Brown's Adjustable

The economics of RDA

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:06:00 -0400

How much will it cost to implement RDA? Will you take out a solo subscription? An institutional one? How much will it cost retrain, to get up to speed? How much time will you spend changing workflows, tweaking your LMS? Will you bother? Do you care?

Historical footnote

Thinking about the economics of it all recently, in another context completely I came across this amusing quote from a German cataloguer:

“I cannot praise as an advance the eyesore they call this international format.”

He/she is not referring to RDA - it’s a very old quote - but to the decision of the Institut International de Bibliographie in 1908 to adopt the measurements of the American postcard (7.5 x 12.5 cm) as the standard format for catalogue cards.

As Markus Krajewski explains in his fascinating monograph (well, to me at least!), Paper machines : about cards & catalogs, 1548-1929, it was no accident that these dimensions came to be adopted as standard. Ever since 1877 the American Library Association, at the suggestion of Melvil Dewey, had been promoting this size as standard, the same Melvil Dewey whose “Supply Department” had been selling this particular index card at a discount for some time. As the “market leader” and with the weight of the ALA behind it, perhaps it was inevitable that it would be adopted worldwide, regardless of whether it was the best choice. (Krajewski explains this far better than I do, including on p. 93 a diagram illustrating how European index cards at the time were much larger. Given that the form of the card dictated the extent of the content, you do wonder how cataloguing might have otherwise evolved.)

Show me the money

Anyways, moving 102 years forward in time to 2010, I came across an interview earlier in the week with the about to retire Janet Swan Hill in which she looks back on her career in cataloguing. When asked about RDA she comments:

“I am a member of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control and it was I who uttered the heresy that said that our first set of recommendations should be suspension of work on RDA until such time […] as a persuasive argument had been made regarding its worth as compared to the cost.”

The interview was conducted before the official report on the US RDA test was released last summer which, as we know, failed to make a ‘business case’ for RDA. She goes on to remark:

“I think there is too much invested in RDA by too many people who have an interest in its publication. That is A - the AACR2 and AACR1 were the biggest money makers ALA had in its publications department, and so it is putting a lot of hope, I think, in RDA and its implementation.”

So there we have it – RDA as money-spinner for the ALA. It should be noted though that RDA is being co-published with Canadian Library Association and Facet Publishing, the publishing arm of CILIP - presumably if there are profits to be made they will be shared equally. I do wonder though how many libraries will be willing to pay given that we are in the midst of a recession. Moreover the paywall for the toolkit itself seems like such an own goal if the aim is to have it adopted as a content standard by the wider metadata community.

So, what’s my point in linking this two anecdotes? I am not making an argument about the value of RDA in and of itself (personally I think it’s a step in the right direction) but I suppose what I’m saying is it’s always worth looking at the broader picture and trying to understand the financial imperatives which both drive and obstruct change.

References

Markus Krajewski, 2011. Paper machines: about cards & catalogs, 1548-1929 / Markus Krajewski; translated by Peter Krapp, Cambridge, Mass; London: MIT Press.

Interview with Janet Swan Hill, 2010. [online] Available at: <http://solstice.ischool.utexas.edu/Capturing_Our_Stories/index.php/Interview_with_Janet_Hill> [Accessed 19 April 2012].

[Thing 4] Violently passive

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 11:33:00 -0400

Two out of three ain’t bad I thought to myself when I looked at the brief for this week’s thing. I’ve been on twitter for about a year now and I’m familiar with RSS; pushnote I’d never heard of but was willing to try. So, some random thoughts below.

Twitter

To tweet or not to tweet. Like most people I was sceptical about twitter until I took the plunge last summer. I set it up, and then …. nothing. Cue tumbleweed blowing across a dusty street. Subsequently, however, I went a-conferencing where I meet real live tweeters whom I began to follow, and discovered the much abused #hashtag which proved a great way of tracking events I could not attend. Twitter I realised was about conversation and engaging with people, and once I understood that I have used it more and more. And how do I use it? Let me count the ways.

