It's the season for bah humbug and in any case I've always been an RDA sceptic. It's not that I think it is out-and-out wrong, just that I'm not convinced that it is going to make a real difference to anything. Too many people are already saying that for RDA to be any good then we'll have to get rid of MARC as well, so it is going to be like unwrapping that Christmas present with great excitement and anticipation and then finding that it needs batteries to make it go and all the shops are shut. And so, in the metaphorical sense, I don't have a lot of time for RDA.
But I don't have time for RDA in the literal sense either. I signed up to the RDA mailing list and now, every morning when I sit down and log on, there are anything up to 30 emails waiting for me, all well-argued and interesting, and written by people with a much better grasp of cataloguing theory and much better brains than mine, on all aspects of RDA from the big picture to the teeniest tiniest subfield - and I haven't got time to read them. I simply haven't got time to engage with RDA in the way I should and the way I would like to. And that's before we get into the business of practical familiarisation and training (assuming that RDA is adopted, and I think that too much has been invested in it for it not to be adopted, whatever its rights and wrongs).
With the constant mantra to do more with less, and the current climate of cuts, I need RDA at the moment like I need a hole in the head. In fact, in the current climate of cuts, it's entirely possible I'll get the hole in the head before I get to RDA.
Happy Christmas everyone!
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Saturday, 20 November 2010
Creative cataloguing
Brunella Longo says: "cataloguing is going to be transformed in a process more and more technologically driven but, at the same time, it will become incredibly more discretional and creative" (I am quoting from her piece here: http://bit.ly/titleproper) and while I am all in favour, as I have said before, of cataloguers using their judgement and common sense, it was "creative" that brought me up short. I don't think of creativity in cataloguing as an unmixed blessing (in snippier moments I have used it as a term of abuse: "Hmmm - bit creative, that"). Too often it looks more like sloppy thinking or a skewed perspective that with hindsight appears perverse.
Brunella also says, "It is not just how good you are at cataloguing rules learned through your librarianship school or how good you are at managing cataloguers, copy-cataloguing services and paraprofessionals on a job rotation basis". Well - isn't it? (I admit to being biassed, as this is pretty much how I spend my working days).
While none of us want to be unquestioning drones, and many of us will think that some of the rules we use are not as helpful as they might be, the fact is that by using the same standards and applying them consistently, we help each other and our users by providing data that can be recognised and shared across services. Surely mavericks end up creating silos?
Brunella also says, "It is not just how good you are at cataloguing rules learned through your librarianship school or how good you are at managing cataloguers, copy-cataloguing services and paraprofessionals on a job rotation basis". Well - isn't it? (I admit to being biassed, as this is pretty much how I spend my working days).
While none of us want to be unquestioning drones, and many of us will think that some of the rules we use are not as helpful as they might be, the fact is that by using the same standards and applying them consistently, we help each other and our users by providing data that can be recognised and shared across services. Surely mavericks end up creating silos?
Monday, 8 November 2010
Is the perfect the enemy of the good?
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?
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?
Saturday, 23 October 2010
Socrates is right
This brought me up short when I read it last week (it is from an article about Socrates by Bettany Hughes and was published in The Guardian on Monday 18th October):
Our modern passion for fact-collection and box-ticking rather than a deep comprehension of the world around us would have horrified him [i.e. Socrates] too. What was the point, he said, of cataloguing the world without loving it?
He wouldn't have meant cataloguing as we mean it, and love may be too strong a word, but who wouldn't agree with him if I were to paraphrase it as, "What is the point of describing and defining things if we don't approach them with a willingness to engage with them and like them?" I have always expected cataloguers to have an intellectual curiosity, but this goes beyond, to an openness of mind, a desire to do the best we can by the things we are handling and genuine goodwill towards authors of all kinds and the works they create.
There was a debate a while back about whether cataloguers are data inputters (of course we are) or more than data inputters (and of course we are that as well) - and when I try to define professional cataloguing it is pretty much as Socrates says, not a dull unthinking and routine recording of the obvious things about a work, but an active interest and a kindly teasing-out of the best within it.
