems like the combination of subject headings that the PSD points to in their decision misses the mark.

When reading this decision, it seems like the PSD fundamentally misunderstands the concept of white privilege by deferring to the headings already being used. The idea of white privilege implicitly touches on discrimination and race identity to the extent that the privileges extended to white people as a result of their identity further margainalizes people who aren't white. But white privilege is not explicitly about either of those things. April Hathcock wrote a really great blog post about this which I think it well worth your time. In her post she writes " Privilege isn't about discrimination; it's about the automatic benefits and advantages that come from living in a system set up to value the lives, ideas, and expressions of one group over all others. You may be a staunch antiracist, but if you are white, you are steeped in WHITE PRIVILEGE. It is a reality of living in the systemic bias of our society."

Thematically related to this discussion of white privilege and systemic bias is Jarrett Drake's keynote address at the Digital Library Federation Liberal Arts Pre-Conference titled "Documenting Dissent in the Contemporary College Archive: Finding our Function within the Liberal Arts." In this address, Drake states

I doubt many of you here know about this history of black college and universities in this country, and I have that doubt for many reasons. The first is that most of you are white and can afford to be ignorant of blackness. The second is that many of our library and archive consortia--this one included--excludes our librarians, libraries, archivists, and archives at black colleges and universities, so even when you think you are immersing yourself within the field of librarianship, you remain blissfully unaware that there is a whole different world out there to which you are functionally illiterate. This unawareness is both a product and a reification of systemic racism, and it doesn't require racists whatsoever.

Both Drake and Hathcock point out that even those of us who believe that we are antiracist still benefit from our whiteness and that white privilege affords us the luxury of being able to be ignorant about aspects of blackness. Further, Hathcock argues that the decision not to name white privilege explicitly and add it to the thesaurus perpetuates systemic racism both in libraries that utilize the thesaurus and in the larger arena of subject cataloging.

Working both inside and outside of a system is important when thinking about how to create a more equitable and inclusive library catalog. While asking the Library of Congress to both change its most problematic subject headings and to add new headings to address issues of importance to our users is a key component of pushing back against the systemic racism inherent in our metadata creation standards, I would also argue that we can work outside of/around the system to add subject headings to records which both reflect the lived experiences of our users and the values to which we claim to adhere.  There are a lot of existing subject thesauri and the MARC standards allows you add a term from a thesaurus other than LCSH in field 650. Library of Congress publishes a list of source codes and has at the bottom of the document an example of how to construct a 650 field using one of these alternative thesauri. Additionally, the MARC standard allows you to utilize fields 69x for locally constructed thesauri that aren't on the source code list. So while LCSH is the (seemingly) most widely used thesaurus for published material, it doesn't have to be the only thesaurus a library uses to describe the about-ness of a resource. A particular community of practise could create its own thesaurus and use that to provide access to headings that the Library of Congress has chosen not to address.

I should note that this isn't a new idea. There's a reason that cataloger's love Sanford Berman.

I know I write a lot about how I think we should think about how much we rely on repurposed metadata and on how we should localize our cataloging practises to better meet the needs of our users. And I think that the use of alternative thesauri is a good place for us to do some thinking. As luck would have it, there are a lot of people in technical services librarianship already thinking hard about these issues. As April notes, Jenna Freedman and Netanel Ganin stand out as people whose efforts in this arena should be acknowledged. I am so, so grateful all of the people who speak so bravely and so boldly about the lived experiences of our users and who hold us accountable for the ways in which we fall short of doing right by them.

Stay positive,
Erin

Don't look to me for answers

So, let's talk about content standards. More specifically, let's talk about cataloging codes.

Yesterday I read an article from 1991 titled "The pragmatic basis of cataloging codes: has the user been ignored" that surfaced for me the tension I feel about the work that I do as a cataloger. In this article, Jon R. Hufford argues that while modern cataloging codes (those codes created since 1841) have had at their theoretical center the needs of catalog end users, none of those codes appear to have taken into account actual user needs in the creation or revision of those codes. In the article, Hufford cites Panizzi and his Rules for Compiling the Catalogue of Printed Books, Maps, and Music in the British Museum (aka, the 91 Rules) as the person associated with the beginnings of modern cataloging. The article predates the development and publication of Resources Description and Access (RDA) as it discusses various cataloging codes created from 1841 to the revised printing of the 2nd edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2r) in 1988.

The argument that undergirds Hufford's article is that while many of the codes he discusses state (either implicitly or explicitly) that they are attempting to develop rules which facilitate ease of use for library users, their creation excludes actual experiences for users. Instead, Hufford argues that the codes are based either on the experiences of the single person who uses them or, when the codes are created by a committee of people, the collective wisdom of the cataloging crowd.

Hufford suggests that librarians have agreed (generally speaking) that "the catalog's main function should be to enable a user to determine whether the library has a certain item, which works of a particular author are in the collection, which editions of a particular work the library has, and what materials the library has on a particular subject" (35). If you're playing along at home, those functions share a lot in common with the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) tasks: find, identify, select, and obtain.

The author ends his article by stating "The accumulated data derived from catalog use surveys which employ valid and appropriate research techniques should be consulted whenever professional librarians consider revising cataloging codes, public catalog arrangements, and/or the content of bibliographic records" (36).