So far, I have: connected with librarians and cataloguers the world over; taken part in an online tweetchat to discuss professional literature (http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/catbkchat); posed cataloguing questions, and received helpful responses; established, as secretary of LAI CMG, informal links with colleagues in CILIP CIG; have flagged and promoted events organised by the CMG; have been directed to and read numerous blog posts /articles that I would have not otherwise have discovered; stumbled on the world of the semantic web and a whole new universe of acronyms; and , in general, have been variously amused, amazed, and occasionally annoyed by the global stream of consciousness that is twitter.

I’m also finding it increasingly addictive, but for the moment, it’s the bee’s knees.

RSS

A few years ago in a flurry of excitement I set up a bloglines account, primarily as a means to aggregate my RSS feeds. I had been reading various blogs for a while and it seemed a great way of keeping track of them. Initially I checked it regularly, but overtime I used it less and less, because, frankly, it was overwhelming. I never had enough time to read all the posts and updates and it began to feel oppressive. Eventually my bloglines account fell into disuse.

In taking part in CPD23 I’ve reconsidered whether to bother with RSS feeds again and I have decided not to. Many people seem to be using google reader but any time I see it mentioned it’s usually accompanied by a sigh - a sigh induced by the sheer volume of unread posts. I know, or rather, have known that feeling. With some social networking tools it’s way too easy to fall into a kind of zen-borg state of passive info-assimilation – if that makes any sense. But it’s a restless passivity, as there is always something new to be accommodated.

Borg librarian ingesting multiple RSS feeds

Occasionally, I, you, will stumble across a blog/website that has everything: regular updates surrounded by a constellation of feeds, links … flashing lights. It is impossible to process all this information;- it is impossible and also completely unnecessary. By all means seek out (this is getting very Star Trek!) great blogs and bookmark them. Actively check them out when you have time or are of mind to … but no blog post is that significant you have to read it in real time. Let them lie fallow for a while and go back when you can enjoy them at your leisure.

Twitter I find is great at filtering the internet ,and for me anyways, has obviated the need for RSS feeds. By following people with similar interests I get enough links to interesting material to be going on with. So, set yourself free, say no to RSS – resistance is not futile!

Pushnote

I’ve installed Pushnote on firefox but to be honest I can’t really see myself using it much. I don’t have time to rate every webpage I visit and would rather remark on the content if minded to by using the comment button – if there is one. Not many people I follow are signed up so at the moment its social networking value is quite low. Still, it’s early days so I’ll play with it for a little while longer.

Pensive

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 07:07:06 -0400

Pensive

I am not a brand

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:49:00 -0400

I haven’t signed up to CPD23* but I was intrigued by some of the discussions around establishing a personal brand so I thought I’d join in the debate. Instinctively, like most people of a vaguely leftwing political disposition, I reacted against the idea. I didn’t quite go running off to re-read my copy of No Logo, but something about the concept left me feeling slightly queasy. Branding seems to reduce the self to a commodity and surely that’s something to be resisted.

Maybe that’s a bit po-faced, after all, what we are talking about here is creating a professional online identity. It makes sense surely to present ourselves in a coherent fashion to the world, especially given the variety of personas we use on facebook, twitter etc. But no, still not mad on the idea.

To begin with, as Jaron Lanier argues in You are not a gadget, none of these personas are entirely authentic anyway - facebook et al provide us with templated identities, multiple choice personalities , and no matter how much we customise or personalise our blogging platform of choice, we are just amending someone else’s creation. In the early days of the internet people were more likely to create something from scratch, but less so now. I, personally , use tumblr. Tumblr is cool. Tumblr has many beautiful themes to choose from. The problem with Tumblr is the constant temptation to change the theme because no matter which one you choose is doesn’t seem quite right ; that nagging feeling, that dissonance, I think, is a consequence of the gap between how we think of ourselves and the self presented in the elegant, but inauthentic, tumblr theme.

Can we separate the personal and the professional? I try to keep a distinction between twitter and facebook, but if I’m honest the boundaries are blurring constantly despite my best efforts. Our online identity is formed by so many factors beyond our control – the search history trail we leave in google, the websites we visit, the cookies we unwittingly invite into our browser - that the effort to control it hardly seems worthwhile. The only real choice we have is not to participate.