Does anyone else think that Socrates has hit the nail on the head?
Our modern passion for fact-collection and box-ticking rather than a deep comprehension of the world around us would have horrified him [i.e. Socrates] too. What was the point, he said, of cataloguing the world without loving it?
He wouldn't have meant cataloguing as we mean it, and love may be too strong a word, but who wouldn't agree with him if I were to paraphrase it as, "What is the point of describing and defining things if we don't approach them with a willingness to engage with them and like them?" I have always expected cataloguers to have an intellectual curiosity, but this goes beyond, to an openness of mind, a desire to do the best we can by the things we are handling and genuine goodwill towards authors of all kinds and the works they create.
There was a debate a while back about whether cataloguers are data inputters (of course we are) or more than data inputters (and of course we are that as well) - and when I try to define professional cataloguing it is pretty much as Socrates says, not a dull unthinking and routine recording of the obvious things about a work, but an active interest and a kindly teasing-out of the best within it.
Does anyone else think that Socrates has hit the nail on the head?
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
Standards
I find myself talking about "standards" all the time, but meaning it in at least two different ways. The first is to mean recognised international standards in cataloguing and indexing - which, at the moment, in the UK at least, means AACR2, M21 and Dewey. It means following generally accepted rules, best practice, because there is safety in numbers, when we do what everyone else does, and because we believe ourselves to be abiding by principles which the best minds in the business have devised over time, so that we not only gain the undeniable and valuable benefits of interoperability, sharing and cooperation, but that somehow we are also doing "the right thing" and as far as possible future-proofing our data. But that simply isn't the case any more. We may input the data in AACR and M21 and Dewey, but our LMS's hold that data in all sorts of ways, they break it down and fragment it and build it all up again into structures that we have no control over and wouldn't even recognise if we saw it. The people who design our Opacs (not that they even call them Opacs now - the Opac is dead, apparently, and what we have got is a resource discovery tool) are spending their days devising new ways of "mining" and "parsing" the data which we thought we had got into the best possible format in the first place. So much for standards, if they have to be broken and re-made before they can be used.
But I also talk about "standards" when what I really mean is "quality" - keeping high levels of accuracy and consistency so that our records are fit for purpose and can be used as the foundation of an excellent service. These are the standards that we know we mustn't drop, even when we have to cope with reduced resources - instead we must work harder and smarter. But hang on a minute - how are we going to define quality if we don't have anything to measure it against? If we don't any longer have any agreement about what constitutes best practice, if we don't have agreement about shared formats and codes, how can we tell whether our records are any good?
If a language doesn't have a grammar, how do we know whether that language is being used properly? How can we communicate if we don't share meaning and structures? Are we reduced individually just making it up as we go along? Can anyone understand us? Is anyone still listening?
But I also talk about "standards" when what I really mean is "quality" - keeping high levels of accuracy and consistency so that our records are fit for purpose and can be used as the foundation of an excellent service. These are the standards that we know we mustn't drop, even when we have to cope with reduced resources - instead we must work harder and smarter. But hang on a minute - how are we going to define quality if we don't have anything to measure it against? If we don't any longer have any agreement about what constitutes best practice, if we don't have agreement about shared formats and codes, how can we tell whether our records are any good?
If a language doesn't have a grammar, how do we know whether that language is being used properly? How can we communicate if we don't share meaning and structures? Are we reduced individually just making it up as we go along? Can anyone understand us? Is anyone still listening?
Monday, 20 September 2010
Do more with less? What rot!
I am so sick of being told that we have to "do more with less" - and everyone seeming to think that this is a quite reasonable thing to ask and quite possible to deliver.
Can you do more washing-up with less washing-up liquid? Of course not. It stands to reason - with less washing-up liquid you can only wash fewer dishes, or wash the same number of dishes not so well. Isn't it about time we said so?