Historically, library catalogs were not meant to aid the user in finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining library materials. But it seems like as libraries moved over time from being closed-stacks in need of a gatekeeper to open-stacks where users can browse freely, our ideas of how a cataloging code should be constructed stayed the same. And in a world where access to information is increasingly unmediated, the seeming unwillingness to change how we create our cataloging codes mean that our library catalogs are not in danger of becoming relics of a time--but have already gone their. After all, how many times have you heard, anecdotally, that users don't start their search in the catalog? And yes, our content standards are forever enmeshed with our encoding standards and our local integrated library systems. But it's still worth considering how we've shut our users and their behavior out of all of these things.

Given how recently RDA was created and adopted, one might think that this would've provided an opportunity for those responsible for its creation and adoption to think about user needs and behavior. But in her book, FRBR before and after, Karen Coyle writes "For a study that was purported to be user-centric, the user's absence is notable. There is no analysis of users; no mention of how varied the user base is; no mention of children or elders or the disabled. Instead, to my mind, the FRBR Final report reads as a study by catalogers for catalogers" (106). It is worth noting that the FRBR model serves as the basis for RDA.

So, back to the tension that I mentioned early in the post. The description of library materials is meant to be a public service and many people who do this work see themselves as advocates for library users. But I often how can we serve the public when we create records using a standard that seems to advocate for a monolithic user without considering their needs. I don't want my work to go into the ether, never to be used by my library's user communities. And, as I mentioned earlier, the content standards we use to create metadata that describes our collections are forever tied to the encoding standards we use and the local systems into which we place records created using these content and encoding standards.

I feel badly about getting to the end of this post and leaving with more questions than answers, but sometimes an opening to a conversation is a gift. I don't think I'm advocating for scrapping our current cataloging code and starting over. But I do think I'm advocating for looking at our current catalog more critically--about who created it and who it was meant to serve--and thinking about our local user communities in how those cataloging rules get applied in a local context.

Stay positive,
Erin

Works cited:
Coyle, Karen. FRBR before and after. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2016.

Hufford, Jon R. "The pragmatic basis of catalog codes: has the user been ignored?" Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1991).

The spotlight is focused, the audience rapt

I am in the quiet space between a couple of writing projects and I'm thinking about the thread that ties the two together.

In the first writing project, I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how my lived experience acts as a lens through which I view the material that I catalog. In the early drafts of this project, I tried to argue that catalogers should both identify biases and work to push against them in their work. I even used the phrase "eradicate bias." As I wrote subsequent drafts, however, I became convinced that our job as catalogers shouldn't be to work against bias to create a neutral catalog. As many people smarter than me have said, the catalog is not neutral ground--nor should it be. Instead, I thought more about how catalogers should consider their lived experiences more to identify who they are and what privilege they do (or don't) possess. In much the same way that understanding how I benefit from whiteness changes how I move in the world, understanding how I benefit from whiteness changes how I approach the material I catalog.

The second writing project is going to turn my attention toward the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. I'm interested in thinking about the six frames can serve as a lens through which catalogers can view what our cataloging priorities should be. I'm interesting in thinking about how cataloging work would change if we brought our practises into closer alignment with what librarians doing information literacy instruction are teaching students. My gut reaction at the outset of this work is that bringing our practises into closer alignment means that we will be less able to reuse records from Ye Olde Bibliographic Utility without making at least some degree of local changes. At the outset of this project, I feel like bringing cataloging practises and information literacy instruction practises into closer alignment will result in more work for catalogers rather than less.

I think the places where these two projects (and the thinking behind them) come together is that we need to spend a lot more time considering our local communities and the values that our local libraries embrace when creating and adapting records for use in our local catalogs. We must consider how we will change every aspect of how we work when we decide that our libraries should be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-ableist, and anti-classist spaces. We cannot create inclusive physical library spaces without also creating inclusive digital spaces--and that includes are our library catalogs. We cannot address signage without also addressing metadata creation content standards. We cannot address loan policies without also addressing controlled vocabulary.

I don't resent people for thinking first about how to create more inclusive physical spaces since changing physical spaces has a visible return on investment for users. But not every person who uses the library does so by coming into our physical spaces. For some of our user groups, the library's digital presence is the only way they will interact with the library, so we also need to put some thought into how we will reflect in those spaces the values we profess in our physical spaces. This might mean changing our website's design or creating a local thesaurus of terms that reflect our values more than any of the existing thesauri. But whatever it means, we have to do it.

Making the changes in local practise that bring information literacy practise and cataloging practise into closer alignment will be neither easy nor cheap. And creating inclusive digital spaces will require both financial resources and staff time. We'll have to decide what we're willing to give up to take on this new work and we'll have to have administrative support to move forward. But if creating inclusive physical spaces is a priority for us, we have to think about how our digital spaces will change too.

Stay positive,
Erin

The time to rise had been engaged

I am always a little bit cheered when someone outside of the metadata creation universe champions a metadata or metadata-adjacent cause. A lot of what I write about is about the value of well-formed metadata in the larger library ecosystem--especially as it relates to a user's ability to discover things in a digital environment.