The idea of branding seems to feed into this idea that we can control our online identity – an identity that is already deeply fragmented. If you look up the word brand in the OED it’s initially defined as the “act, means, or result of burning”, then later as “a sign or mark, sometimes in a general sense, but usually (with reference to the practice of branding criminals) conveying the idea of disgrace; a stigma, a mark of infamy”. So in its origins branding was something done unto someone or something else - in other words it is essentially passive and in a sense giving over so much personal content to social media allows them to brand us with their values and not the other way round.

That’s not to say I’m going to give up twitter! – I really enjoy using it and it’s been a real eye-opener professionally speaking in that I’ve discovered a whole world of cataloguing librarians I didn’t know existed. I like the cacophony of voices – be they cranky, quirky, funny, informed, cynical – and I’d rather they maintained their individuality than begin to corporatize themselves.

*I have now

Tale of a title

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 09:24:52 -0400

It was a dark and stormy morning when I first set my eyes on the latest publication by the Sisters of Mercy, Longford, Ireland. Gingerly I lifted it off the trolley and casually perused the pages, searching in vain for an ISBN. This book is going to be a handful I mumbled quietly to myself. Not to be deterred I ploughed on and turned to the title page to transcribe the title proper, whereupon I stumbled on a sequence of words in a variety of fonts and sizes, some in isolation, some superimposed on each other, which I parsed initially as:

Convent of Mercy — 1861-2011— Longford

What is the correct order I wondered? What the hell is this book called? For illumination I turned to the cover where I discovered a similar confusion of words and fonts :

1861-2011 — Convent of Mercy — Longford — an illustrated history

How generic I thought, surely this place has a name? And so I glanced at the spine and lo, there it was:

St. Joseph’s Convent of Mercy — Longford — 1861-2011— an illustrated history

This, I thought subjectively, is probably what they feel is the real title of the book, a supposition undermined somewhat by a fourth variation found on the title page verso:

Convent of Mercy, Longford – 1861—an illustrated history

After much prevarication I eventually transcribed the title as Convent of Mercy, Longford : 1861-2011 – with multiple variant titles. Is this really the book’s title? I’m not sure, but it’ll do for now. End of story.

all beautiful

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:53:00 -0500

On the pcc list, Deborah Tomaras writes:

I just cataloged the book corresponding to OCLC #702491897. When I looked at the record, the 300 read:

319 pages : |b illustrations (some coloured, all beautiful), maps ; |c 25 cm.

I’ve corrected the spelling of “coloured” to American usage—is there an RDA provision I’m missing about this, or was it a typo?

But the part I can’t understand is the inclusion of “all beautiful”. Are we allowed, under RDA provisions, to include value judgements about the illustrations? Are value judgements allowed elsewhere in cataloging under RDA? Under AACR2, we are supposed to be as objective as possible when creating records, and not allow personal biases in subjects, etc. But this is ridiculous. Aren’t we supposed to just be transcribing in the 300 field?

Is this a rogue cataloger, or is there a provision I should be cringing about now?

Thanks in advance for all information (and potential public drubbing of CGU?).

Later, she names and shames! :

The book in question was cataloged by University of Chicago, an American cataloging agency, presumably therefore supposed to be using American spellings for things. The book itself was in Swedish, so would not have said anywhere specifically that it had “all beautiful colo(u)red illustrations”. I do not correct British spellings when I see records by UKM etc., or generally, for that matter. I changed it here only because I was also editing out the phrase “all beautiful”, so thought I’d clean up both at the same time.

IMNSHO not all the illustrations were beautiful. And frankly, this is the problem that I had with the record—not really whether illustrations were listed as colored or not (I tend to note this especially in art books, as others have mentioned). The problem is that subjective judgements have been allowed into cataloging, where I don’t believe they should exist. Since this is an RDA record, and I am not entirely conversant with RDA rules, I sent this around to the wider cataloging public, to see if this is acceptable practice under the RDA framework. (After I had a good laugh, and then fixed the 300.)