Can you do more washing-up with less washing-up liquid? Of course not. It stands to reason - with less washing-up liquid you can only wash fewer dishes, or wash the same number of dishes not so well. Isn't it about time we said so?
Sunday, 12 September 2010
Is it too late?
Several comments on the last post referred to the so-called "next generation" Opacs, and they struck a chord with me as I am in the process of implementing one such (which is the reason for my too frequent absences from this blog just lately). I agree that they have an enormous potential for revealing and exploiting the information that we have been putting in bib records for years and which our present Opacs have been unable to make use of - and, hopefully, a better subject search will be one of the benefits.
But I can't help thinking that the timing of these new developments is unfortunate. Yes, a better Opac, a more attractive and engaging and effective Opac, is exactly what we want not just to help our users (which is always the most important thing) but also to show our masters that what we do has a practical value and importance. At last it is obvious why we put all that arcane coding into our records and why we fuss about consistent forms of headings, because at last everyone can see what use it is.
However, at exactly the same time as it suddenly becomes worthwhile to catalogue things "properly", I (and I am sure I am not alone) continue to face a reduction in resources which will mean cutting back even further on full standard cataloguing and the staff who are capable of doing it. For years we have been passing more and more of the bread-and-butter cataloguing to non-professional staff and in the process have necessarily been simplifying what we ask them to do. That means, for example, not bothering overly much about Leader and 008 coding. In the context of our old Opac, which didn't make any use of such things, this made perfect sense - why fuss about something that wasn't being used?
Now I am looking at an Opac which depends on accurate and detailed coding of the fixed length fields in order to express format and form and all sorts of other very useful stuff (all of which I very definitely want my users to see). For a database that contains a fair amount of simplified catalogue records as well as all sorts of gruesome legacy data, that means re-cataloguing stuff. I face a daily struggle to persuade my masters of the case for cataloguing stuff in the first place, never mind re-cataloguing it!
If we had had these wonderful Opacs a few years ago, I could have shown what would happen to the catalogue if we simplified and downgraded our cataloguing. Look, I could have said - if we don't put the detail in, you can't use the catalogue to do this, or this, or that. But what my wonderful new Opac shows is the inadequacy of what we have done and I fear that it is now too late to turn back the clock. I do hope I'm wrong.
But I can't help thinking that the timing of these new developments is unfortunate. Yes, a better Opac, a more attractive and engaging and effective Opac, is exactly what we want not just to help our users (which is always the most important thing) but also to show our masters that what we do has a practical value and importance. At last it is obvious why we put all that arcane coding into our records and why we fuss about consistent forms of headings, because at last everyone can see what use it is.
However, at exactly the same time as it suddenly becomes worthwhile to catalogue things "properly", I (and I am sure I am not alone) continue to face a reduction in resources which will mean cutting back even further on full standard cataloguing and the staff who are capable of doing it. For years we have been passing more and more of the bread-and-butter cataloguing to non-professional staff and in the process have necessarily been simplifying what we ask them to do. That means, for example, not bothering overly much about Leader and 008 coding. In the context of our old Opac, which didn't make any use of such things, this made perfect sense - why fuss about something that wasn't being used?
Now I am looking at an Opac which depends on accurate and detailed coding of the fixed length fields in order to express format and form and all sorts of other very useful stuff (all of which I very definitely want my users to see). For a database that contains a fair amount of simplified catalogue records as well as all sorts of gruesome legacy data, that means re-cataloguing stuff. I face a daily struggle to persuade my masters of the case for cataloguing stuff in the first place, never mind re-cataloguing it!
If we had had these wonderful Opacs a few years ago, I could have shown what would happen to the catalogue if we simplified and downgraded our cataloguing. Look, I could have said - if we don't put the detail in, you can't use the catalogue to do this, or this, or that. But what my wonderful new Opac shows is the inadequacy of what we have done and I fear that it is now too late to turn back the clock. I do hope I'm wrong.
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