So given my soapbox feelings about well-formed metadata and its role in discovery, I was interested to Chris Bourg's blog post about the role of serendipity in the research process and browsing in the online environment. I was even more interested to know that Chris gave this talk to members of the IviesPlus group as part of IviesPlus Discovery Day, because I feel like those are the people and institutions with the resources to really dig into these issues.

The part of Chris' blog post that really caught my attention was this:

What we are hearing are scholars who want us to build tools, or facilitate the building or deployment of tools, that will allow them to see connections to their work and their teaching and their interests that they cannot see now. They want to discover articles and books and data and images and maps and primary sources and teaching objects and people on the fringes of their own areas of focus, but that are otherwise kind of in their blindspots. They want to make happy & unexpected discoveries; and they want it not to be by accident, but to be because the library has provided the tools, the data, and the metadata to make it so.

What I appreciate about this statement is the acknowledgement of the fact that creating this kind of world, this kind of future, requires well-formed metadata. Researchers want to be able to discover the things they didn't know that they wanted to discover and I believe that library would love to make that experience available to users. But, as Chris points out, that requires a different set of tools than are currently available to users. It also requires a commitment to understanding what metadata those tools require to provide the kind of experience that users want and, once those needs are assessed, the commitment to developing that kind of metadata.

Creating the descriptive and subject access to library materials that will facilitate the kind of user experience Chris describes is costly. Yes, metadata from other parts of the supply chain can (and should) be used. And yes, linking to authoritative source outside of the current authority ecosystem will help cut down one cost. But at some point, libraries will have to take on the task of creating and remediating metadata in order to make it useable by the tools that are necessary to facilitate true, serendipitous discovery. And that creation and remediation is timely in terms of time and in terms of personpower.

I am grateful that Chris put forth this vision for the future of discovery. And I'm doubly grateful that metadata was mentioned in the same breath with tools and data. It isn't enough for metadata creators to talk ceaselessly about the value of well-formed metadata in the discovery process. We need for administrators to talk about it, too. I am inspired by the ideas that Chris put forth in the talk that lead to the blog post. And I hope that we, as metadata creators, have the resources we need to create the well-formed metadata that will lead to those ideas becoming reality.

Stay positive,
Erin

The secret to a happy ending is knowing when to roll the credits

I mentioned in my last blog post that I'm writing a book chapter. I'd had "Naming and reframing: a taxonomy of attacks on knowledge organization" by Tina Gross on my to-read list for a while. And this chapter I'm writing provided me a great opportunity to read it.

To say that I have some Capital-F feelings about this article would be a pretty significant understatement.

In the article, Gross identifies 10 types of attacks of knowledge organization and then goes on to define and give examples for each of these attacks. Gross doesn't offer any solutions to the problem of attacks on knowledge organization and states pretty plainly that the point of the article is not to solve the problem, but to establish language through which we can describe it.

There are two attacks that I think have a symbiotic relationship: disregarding quality and distorting user behavior.

When describing disregarding quality, Gross writes:

There is such a thing as metadata being good enough without being comprehensive, and there's also such a thing as declaring hopeless garbage to be good enough without considering the implications for users. Doing the latter is self-defeating--when metadata fails to facilitate the level of searching needed by users, they have a less satisfactory experience. Usage is likely to go down resulting in even less justification to support and pay for the creation or acquisition of quality metadata. (p. 266)

via GIPHY


This particular attack leads to the library infrastructure version of chasing one's tail. For whatever reason, the metadata creation standards at a library decline. Because the metadata is incomplete, incorrect, or both, users can't find what they're looking for and usage of key resources that are powered off of the shoddy metadata goes down. Administrators look at the decline of usage of the key resources and decide that the because the usage is going down that the resources devoted to creating metadata that powers those key resources can be reallocated.

While a metadata creator might be able to draw an immediate connection between the change in metadata quality and usage of key resources, an administrator might not necessarily be able to do the same if they don't have an understanding of how metadata informs search results and all they have to go on is the usage data of key resources.

While we're on the subject of what users do or don't use, let's look at distorting user behavior. Gross describes it as "asserting that users don't use certain types of metadata, even though major search functions are powered by them" (p. 267)

This attack has as much to do with the narrative constructed by outside forces as it does with what libraries know to be true of their users based on actual evidence. There are a not-insignificant number of studies which suggest that users don't start their research in the library catalog, so administrators decide that resources used to create metadata can be reallocated to other library services. There are two things that strike me about this:

1. What seems to be missing from these studies, though, is how many library users interact with the catalog at some point during the research process. Just because a user doesn't start their search in the catalog doesn't mean they don't go there at some point in the process.

2. Our users are not a monolith. What is true about the research process of one user group may not be true of all user groups.

So which comes first--disregarding quality or user behavior? And, perhaps more importantly, where do metadata creators go from here?

I don't have the answer, but I have a couple of ideas.

First, metadata creators should be gathering as much information as we can about user behavior and using that information to guide the decisions we make. We should know what our users find most useful in catalog records and be focusing our attention on that. This differs from library to library and user group to user group. So while you can probably use those reports that construct a narrative as a starting point, you're going to have to interact with actual users to understand the context at our own library.

