Managing Cataloging and the Organization of Information

Philosophies, Practices and Challenges at the Onset of the 21st Century

Ruth C Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317956693
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Discover how librarians around the world are responding to the new demands of a fast-changing profession!More computers and fewer staff, more types of resources to catalog and less time in which to study them--these are the problems librarians are facing at the dawn of a new millennium. Managing Cataloging and the Organization of Information offers solutions from cataloging and technical services managers around the world. Contributions from Australia, Botswana, Latin America, Canada, and the United States guarantee a truly international perspective.Managing Cataloging and the Organization of Information describes new and effective ways to coordinate all aspects of automation, staffing, organization, teamwork, and work flow. These techniques have been tested in libraries ranging from small college libraries to the ancient and revered Bodleian Library and the vast Library of Congress. National libraries, academic libraries, and specialized medical and law libraries are also represented.In Managing Cataloging and the Organization of Information, catalogers and technical services managers will find useful suggestions in a number of areas, including:

• total quality management
• flexible strategies for cataloging local and remote resources
• cataloging operations, trends, and perspectives
• putting cataloging philosophy into practice
• staff assignments and workflow distribution
• building team spiritManaging Cataloging and the Organization of Information is an invaluable resource for library administrators, catalogers, library educators, technical services managers, and information scientists.

Academic Libraries

Exploding Out of the MARC Box: Building New Roles for Cataloging Departments

Judith Ahronheim
Lynn Marko

SUMMARY. A new, less catalog-centric model for library services has begun to develop. There are places within this new model for catalogers and cataloging departments to contribute in new and more challenging ways than has been the current practice. Catalogers will need to apply old skills in new ways and departments will have to restructure in order to facilitate their service. Management of these new departments requires emphasis on different skills from those used in traditional departments. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>]

KEYWORDS. Cataloging, metadata, library management

Exploding out of the MARC Box

The University of Michigan Library has a long and rich tradition of a well supported research library collection which also has been well supported in terms of bibliographic control. At this point, bibliographic control services are somewhat distributed with cataloging occurring centrally through the monograph and serials divisions as well as area program services. In addition, cataloging services are provided beyond traditional technical services in maps, archives, and special collections. Monograph Cataloging Division has responded over the years to very real administrative and service pressures to provide cataloging services that are responsive to user needs. Such services required of the department include not backlogging newly acquired material, but cataloging it promptly through continuously improving copy cataloging techniques and modified minimal level original cataloging, called Brief Record Cataloging. Over the years, original cataloging has become the province of highly trained support staff which has allowed the development of change and growth oriented roles for the professional cataloging librarian. In this article, we will describe some of the change and growth opportunities that we have seen and outline a vision for the cataloger and cataloging department for the next decade.

Much of the recent literature relating to cataloging focuses on process improvement. We learn how libraries organize their work processes, either within the library itself or in association with outside vendors through the purchase of goods and services. We also learn how libraries continuously seek to enhance their services and provide high quality, low cost service to the Community which they serve.

The cataloging function in our department, as is the case in most large, research libraries, has undergone its share of cost studies, service review, evaluation, and cost containment efforts over the years. This presents a dual challenge to today's manager, to contain costs while pursuing innovation. In this challenge, there is opportunity. Even though cost, efficiency, accuracy and adherence to standards are important parts of what we do, we feel that catalogers and cataloging have very important additional contributions to make to the new information environment.

As libraries add networked digital resources to their collections, a new library infrastructure has begun to develop. While the catalog continues to play a role in the identification of useful information, it must share that function with a wide array of additional tools, some vendor provided, that operate using different principles and vocabularies of description. Looking at this wider information universe, we need to make certain that while we are providing programmatic support for cataloging services, we carve out resources for new initiatives. How one manages the traditional pressures of production along with participation in the information universe, is always going to be a challenge. And how a library determines it will meet those challenges, also determines the shape of the organization structure that is going to be used.

The cataloging department of even the near future is going to need to develop some new skills as new models of organization emerge within the rest of the library and the university. Flexibility of staff and their view of their core assignment is going to be a key component of success. Collaborative models within and in association with other departments are going to need to be encouraged and fostered. Project orientation and management skills will be another important component. This will necessitate a flatter supervisory structure that is characterized by collegial relationships which have trust as both a hallmark and primary component.