Since Mr. Cronin of University of Chicago has replied to RDA-L about the question of whether this is RDA practice, I’ll consider it answered: “My personal apologies to the cataloging community for what was put in the 300 field. This has nothing to do with RDA, nor does it reflect CGU’s policy or philosophy. While NYPL would like to politicize it, this is nothing more than a demonstration of extremely poor judgment of a cataloger who, frankly, should have known better.” I will only state, for the record, that I was not attempting to “politicize” the issue, but rather to get a handle on the new rule-set for cataloging, and discover how far my understanding of what goes into a cataloging record has to change. I’m glad to know that subjectivity is not standard RDA practice. I will admit to calling CGU out publicly for their cataloging in this instance, but I would also do it for an AACR2 cataloging agency that had made strange errors in records, if I knew with certainty which agency had done the cataloging (i.e., it’s about the cataloging, and nothing more).

The politics of cataloguing

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:53:00 -0500

The plain people of Ireland may have spoken and voted the current government out of existence, but, alas, its legacy lives on in the form of official publications. A year or two ago, in a superficial attempt at reform, our then Taoiseach Brian Cowen announced a plan to rename several government departments for no apparent reason. Apart from the ensuing waste of money (changing stationery etc.) it created unnecessary work for lowly cataloguers everywhere. To whit, two examples:

- Dept. of Dept. of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, now the Dept. of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation

-Dept. of Dept. of Justice, Equality, and Law Reform, now the Dept. of Justice and Law Reform

The dropping of the word equality tells you everything you need to know about the values of said government.

The previous headings retain their validity of course, so lots of NACO work and see also references now beckon. Moreover, keeping track of the changing department names itself would be extremely tricky were it not for wikipedia, which maintains very comprehensive entries (official websites are next to useless). Of which, a good example here:

http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Department_of_Justice_and_Law_Reform

Alot of work has been done in previous years ensuring that our headings map to Library of Congress where it is the tradition to abbreviate the word Department. This presents as problem in the context of RDA which recommends the abandonment of abbreviations (also true of AACR to an extent). The Library of Congress has issued a communiqué in which it states:

The Library of Congress will not undertake changing headings with the abbreviation “Dept.” to the fuller form at this time. Between August 20-October 1, 2010, the Library requested comments from the library community on changing “Dept.” to “Department” to follow the longstanding AACR2 provision (which is also incorporated into RDA: Resource Description and Access) of not abbreviating “department” in headings unless it is abbreviated by the body on the resource from which the name has been taken.The few comments received by the Policy and Standards Division, Library of Congress, via email showed a clear preference for making this change but the limited response did not constitute a mandate. In addition those opposed to the change had solid reasons for not undertaking the change at this time. Consequently, the Library’s Policy and Standards Division will NOT proceed with implementing the change now. The issue will be reviewed again, following a decision regarding implementation of RDA.”

So, we’ll find out in April then! Whatever they decide, it will leave someone quietly tearing their hair out … except for those of us who are balding perhaps :)

Rainbowtastic view from my desk

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:00:33 -0500

Rainbowtastic view from my desk

Books, boxes, statistics

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:15:50 -0500

Well, it’s six-thirty and I’ve finally clocked out. It’s been a long and tiring day, and an instructive one in terms of some of the issues related to working in a legal deposit library.

Recently, we have been experiencing a massive upsurge in the number of books received, mainly due to the fact the the legal deposit agency in Scotland is now fully up to speed and beginning to process its backlog of claims. While welcome this means alot of boxes arriving very suddenly. This week alone we had almost 2,000 matched items (by matched I mean books with corresponding records). We are a bit low on staff this week for various reasons so it was a case of all hands on deck in terms of sorting through everything and trying to identify the more academic material. (It doesn’t help when you have a hangover - went to a librarians “networking” event last night at the Royal Irish Academy - wine followed by pints followed by late night taxi home).

We got through it and I have spent most of the day since clearing my trolley; creating original catalogue records takes a backseat on days like this. Mid-afternoon my boss stopped by my desk and asked me to compile some statistics on the amount of audio-visual material we have. Happily I said yes - but as I soon I started to think about it I realised the request was more complicated than it seemed.