Second, our public services colleagues have to help us gather data about when users can't find what they're looking for because of poorly-formed metadata. This data can help metadata creators make the case for the re-reallocation of resources back to metadata creation. Nothing says 'hey, we need more resources in the cataloging department' like evidence of where users have walked away empty handed. To the extent that it's practical (and legal), I would advocate share reference interview transcripts or notes as well as catalog search logs.

Finally, I want to say that I picked on administrators a lot in this post, but I do so affectionately and with the understanding that our administrators have a lot to think about and decide on any given day. And, ultimately, they work with the information we give them to make the best decisions they can to allocate resources to library services. It's our job to give them the information and tools to make the best decision possible.

Stay positive,
Erin

The right notion in the meantime

Last week I attended the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's Joint Operations Committee Meeting. This is, essentially, the business meeting of the various groups that form the PCC. This year's OpCo meeting included a lot of discussion on BIBFRAME and what a world after MARC might look like. In the midst of this conversation, I sent out a couple of tweets:

Interesting thought: movement away from MARC means we have opportunity to decide what to keep and what to give away from current practice.

— Erin Leach (@erinaleach) May 5, 2016

How do we decide what to keep from current practice given that 'we've always done it this way' will likely not be a compelling argument?

— Erin Leach (@erinaleach) May 5, 2016

There is much about BIBFRAME and the post-MARC world that I don't understand. And until I attended this meeting, I was pretty sure I wouldn't wade into this discussion because I had nothing smart to add.

But now I do.

Building a new encoding standard is really amazing. I doubt many people really think of it that way because it's such nuanced work. Honestly, I don't think about how amazing it is most of the time. I mean, I quit the BIBFRAME list because it was so far over my head as to be useful to me. So the wonder of standards creation is lost on me most of the time.

The part about building an encoding standard that excites me most is that it gives us the opportunity to radically reconsider our current practises. What parts of our current practices are so important that we want to preserve it and what parts no longer serve us? What new practices could we incorporate to better serve our user communities?

I hope that as the metadata creation community builds out and implements BIBFRAME that we don't just try to map MARC fields into BIBFRAME elements and create what might essentially be considered MARC2.0. I hope that the community takes the time to consider what MARC fields are essential in helping users complete the tasks that brought them to the online catalog in the first place.

This evaluation and decision-making process requires the metadata creation community to think about who it considers its users and what they might require in order to successfully navigate the online catalog. I desperately hope this means consulting with actual library users in order to devise user tasks and use cases based on actual user needs as opposed to talking about a monolithic user.

This evaluation and decision-making process also requires the metadata creation community to have a difficult conversation about administrative metadata and about the extent to which the metadata community itself is a user. What I think we need to wrestle with as a community is the fact that while the metadata community is a user, we are not the primary user. We should not put our needs first and we definitely shouldn't cling to old ways of doing things because they suit our needs. Instead, I would argue that the metadata creation community should identify the minimum amount of administrative metadata required to successfully complete our work.

As we build this new encoding standard, I hope that we decide to use this opportunity to radically reconsider our metadata creation process. And when we do, I hope our benchmark for which practises to continue and which to stop are based entirely on end user needs and not on our own.

Stay positive,
Erin

And when I start to feel it making sense for me

So...let's talk about this story that circulated last week about the Representative from Tennessee who wants to introduce legislation to force the Library of Congress to reverse its decision to cancel the heading Illegal aliens and, in its place, use the headings Noncitizen and Unauthorized immigration. It seems likely that this proposed piece of legislation is little more than a push for attention by a person who is up for reelection. After all, what better way to make a name for oneself than taking on the bastion of political correctness that is Library of Congress.

I think this story surfaces, again, an issue that I've written about before: the Library of Congress is not the U.S. national library even though we in the U.S. library community treat it as if it were. We use the Library of Congress' thesaurus and classification scheme for subject cataloging even though many in the U.S. cataloging community have been talking for many years about its flaws and working for many years to try to correct "-ist" headings and class numbers.

And while it would be fun to talk more about the problematic nature of treating the Library of Congress as de facto U.S. National Library, I think that there is a more important issue that this story surfaces: cataloging is not a neutral act.

While it's true that catalogers are taught to be objective in how they are taught to describe the objects they're tasked with cataloging, this feels impossible. One could argue that it feels less impossible in descriptive cataloging, because it is easier to be object about, say, the publisher of a book than the subject of that book. But this feeling of impossibility is even baked into our content standards, which leave room for "cataloger's judgment." In some cases, the standards reason, a cataloger will have to interpret a rule and apply it in a way that makes the most sense to them. Which means that even descriptive cataloging --the part of cataloging that is meant to have the greatest chance of objectivity--isn't actually all that objective.

And while it feels like a challenge to talk about objectivity in descriptive cataloging, it feels wholly impossible to talk about objectivity in subject cataloging. If the language itself isn't neutral, how can we be expected to be objective in our application of that language?

I have long thought that in addition to talking about cataloger's judgment, we should also talk about cataloger's bias. So, let's do that. One of the definitions Merriam-Webster gives for bias is "an inclination of temperament or outlook, especially: a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment." And when we talk about cataloging--especially subject cataloging--that makes sense to me.