In addition, the ability to change in response to these developments will determine how effective, integrated, and forward looking the department is as it provides services to support legacy print, electronic, and web-based resources. In this article, we hope to focus on the elements of that cataloging department of the future This will be a department that provides tools to manage those resources and which contains staff members who combine traditional cataloging skills with new tasks, expertise and relationships.

Metadata Specialization

If the library's service posture is not to become fragmented and chaotic, methods must be devised that relate description, discovery, and delivery tools to one another in some fashion that makes sense to users. In addition, the ease of moving from one resource to another within a network raises user expectations of interoperability, of being able to take information from one resource and apply it in another. Central to these sense-making and cross resource functions is the type of information we call metadata. Libraries will need to develop expertise in understanding how a multitude of profit and nonprofit communities have chosen to structure their resources and resource descriptions with a view to making them work together. One title for someone with this expertise is "metadata specialist." Such an individual will work collaboratively, as a member of a project team, either integrating existing resources into the library system or helping in the resource's creation. As part of this function, the specialist facilitates the bringing of independently developed resources under the Library's umbrella by encouraging the development and use of standardized management tools.

For a cataloger or other technical services staff member to become such a specialist, he or she will need to develop or strengthen him- or her-self in several ways. First and foremost he/she must develop a broader vision of the information universe and an acceptance that MARC/AARC2 will not be the best answer for every problem. Second is to cultivate an understanding of the development of non-library-based descriptive traditions and an awareness of new developments in taxonomies and hierarchies specific to specific knowledge domains. Further, catalogers need to develop greater comfort and understanding of formats like image and sound based resources, not just filtered through AACR2 colored glasses, but in all their capabilities and granular richness. For example, the CIMI extensions to Dublin Core include emphasis on aspects of the objects they describe that are not emphasized in AACR2 desciptions. Or, in fields in biological specimen databases where taxonomic description is a major access point, but whose richness and relationships are not reflected in standard library description.

Catalogers are already experts in the interactions of one search and delivery system: the MARC/OPAC one. We know the effect changes made in a MARC record will have on public displays and on system response to searches in the OPAC. Now, as metadata specialists, we need to learn about other systems that exist and are being developed, so that we can make similar predictions about how our records will display and index in those systems and how other systems' metadata Will display and index when shared with ours. As standard search tools integrate, through standards like Z39.50, we will also need to be aware of the impact of our decisions on those more generalized displays.

In addition, catalogers moving into these broader metadata realms. need to be far more proactive than we have been in the past. We need to be able to place ourselves on development and deployment teams and make the case for our value to them. We need to seek out projects as they develop and insert ourselves into the planning process. This requires the development of new kinds of cross community people skills.

As part of projects that create or mount resources, we need to learn effective ways to manage projects: making reliable estimates to time and funding needs, identifying goals, scheduling, breaking projects down into smaller tasks, sharing workloads, working with partners from different intellectual traditions respecting what each partner brings to the table, knowing what to do when project directions change midstream, defining change control issues to managers, identifying missing tasks, contingency planning, developing milestones, getting commitment from people you don't manage, moving from project into general production, reporting project status to others, and serving several masters at the same time. Our collaborative skills need to be raised to a higher level. Equally important, we need to be prepared to accept responsibility for the projects of others with a collaborative mindset. We need to learn a new culture that encourages sharing rather than control.

Administrative Support

Getting from here to there, is a long, and thoughtful process. The first thing that is needed is a library vision and a vision of, in particular, the services that the library is going to offer. Furthermore, administrative support and understanding of the demands of the information environment is needed and that means attendance at conferences that are not necessarily always library conferences and as a result have a higher level of expense that we are used to for registration fees. Attendance at these conferences is not always comfortable because we are not among known colleagues but among professionals who have their own language, their own jargon, and their own ways in which they relate to one another. We need to extend beyond our library domains and in so doing cultivate a common point of view over a period of time with non-library information professionals in non-library communities.

The second step in all this is, frankly, to bring it home. Going to conferences is often a challenging and career enhancing experience that creates excitement, but if there is no opportunity at home to use the new information, the new skill set, the new tools, there isn't an opportunity to solidify the new skills through practical application. The institution needs to provide the support, not just for travel to non-library conferences, but also to be willing to provide practice experiences for the attendee who returns from such trips needing a way to begin applying the new knowledge learned. Small pilots provide hands-on experience that speaks louder than any number of training sessions and workshops.

