Meeting 3, Briefly

This third meeting of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control focuses on the economic and organizational issues. Unsurprisingly, most of the conversation was about the high cost of cataloging. The suggested solutions fall into these areas:

1. Be willing to accept imperfection. In particular, take in copy cataloging without scrutiny, or with very select scrutiny, only paying attention to areas that are important for retrieval.
2. Put less energy into the easy cases (recently published books) so that more can be spent on the special cases (archival materials, digital materials).
3. Use vendor-supplied cataloging that comes with purchase of materials
   
4. Find new partners. Many speakers suggested that libraries partner with publishers to get some metadata creation earlier in the supply chain.
5. Do more cooperative cataloging; spread the work across more institutions
   

However, much of the conversation showed how hard it will be to implement these suggestions in the real world. Mary Catherine Little of Queens Public Library talked about having a very diverse customer base that requires them to catalog in a couple of dozen languages. Susan Fifer Canby of the National Geographic Society talked about storing the digital photographs that are now produced by the thousands.

Interestingly, no one was willing to give up authority control. In fact, there was a desire to expand it into other areas such as article databases, although in the journal publishing area there were thoughts that authors could self-identify as part of publishing. There was a negative reaction to the idea of "social tagging." And there wasn't much discussion of the possible use of full text to either generate cataloging or to function in the place of cataloging.

In the end, none of the proposed solutions really appear to solve much of the problem. To begin with, any savings will merely free up staff to work on cataloging items that make up the real or virtual arrears: paper archives or the vast digital world that libraries hardly touch today. Many of the suggestions are details that would chip away at cataloging time but not really change how we do things. Nothing really radical or revolutionary was put forth.

I'll try to put out more detailed notes soon.

LoC Meeting -- Live Webcast

Today's meeting of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control is being webcast live. However, if you prefer time-shifting, the webcast will be available online for "any time" listening later this week. See the agenda.

Bibliographic Futures, Meeting 3

I'll be attending the third meeting on bibliographic futures being held at Library of Congress on July 9. If I have connectivity I'll blog it in real time; otherwise, I'll give a summary later when I get connected.

Meanwhile, out of purely selfish reasons I consolidated my notes from Meeting 1 and have placed them on my web site. They aren't yet linked from the home page, but I'll get to that soon.

Breaking the ALA cycle

If you've ever been on a committee that ties its work to the library association's two-times-a-year cycle, you know how frustrating and inefficient that is. With only two working meetings a year it takes many years to get anything done. This accounts for some of the slowness of the accomplishments of our profession. And obviously that pace is not serving us well in this fast-changing world.

As proof that it can get better, I cite a recent project I was on that was organized by the ALA Office of Information Technology Policy. Our goal was to produce a set of principles relating to digitization and digital resources, to get those principles reviewed by a wide professional audience, and to have them passed by ALA Council so that they would enter into the ALA Handbook as association policy. We did it all in barely over a year by harnessing the (less than perfect) technology of the ALA web site. Essentially we placed our principles on the ALA Blog and sent email to all ALA units asking for comments. We had prepared the way by visiting numerous meetings at ALA in Seattle but definitely had not managed to contact every potential respondent. Over two months there were thousands of viewings of the principles and many dozen comments. We also received comments via email. By the time we presented the principles at ALA Council in Washington, D.C. we had some major groups signed on as supporters, including ALCTS and LITA. We also had visible proof that our work had been made public and reviewed.

This was a relatively small project, but it gives me some hope that we can break out of the cycle of working on ALA activities for only four days twice a year. If we are going to move our profession forward, we have to be able to harness the technology to get needed work done. Blogs, wikis, shared editing of documents -- if we do it right, the two meetings can become times when we get face-to-face with each other for the pleasure of each other's company, and not to sit in a windowless room editing some document by committee.

Grace Hopper's Stone

Whenever I visit Washington D.C. I try to find time to go to Arlington Cemetery. I don't visit the famous graves. Instead I trudge along the main road to a point at the far corner overlooking the Pentagon, which is where my father is buried. Well, in-urned, actually, since he was not important enough for an actual burial. In the military, you carry your rank with you to the grave, literally.

It so happens that I pass by the grave of Grace Hopper on the way to the columbarium, and I always stop and pay my respects.

Arlington is nothing if not military. All of the headstones are identical (with a few famous exceptions), and no decoration is allowed. There are particular occasions on which you can leave flowers or flags (like Memorial Day), but the rest of the time it's just green grass and white headstones. So people have a habit of marking their presence by placing a small stone on top of the headstone. I find it to be very touching, a tiny bit of civil disobedience. I don't think I have ever been to Grace's grave when there wasn't a stone on it. To me it's a great reminder that others also visit her and care. So here is her current stone. And if you visit, please clean the bird crap off her headstone, and add a pebble if you can find one. (She's located at 59-973)

Some quick notes from ALA

Catalog front-ends are the new kids on the block in the exhibits. You can see Aquabrowser, Endeca, Primo, and others. It's clear that the separation of the user interface from the ILS is well underway. Aquabrowser has a new product for small libraries called Aquabrowser online where they will host a library's front-end for a monthly fee. This might be a great way for libraries to try out a front-end without having to make the full commitment of a purchase. It would also be an excellent way for a library to show its board the possibilities before asking for an allocation of funds.

There's a lot of buzz about RDA which is now looming on the near horizon. Work is going forward to begin training and implementation plans. At the same time, I have yet to speak to a cataloger who thinks that RDA is workable as a set of cataloging rules. I suspect that what has happened is that the JSC, in its desire to define a neutral set of data elements, has created a product that is neither a rigorous set of data elements nor a set of cataloging rules. I can't help but see this in familiar terms: "stay the course." In other words, we've gotten ourselves into an expensive mess that we can't easily get out of. To admit failure is unthinkable after all of this time and expense. At least the RDA process isn't creating actual casualties. I blogged one of the RDA sessions at the ALCTS blog: http://blogs.ala.org/digiblog.php.

And if you think that e-books are dead, you should visit the 20-some booths exhibiting e-book products, as well as audio books. OverDrive is now serving up movies and games along with its e-book products, all mainly used by public libraries.

Google is here with one of the most mistaken campaigns I've ever seen at an ALA. They are holding a "find the info" contest that starts out: "You're an undercover government agent. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: find the info you need, and find it fast." Don't they know the history that libraries have with "undercover government agents?" However, there are prizes, so I assume that librarians are playing along. It's amazing what people will do for a free key ring or a post-it note pad.

Privacy Audit

I had the pleasure of working with San Francisco Public Library on an audit of their records relating to patrons and patron activity. This doesn't sound like an exciting activity, but in fact the staff I worked with there really got behind the project. Basically, we (they, really) ferreted out all of those nooks and crannies where patrons sign up for things, or where they leave some footprint in a system or on a sheet of paper. We looked at remote services and ad hoc practices in the branches, including use of things like MySpace and instant messaging to communicate with teen readers. There were some surprises (mainly files in the desks of those folks who feel they have to keep everything, just in case) and a few sticky issues (what to do with held books that are placed on public shelves? Use the patron's name? Use the patron's library card number, which they usually don't know?).

The final report to the Library Commission is online as a PDF. The actual results of the audit ended up being over 80 pages, with copies of all of the forms and all of the printed and emailed outputs from the library. You can see the blank forms that we started with here. And this is the Word template that we used for the final audit results, one page for each document or system. In my copious spare time (which seems non-existent at the moment) I will try to mock up a few filled in forms so people can see what the final data looks like.

In any case, here's a library that can now say "We know where our data is, who has access to it, and how long it is kept." That's pretty good.