Catalogers bring to bear on the works they catalog a lifetime of lived experience. It is impossible to put away that lived experience in order to describe works in an objective fashion. And it is both disingenuous to library users and unfair to catalogers to continue to perpetuate this....lie. As a middle-class, white, cisgender woman, I can't put away my lived experience in order to describe the things I catalog--nor should I. And I shouldn't expect that my colleagues from marginalized groups to do the same.

So how do we reckon with this? How do we acknowledge cataloger's bias and then move through a flawed system in order to order the objects we are tasked with describing? I think we do it in two ways.

1. Appreciate the lived experiences of your colleagues and your users and think about how this is reflected in your metadata.
My experience with the heading Illegal aliens is different than someone who has lived that experience, which means I should believe them when they say that this terminology is dehumanizing. The same goes with any number of "-ist" subject headings. If someone tells you that the words you're using in your metadata to describe them invalidates their lived experiences, take that seriously. Don't dismiss it because their lived experience is not the same as yours.

2. Educate yourself and your users.
If you are unclear about your place in creating and maintaining oppressive systems, you have some work to do. I wrote before about how you have to understand your place in an oppressive system before you can dismantle it. Read everything you can and have hard conversations with you friends and your colleagues about white privilege and oppression. If you need a starting point for educating yourself, April Hathcock's blog has a lot of great posts on intersectionality and on doing the work.

If you have a relationship with library users, you should use every appropriate opportunity to talk about catalog records and bias and how the material you retrieve when you search is based on biased algorithms. It seems likely that making the catalog as transparent as possible for users will help them find the material they seek while navigating the biased language of subject headings. Emily Drabinski's article, "Queering the Catalog," is a great read when thinking about how to bring users into the conversation about metadata. And anything you can read by Safiya Noble is great for thinking about algorithmic bias.

There are a wealth of tools out there to help you get started in thinking about how to educate yourself and your users. If you have other ideas, feel free to drop them in the comments!

While coming to terms with cataloger's bias is both challenging and uncomfortable, it's unbelievably necessary. We cannot continue to believe that cataloging is a neutral act. And the quicker we move on from that point, the quicker we can help our users identify how to get the best information they need to complete the task at hand.

Stay positive,
Erin

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

They pale before the monolith that towers over me

Yesterday I wondered aloud on Twitter why cataloging and catalog records are always held up as signs of the Library of the Past.

Also, while we're on the subject. Why are cataloging and catalog records always the punching bag when we talk Future of Libraries?

— Erin Leach (@erinaleach) March 30, 2016

I'd just read this Ithaka S+R Issue Brief and was left with mixed feelings about what the Digital Future means for the creation of well-formed metadata.

I actually agreed with much of what Ms. Marcum has to say in this brief. Libraries absolutely do need to understand the needs and desires of users when it comes to library use and then act accordingly. Marcum writes:

Our users, or customers, are in control. Instead of settling for what we have to offer, they can now readily determine who can meet their information needs. Some information resources are freely available through the Internet; some sources provide information for a fee. The user can decide what is important to him or her, and also decide how much that service is worth.

I agree with that 100%. We can't dictate to our users how they should use our resources or what services we provide should be valuable to them. But I would stop to say that I think we should be careful about describing users in monolithic ways. I've written before about how user needs are contextual. While all user groups have some habits in common, I think it's potentially damaging to think about users as a single type of person and change our workflows to match that single type of user.

In this world where users can access a wealth of information from a variety of sources, Marcum suggests that digital resources become even more important. She suggests that libraries need to shift their foci from acquiring and describing print resources to providing access in greater numbers to digital resources. Marcum writes:

In the print world, librarians have been concerned about cataloging books and journals so that faculty and students could discover the resources in the library. In the digital environment, our users are more likely to find digital resources through a Google search than they are through searching the library's catalog. Access to information resources is what users care about--not what the library owns.

Okay, so Ms. Marcum and I are more or less still on the same page here. I think it's fair to suggest that some users prefer instant access to information resources. And the needs of some users require us to think more broadly about how we describe our resources and where we make them available.

But here's where Ms. Marcum loses me:

In the digital era, instead of preparing detailed cataloging records to enter into our online catalogs, we are far more likely to invest in services that our users really want--specialized and individualized help when they can't find what they want in a Google search, access to more electronic journals and databases, on-line reference services, and access to new types of scholarly information--data sets, blog posts, and multimedia resources.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like at least some of these things that Marcum suggests that users want hinge on well-formed metadata in local library catalogs. Where are the people providing specialized and individualized help directing people when Google searches fail? How do users gain access to more electronic journals and databases? Maybe not always the local library catalog, but sometimes.

Library administrators must survey their communities and adjust priorities to meet changing user needs. I get that. But I also think that as long as users need to find library resources--physical or digital--well formed metadata will be an integral part of that task. In fact, I think well-formed metadata is especially important for digital resources because in a digital world we lose the capacity to browse the shelves to find all of the things we missed in our catalog search.

About a year ago, I wrote a post about the importance of having an elevator pitch about the value of well-formed metadata ready for those times when people suggest that perhaps cataloging isn't as important as it once was. In some ways it's disheartening to see that we're at the same place we were a year ago.  And while advocacy is important, I think that if enough people are suggesting that cataloging has extended beyond its usefulness, maybe it's time to evaluate our practises to live in the digital age. I think this means learning more about how users actually acquire information and adjusting our local and national practises accordingly.

