Here is a practical question - and I'd be interested in any views, because it is one of those things that don't get taught in library school but I bet we face quite often in the workplace.
As I have said before, much of our straightforward cataloguing is delegated to library assistants - who have no theoretical training in the rules of cataloguing and indexing and, very often, no previous experience. Their job is to download records, check them against the book in hand, identify errors or omissions and make any necessary changes. They deal with (what should be simple) adult and children's fiction, all English-language and all of it newly, or recently, published.
Were they professional cataloguers, I would expect them to know AACR and M21, and apply those standards sensibly - by which I mean, that if faced with a record acceptable in all respects except a fairly minor one (and I mean something like the omission of "by", or an ampersand for "and", in the statement of responsibility) then I wouldn't expect them to correct it. On the other hand, I would expect them to put right something that really matters - a mis-spelling in a name, or an added entry omitted. So they have to know what matters and make a judgement - is it worth spending time correcting or adding something if it doesn't affect retrieval and isn't misleading, bearing in mind that we none of us have time to do everything perfectly and their time would be better spent on something more important.
That's a fair enough expectation (in my opinion) for a professional cataloguer, but is it fair enough to expect the same of a library assistant? I find it quite difficult to explain the rudiments of AACR and MARC to library assistants, but they will usually believe me that there are rules which should be followed. What they find very hard to understand is when rules needn't or shouldn't be followed.
What I tend to end up with, therefore, is a simplified set of rules being rigidly (I could almost say, thoughtlessly) applied - which is not much to the benefit of the staff or the catalogue. I don't like people using tick-lists but I am often told that this is easier and that it is unfair to ask library assistants to do more than this.
What do other people do?
Interesting.
ReplyDeleteWe have a lot of library assistants doing cataloguing. They are introduced to the basics of AACR2 and MARC21 and should be able to identify issues and ask for clarification where necessary. It sounds like we expect them to apply a lot more "cataloguer's judgement" than your library assistants.
Having said that, until recently, their work was then checked by a senior cataloguer (often though not always necessarily a qualified librarian), so at least major errors/omissions/mistakes could be caught. We're moving away from that though, as for run-of-the-mill cataloguing, they do a great job.
The key to it is to have confidence in the staff to ask when they're not sure. Often this means that they need to know enough about cataloguing to know when there might be an issue worth asking about (if that makes sense). I'm always heartened when I train someone who is happy to ask questions.
I don't mean to diss our library assistants, who do pretty well, by and large. And it is only human - and it isn't only a trait of library assistants - to concentrate more on things which are easy to understand ("transcribe the statement of responsibility accurately") than the difficult things (intellectual responsibility, what to do about authors with a propensity to be "writing as" someone else). Nor should we assume, as we tend to do, that adult and children's fiction is easier than other stuff (lots of those "writing as" in crime fiction, or mixed responsibility in picture books). But it was the checking which brought home the difficulties to me. Like you, we (I) spot check the LAs' work and when you have given people a stripped down and simple (and ergo rigid) set of rules to follow, I found myself marking as errors things which I wouldn't have considered to be errors (because I would have taken them as evidence of judgement and discretion)in the work of professional cataloguers.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about asking questions, of course - and also right when you recognise that you need to know quite a lot before you realise what you don't know, and can distinguish between what matters and what doesn't.
Has anyone out there got a good and proven way of training LAs in cataloguing?