To be begin with what does the term “audio-visual” mean. We have dvds, cds, videos, sound recordings etc. And beyond identifying all the formats there is also the issue of location - a matter which is never straighforward in a legal deposit library. I also had a problem in that I was unfamiliar with the reports function in our new LMS - that took a while to figure it out (so you see how this task was starting to take longer and longer …). Thankfully a colleague was on hand to explain the basic syntax -which turned out not to be that scary in the end. The same colleague (and this is where it’s fantastic to have colleagues whose knowledge of our collections - institutional memory if you will - stretches back much further than my own) also pointed out that pre-Marc 21 it was not always possible to correctly identify material type in the leader. In addition, any cds attached to books would be very difficult to identify since the item record would not distinguish them from the book (I could try a very involved query involving shelfmarks, but really, life’s too short). In generating the report I would also have to exclude all the redundant records with no holdings floating around in the catalogue as they could seriously distort the end result.

Bearing all this in mind, it was clear that any statistics the sytem could generate would be partial and incomplete. But perhaps that’s always true of catalogues and statistics. I plan to run the queries on monday morning when the system won’t be so busy.

After teasing all this out I got back to sorting out my trolley which I am pleased to say is now entirely empty.

Over and out, have a good weekend everyone :)

Cataloguing poem

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 09:01:00 -0500

I seem to have deviated slightly from the whole day in the life of a librarian remit, but I thought I’d finish off with a little poem - a rather poor parody of One Art by Elizabeth Bishop (I can hear her spinning in her grave as I type). So, here goes:

One Record

Cataloguing books isn’t hard to master;
So many things are simply meant
To be described that to try is no disaster.

Catalogue every day. Accept the fluster
Of records lost, the hour badly spent.
Cataloguing books isn’t hard to master.

Then catalogue more precisely, check things faster:
Places, and names, until you reach by increment
A higher level. None of this will bring disaster.

I make records built to last. And look! My last, or
Next-to-last of three to the BL went.
Cataloguing books isn’t hard to master.

I lost two books once, first editions. But as creator
Of their records I salvaged some contentment.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a complete disaster.

—-Go on you, to describe these tomes’ a pleasure –
I tell no lie. I think it’s evident
That cataloguing books’ not hard to master,
Though occasionally it may look like (feck it!) like disaster.

Tools of the trade

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 10:34:00 -0500

Tools of the trade

Cataloguer as trolley dolly

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 05:24:00 -0500

Leaving thoughts on controlled vocabularies, linked data and the semantic web to one side for the moment, for today’s entry I’d like to focus on the more important issue of the role of the trolley in the life of the cataloguer, particularly since I seem to have spent most of this morning pushing one.

Working in a legal deposit library means you are constantly moving stuff and do this you need trolleys and lots of them - in my department alone we have over fifty. Moreover they are colour coded: red for Cataloguing (danger!), yellow for Accessions and grey for Periodicals. Everywhere you look there are trolleys being hauled, pushed, stacked … and ignored.

Cataloguers arrange their trolleys in basically three configurations. First there is what I call the Custer’s Last Stand arrangement. This is where the cataloguer is completely encircled with no hope of rescue. In the second configuration the trolleys are still massed threateningly but there is clear path to the desk visible. Lastly there is the solitary trolley, neatly stacked and well organised.

Every book on a trolley is a book in limbo (this despite the Catholic Church having abolished the concept a few years ago!). Mentally you may have finished with it, but until it reaches its final destination - which in my case is usually a book repository four miles away in north Dublin - it is beyond the reach of the end-user. To every book its reader and all that.

Finally, I estimate that I spend at least 10 minutes a day nudging, moving and tripping over my two trolleys. That’s almost an hour a week, 4 hours a month, 2 days a year, and, if I work until I’m 67, that will be 54 days of my life centred on trolleys. Okay, perhaps I exaggerate – but you get the picture!

And that’s all I’ve got to say on the subject.

Coming up next week: Time and motion study reveals TCD library staff spend ridiculous amounts of time moving books around for no good reason.