At least that way when people suggest that well-formed metadata isn't as useful as it once was, we can say we did our homework as we advocate for ourselves.

Stay positive,
Erin

This ain't no acrobatics

So, lately I've been writing about catalog records and the contextual needs of users. It's been fun to play with ideas about how we could change the ways in which we catalog our collections in order to meet the needs of users. The part about writing this blog that's enjoyable is that I can put ideas into the world without also having to assign dollar values or staff time to these ideas. Essentially, I can put the in an incubator and see how they grow over time.

But over where ideas meet reality, libraries often don't have the money or the staff to treat resources description in the way that we might want them to. And, in the absence of those resources, they are forced to make choices about how items in their collections are described. But how do we decide--how should we decide?

In 2007, David Banush and Jim LeBlanc wrote an article titled "Utility, library priorities, and cataloging policy" that applied utilitarian principles to cataloging backlogs--specifically liberal utilitarianism. The authors worked at an institution where shifting institutional priorities meant that fewer resources were available for the cataloging of library resources. And in that environment of changing priorities and fewer resources, the Cataloging Department was tasked with reducing their significant backlog.The article discusses the ways in which their institution decided how they could process their backlog to do the greatest amount of good for the largest number of patrons. The institution changed the extent to which humans would intervene in the cases of both original and copy cataloging. The result was accepting more records as-is and creating less detailed records in cases where records didn't exist while also utilizing an automated process to search the bibliographic utility on an ongoing basis for fuller-level records to replace those less detailed records. And while they acknowledge that the long-term effects of the decision's they've made on user access won't be immediately discernible, they were able to share some statistics for 2005/2006 that made it seem like, in the short term, the decisions they made weren't disastrous for user access.

The article makes a good point about how resources in an organization are finite and that when we make one thing a priority over another thing, we decide how to allocate the resources. Banush and LeBlanc write:

If library administrations agree with Mann and others that more resources should be devoted to cataloging as it has been traditionally conceived and practiced, the additional funding and staffing will almost certainly come at the expense of other initiatives (107).

I think that libraries have to provide users with the collections and services they the need to be successful researchers. I also think that Banush and LeBlanc are probably correct when they assert that allocating resources to the emerging collections and services that users need to be successful researchers means that other areas will lose resources in the form of funding or staff positions. And in a world where many information seekers bypass the library's catalog to find information resources, metadata creation and remediation may seem like an easy target for reductions in both funds and staffing.

But I would argue that there is room in this 'do more with less' world for libraries to consider their priorities and how metadata creation and remediation might be embedded in those priorities. Users want access to more digitized and electronic collections? How will you represent those in your catalog and/or on your website? Users tell you on your satisfaction surveys that they can't find what they're looking for in the catalog? How can catalog records be improved to help users succeed in finding what they need?

It's likely that not every item that comes through a library's cataloging department needs hands-on intervention. But whether it's unique collections or specialized areas of collection interest, I suspect that are items that come through the library's cataloging department that need hands-on treatment that don't get it because of financial constraints. And, in that case, library users suffer.

While it's nice to have an incubator space for ideas to grow, I don't think we can write all of them off as wishful thinking or as too expensive. I feel strongly about how well-formed metadata can improve the experience of our users--especially in the realm of subject access. But I also acknowledge that we have to find the places where we're willing to give something to get something. So how do we choose?

Stay positive,
Erin

Works cited:
Banush, David and Jim LeBlanc. "Utility, library priorities, and cataloging policies." Library Collections, Acquisitions & Technical Services 31 (2007) 96-109.

We were perfect when we started, I've been wondering where we've gone

I finally finished Hope Olson's The Power to Name last week. And while I was sad to see it end, I really appreciated the forward-thinking ways in which Olson proposed potential solutions to the problems she identified in the preceding chapters. Though the book was published in 2002, Olson's solutions to the subject analysis problem still seem...controversial.

And can we talk about how much I love them? Because I do--love them.

Olson's solutions are based on the idea that catalogers can apply controlled vocabularies and classification schemes radically in order to center the Other who is most often marginalized in a conventional application of these systems. Her solutions are also based on the idea that while change is possible at a macro-level, change is most effectively achieved on a micro-level. Olson writes "Ameliorative change needs to come from both LC and individual libraries because universal solutions are not viable options" (234). Olson later writes "Our techniques must have the local context as the primary motivator. The far-reaching principles and the standards that have grown from them must be at the service of local, contemporary needs" (239).

I appreciate that while Olson criticizes controlled vocabulary and classification systems as broad concepts, she does not let individual libraries (and the catalogers they employ) off the hook. She notes that individual catalogers have as much responsibility for the subject analysis of the items in their collection as the de facto U.S. National Library.

Although, maybe instead of responsibility we should say agency.

I think that catalogers don't often have "the local context" as their primary motivator. This isn't always our fault, as sometimes resources aren't on our side. Libraries have begun purchasing more metadata from vendors in an effort to move material more quickly to the shelves or to make online resources more accessible on a scale not possible with item-by-item cataloging. But it's worth considering what we lose in terms of local user needs when we gain efficiency.