Standards

The network accessibility of databases has presented new challenges to communities outside as well as inside the library profession. Practitioners operating in a wide variety of fields now attempt to locate and share information that resides in other practitioners' databases. Equally importantly, the idea of the "reusability" of research data is being encouraged by that major grant funder the Federal Government.¹ Such impelling forces have begun to encourage a variety of commumities to come together in an attempt to standardize the description of resources in their particular fields. Thus we see standards developing in the art museum community, the natural history community, and more broadly, in the Internet community as a whole. But we cannot contribute if we do not participate, and we cannot participate if we are not willing to make use of the standards being developed. Any improvement in the consistency of description of resources benefits us because we can develop more consistent processes for handling the descriptions and using them in conjunction with others to provide users with comprehensible description and access to resources.

This does not mean we should translate all data into MARC/AACR2, It is important for us, as we move into new information arenas, to understand when MARC/AACR2 is not appropriate and to develop comfort levels with other schema that will allow us to choose tools that are appropriate to the description and access problems that face us. Staff need to have comfort with a variety of schema. Such comfort allows staff to make effective decisions on appropriate schema use for differing purposes.

As librarians begin to participate in the development of new descriptive standards with other communities, we bring to the table a wealth of experience and tradition from our own profession. Perhaps the most valuable contribution we can make to standards discussions is a respect for the long-term value of both the resources and their descriptions. Our experience in maintaining descriptions over long periods of time and incorporating new functionality into systems while retaining older forms has useful lessons for other practitioners. As a profession, we have thought about these complexities and, even when our solutions are not perfect fits for others, we can offer them the benefit of our experience in having extensively thought about them. Librarians have made significant contributions, for example, to the development of GILS, FGDC, and Dublin Core descriptive standards.

Positioning

How do we position catalogers to provide this new kind of service? We need to identify for ourselves what are the long term values of cataloging that have meaning beyond the library field and which values we are ready to compromise on or discard. Outsourcing need not be the enemy. Deciding when local customization is truly necessary and when acceptance of other's work is acceptable should be a basic component of planning and strategy development. But that transfer of work should not mean that catalogers are let go. Freeing up catalogers to do more complicated work means that you can customize where the added value means something to users. For example, if we believe that authority control is a vital part of the value we add, we need to be prepared to make that case in the criteria we require in outside resources and we need to be willing to work with others investing time in designing tools that will apply authority control outside a pre-existing resource that we cannot control.

We need to participate in non-library conferences where standards are being developed and make connections with actors from other traditions. And to do it at lower functional levels, rather than just at the upper management level. If we are asking catalogers to represent a library point of view, they need to begin talking to people other than librarians. That means attending and listening carefully to presentations by practitioners of the fields we are attempting to serve. This activity enhances the metadata specialist's ability to speak the language of fellow team members and gives him/her greater legitimacy in the eyes of co-workers.

We need to find out what the rest of our local community is doing. The ready availability of inexpensive software for creation of databases means that valuable collection-worthy resources are being developed under someone's desk. If you don't know that someone, you don't know it's there. Getting that data out where others can find and use it provides a value-added service that is not collection-based, but yet still partakes of the Library's mission. But finding such resources requires much greater involvement in our user communities and the building of a higher level of trust with resource creators that we will respect their efforts and perpetuate their purposes as well as our own. Long-term, the building of such relationships and services means there will be a greater chance of preserving these resources when their creators move on to other things. However, upon accepting these resources, we make a commitment to maintenance, whose burdens can be intense. It therefore behooves us to take care in our decisions and to encourage standards-based development at every opportunity.

Management

Getting metadata specialists into such productive relationships means they have to be respected by team members. While some of that respect will develop from the specialist's contribution to the group, the specialist starting out needs something even more important: the demonstrated respect of her institution. If what she knows and does is not valued there, it will show to others and what she does will not be valued elsewhere.

Managing a department that contains these types of specialists becomes more and more complex. B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Managing Cataloging and the Organization of Information
• Preface: Chaos, Convenience, and Catalogers
• NATIONAL LIBRARIES
• LIBRARIES AROUND THE WORLD
• SPECIALIZED LIBRARIES
• ACADEMIC LIBRARIES
• Index