Slipology, or, the importance of bits of coloured paper

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:10:00 -0500

For all the advances in library management systems many cataloguing departments are still heavily dependent on slips of coloured paper to manage workflow. I’ve been busy putting slips in books today so I thought I’d assemble all the various ones we use at work and take a photo of them. Apologies for the slightly murky quality. I think, in this instance though, a picture really does paint a thousand words :)

A week in the life of a cataloguer, sort of

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 04:20:00 -0500

Right, where to start. At the beginning I suppose. I work as a cataloguer in the Bibliographic Data Management Department (I know, quite a mouthful) of Trinity College Library Dublin. I’ve been working here, oh, roughly seven years and in that time I’ve acquired some modest cataloguing skills. My work is quite interesting and varied - chiefly because the material I work with is and if you kindly keep reading I’ll attempt to explain what exactly I get up to of a bog standard week.

Trinity if you are not aware is a legal deposit library, which basically means we get a copy of every book published in Great Britain and Ireland. This is both a gift (hey, we have everything!) and a burden (er, where do I put this?). As part of a famous and mysterious Memorandum of Agreement signed in our distant and glorious past, the honour of cataloguing all these books is shared unequally between the various legal deposit libraries - thank you British Library. Being librarians, the allocation was done alphabetically – we got the letter d. As a result I have acquired an expertise in the cataloguing of books on death, depression, diets, databases and dogs.

For most people the week begins on Monday but for me it begins on Thursday, for that is the day when we receive our weekly tranche of books in dire need of a bibliographical record. We are informed how many we have to do (usually between 20-30) and we proceed in a civilised and orderly fashion to share the material fairly and equally. Actually, that’s a complete a lie. There’s usually a mad scramble to get your hands on a bunch of half decent books. There is an unwritten rule in cataloguing: the thinner and more insubstantial something is, the more tedious and painstaking it will be to catalogue. Many’s the day I have arrived late on the scene to be greeted by a dispiriting bundle of government reports (see Fig.1).

The good news is that we also catalogue everything published in Ireland, both north and south (this means our allocation extends to the whole alphabet). In cataloguing these books I pay extra attention to our authority files – if an author is not established in the Library of Congress I make a NACO submission. This is oddly satisfying, but I can’t really explain why. Occasionally I make a SACO submission – this is not quite as straightforward a process as sometimes LC will say no. A former colleague had a long and trying correspondence with LC in his attempt to have the term “real ale” established as a separate and distinct subject heading. Happily he was successful!

In addition to creating original catalogue records the other main thing that I do is classify material to go on the open shelves (the vast majority of our books go to stacks). In Trinity we create shelfmarks using a combination of Dewey and Ranganathan strings which make absolutely no sense to anybody. Each cataloguer looks after certain subject areas. For years I looked after physics, chemistry and computer science but just recently I have been reassigned to film studies, history of art and English literature. For a cataloguer with an arts degree this is the equivalent of having died and gone to heaven.

Over the course of one week I could literally handle hundreds of books. There are records available for most books – it’s rare that you will not find some kind of a record either in OCLC or RLUK. In recent times I have begun cataloguing DVDs which I have discovered to be a complete minefield bibliographically speaking. I’m really hoping RDA will bring some clarity to the situation.

So, having explained, very briefly, my core cataloguing duties I thought I might conclude by listing some of the other bits and pieces I do: I maintain and update the department website; teach information skills; give enthusiastic library tours; serve on several library committees; moderate the tagging function on our Stella catalogue (named after one of Jonathan Swift’s girlfriends, don’t ask me why!) and create podcasts of varying quality for our library website.

Okay, that’s it for now, more pics ‘n stuff to come, thank you for reading!

PS. Quick plug, for my sins I am currently Secretary of the Library Association of Ireland’s CIG – our annual seminar is coming up soon, details here:

http://www.supersaas.com/schedule/LAICIG/Seminar

Fig. 1 Dispiriting bundle of government reports

Fig. 2 Current state of my desk

Wordled bib record

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 05:03:48 -0400

Wordled bib record

View over Dublin, from the Gravity bar

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:38:00 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

View over Dublin, from the Gravity bar

Hopkins

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:08:07 -0400

Hopkins