One of the solutions that Olson proposes is for people within individual libraries to decide what matters most to their users and set subject analysis priorities based on that. Olson writes "Local libraries could privilege different differences: gathering by race or ethnic origin is likely to be of more use in some libraries than by age" (235). Olson's argument is that while controlled vocabulary and classification systems are often inflexible, local applications don't have to be. Libraries can decide in which way they want to pull together books on a particular topic or about a particular group of people.

I think we might dismiss Olson's idea out of hand because it seems time consuming and we can't imagine devoting that much of our time to changing our cataloging workflows. Olson's proposition isn't a cheap or easy solution to the problem of subject analysis, but it does put a library's user community squarely in the middle of the discussion about how priorities for analysis are set. Imagine what it would be like if a subject specialist and a cataloger sat down and talked about what was most important when it comes to describing items in a particular subject specialty. What is most important to users in that discipline--what should I (the cataloger) look out for? Are there particular terms that are triggering to the people you work with with--what language should I avoid?

We often give our rare and unique collections this kind of treatment, but we rarely extend it to materials that are widely held in libraries. And maybe that's okay. Maybe part of considering the "local context" is deciding that not every item is worth the kind of attention to detail Olson's proposed technique would require. Maybe part of considering the "local context" is deciding that what really matters is focusing our attention on the material that only our libraries hold and hoping that the copy we find in our bibliographic utility of choice is good enough to help users get what they need.

The point, I think, is that a cataloger doesn't have to lavish significant attention on every item their library requires. But that cataloger shouldn't shy away from lavishing attention on the items that require it either. We shouldn't shy away from editing a catalog record from our bibliographic utility of choice because it's good enough. We should decide, instead, that that record does not require editing because it suits the needs of our users.

Stay positive,
Erin

Works cited:
Olson, Hope. The power to name: locating the limits of subject representation in libraries. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Print.

You can get with this, or your can get with that

I read Karen Coyle's FRBR, before and after recently and I was really enamored with how often, and to what degree, the author asks us to consider users and their needs. And the point she returns to over and over again is that librarians design standards and systems without including the user in the design process. Instead, we ask users to make use of systems we design without their input. Coyle writes in the introduction:

"...making any general statement about the structure or data elements needed to describe all resources for all users of a library catalog is going to be difficult if not impossible. And yet this is what we do on a routine basis: we create records that treat all resource types the same, and for only one definition of 'user.' We also ignore or downplay many of the characteristics that are important for users (xiii)

Coyle's quote led me to consider the why of metadata creation and this is where I landed: catalog records serve two distinct purposes.

Purpose the first: inventory control--
Libraries need to have some back-end inventory control system to manage the material in their collection. It is helpful to know, at any given moment, which items in your physical collection are on the shelves and which items are not. And it's also helpful to know where (or, I suppose, with whom) the items that are not on the shelves have gone. Finally, it's useful libraries to be able to tie purchase or subscription information to the items on the physical or virtual shelves.

Metadata elements required for the purposes of inventory control of  any given physical or virtual item are fairly small and might vary depending on the library and the material type of the item.

Purpose the second: discovery of resources--
Users search our catalogs to find material in our collection. Sometimes the user knows what they want and sometimes they don't. The elements we record in our records govern how users can find the material we describe. While our systems have evolved to the point that we can keyword search entire records or drill down through results sets using facets, we are generally able to query metadata that describes our collections the basis of title, author, or subject.

Okay, yeah. So what?
I think that we conflate these two purposes more often than not. And that in doing so, we do the user a significant disservice.

Metadata reuse seems to be underlying goal of any attempt to implement standardization in catalogs. And the underlying goal of metadata reuse seems to be a reduction in the cost of cataloging. Putting metadata we purchase from vendors aside, if we put our records into a shared bibliographic utility, other libraries can download them and original cataloging of an item happens only once.

But user needs are contextual and what users require when discovering resources can vary depending on any number of factors. Reuse of metadata without human intervention is fine if what you require is a placeholder for inventory control, but what happens on the 'discovery of resources side' when the record you download doesn't have the data elements your user group needs?

This is not an argument against a shared bibliographic utility or against the reuse of metadata created by other libraries. This is also not an argument in favor of every library should catalog every item in their collection from scratch. Original cataloging on that large of a scale is financially unsustainable and, for much of any given collection, a waste of time.

Where do we go from here?
On a micro-level, we should identify and document the ways in which downloaded records can be enhanced to help users discovery our library's holdings. Chances are, you have a written procedure that your copy catalogers use when making local edits to downloaded records. Have the data elements that your copy catalogers edit been identified by users as significant for access? If not, have you at least run your document past one of your public services colleagues?

On a macro-level, we need to incorporate end users in the development phase of our cataloging and library technology standards. We should identify user tasks based on the actual needs of users. And we should get feedback from our user communities on the models we build before devoting significant resources to implementing them. By doing this, we save our precious time and build infrastructure that better serves the needs of users.

Stay positive,
Erin

Works cited:
Coyle, Karen. FRBR, before and after. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2016. Print.

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

Through the storm we reach the shore

Last week, I wrote a blog post that tried to answer the question: Is there a better alternative to the SACO process of LCSH review to ensure that change happens?

After I put the question into context by talking about the SACO proposal process, I wrote about how the Program for Cooperative Cataloging and the ALCTS CaMMS Subject Access Committee could change their process to become more inclusive.

This week, I want to talk about how alternative thesauri could be used instead of, or in conjunction with, LCSH.

Metadata creation using MARC as a content standard allows for a variety of thesauri to be used in the topical subject access field (field 650). If using a thesaurus other than LCSH, a cataloger can enter a term source code in $2 of field 650 to indicate which thesaurus the term comes from. This list is lengthy, though not exhaustive.

MARC also allows catalogers to employ a local subject access field (field 690). This field allows a cataloger to create a local subject term or to choose a term from an existing thesaurus not included on the term source code list. As with field 650, catalogers should document the source of the heading in $2 of field 690.

via GIPHY

HEY! WAKE UP!

Given the freedom that MARC gives catalogers with regard to employing a variety of thesauri, a potential better alternative to the SACO proposal process is to circumvent the use of LCSH entirely. Or, perhaps, to augment the flawed thesaurus with other controlled vocabulary. Using alternative thesauri gives libraries the opportunity to bring language into their catalog that is both more inclusive and more culturally responsive. Alternative thesauri are also a way to negotiate around the fact that LCSH is slow to change when language changes. 

A shift toward using alternative thesauri in MARC records requires buy-in both from the cataloging community as a whole and from individual libraries. As a cataloging community, we need to accept that disciplines and communities often have a better understanding of their organization and of their lexicon. As individual libraries, we need to understand that investing the time in identifying appropriate alternative thesauri for types of material and subject areas is a valuable investment in creating a more inclusive search environment.

If our goal as libraries is to create a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable space for our users, I would argue that metadata is as important as how we change our policies, practices, and spaces.

Stay positive,
Erin

All My Daydreams are Disasters

Erin talked recently (and all the time) about how catalogers and technologists need to include public services professionals and patrons in their discussions of the library future. It got me thinking, again, about The Problem With The Catalog. This isn't a "the OPAC is dead" post, and I have to admit that I don't even know what "the OPAC is dead" discussion is about because I've avoided it because it seems entirely off-base to me. However, I think that a return to basic principles is in order when we think about the post-MARC world and how library catalogs have worked (or not worked) for us in the past.

The basic question I like to start with is "what are we trying to do here?" It is a question that gets overlooked far more than we're aware and way more than we should be comfortable with. I have some theories as to why that is, but we'll leave that for another day. What are we trying to do with a library catalog? What are our purposes?

Let's take a look at the many and varied things that we try to do with the library catalog, based on the audience.

Library Staff
Library staff use the catalog as inventory control, a complete and comprehensive list of items in the building at any time, a complete and comprehensive list of items that the library owns. Most systems also use the integrated library system (I'll note that it isn't necessarily the catalog, but the linkages are essential to how we function these days) as a customer management system, tracking interactions with users including lending, money owed, renewal dates for borrowing privileges, and a host of other things. Many libraries also use the integrated library system as an accounting system which encumbrances, expenditures, budgets, renewal dates for continuing commitments, and an archive of fiscal functions.

Other Libraries
We use library catalogs as a means of communicating with other libraries, an extension of the inventory control function of the catalog. In communicating with other libraries, the need for complete and comprehensive coverage of the exact physical item is reiterated. We communicate with other libraries through both our catalogs (through Z39.50 as well as union lists) and through union listing of serials holdings in places like the OCLC database. All of this facilitates interlibrary lending to the end of providing more and better materials to our users and to the users of other libraries.

Library Users

I put this last because it often seems to come last in how we think about our catalog. We, naturally, think of our professional needs before our service needs. Our thinking seems to be along these lines:

Well we obviously need to have a catalog that has a well designed inventory control and a good accounting system and that will work to talk to other libraries. Doing that obviously gives the users the information they need -- a comprehensive and complete listing of library items here and at other libraries and a way to get access to them. We've been taking care of users all along!

But library users aren't using the catalog in the same way we are, they're generally looking for things. Looking for things takes on a number of guises, but I don't know that any of those guises is exactly inventory control.

An important wrinkle in the story of the library catalog is shared cataloging. I would argue that shared cataloging helps library staff and communicating with other libraries, but is of questionable value to the library patron. After all, I really am not sure that a librarian at Harvard or Duke or even the Library of Congress knows best the description of the item that is both accurate and facilitates my users at Rural State University or Large Public Library or Tinest Library Ever looking for a thing. (this same discussion could be happening about subject cataloging, for instance).


I'm not sure that's a complete list of the things that we're doing or at least trying to do, but those are the main things I see. Let me know in the comments if I've left anything out.  This look at what we're doing start the conversation.


My original question is what are we trying to do here?
Let's break that down into an examination of what's already going on:

• does it make sense for us do each of these things?
• does it make sense to us to try to do all of these things together?

 From there, we can expand the scope:

• are we trying to do the same thing that we were trying to do when we set all this up?
• are there things that we're trying to do that are wholly unaddressed?

To me, this seems like the basis to start a discussion that involves everyone and aims at building a common understanding based on our collective goals instead of what is going wrong with what's happening right now. What do you think? What questions would you add to the discussion? Let me know in the comments.

& Keep Rockin'
Rachel