Administrative? Who, me?

One of the reasons for the lack of posts lately is that like many, if not most, library authorities at the moment, mine is engaged in restructurings, rumours and threats of redundancies, ever-changing plans and plots, to the point that now we begin to long for any conclusion at all, even the worst, as long as it puts an end to the uncertainty. It is all very time-consuming and tiring and noone is going to come out of it well.

One of the latest plans for restructurings - it was only yesterday, but there has probably been another one since - showed Bib Services being merged under the overall title of "Administrative Services".

Now, "Support Services" I could have borne with a reasonable degree of equanimity - we provide support and a service. That's what we do.

But there's something about "Administrative Services" that really puts my back up. There is, I suppose, nothing wrong with being an administrator - but to be part of an administrative service? Doesn't that sound petty and mean and unimportant and, well, downright unprofessional? A way of demeaning and belittling bib services into something which involves form-filling and pen-pushing and counting paperclips? The sort of bad name you'd give a dog before neglecting and finally shooting him?

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, just as long as it wasn't called an administrative service.

Tell me, am I being arrogant? Am I just tired and overwrought and a big glass of wine and half an hour with Monty Don will make me feel better?

You say, "Resource discovery technology"; I say, "Catalogue"

This is a response to the post on the High Visibility Cataloguing blog here:
http://highvisibilitycataloguing.wordpress.com/why-cataloguers/challenging-metadata-surrogacy-processes/ . I would have added a comment, but I just knew that I would have gone on too long!

You see, I agree 100% with Venessa's desire to raise the profile of cataloguers and I agree that it is something that desperately needs doing. I agree that we are seen as "antiquated gatekeepers" and I'd go further and say that it isn't only authoritarians who see us that way. When she says that we need to rethink who does what, or that we should challenge the legacy of our predecessors, I'm right there and cheering.

I differ with her in two respects, firstly, that in my opinion she doesn't go nearly far enough in redefining roles; and secondly, that I think that we shouldn't rely on changing words to make us sound good.

"The systems librarians is now an integral part of the cataloguing team". No. No. Cataloguers and systems librarians are becoming the same thing. I make no pretence of being a technician (start talking to me about servers and I'm thinking of Wimbledon), but a cataloguer deals with data, creates data, edits data, manages data, exploits data. Cataloguers are getting in touch with their inner systems librarian, and that's the way it has to be. Cataloguers aren't being asked to take on bulk editing, or digitization - that's what they should be, and are, wanting and needing to do, and deciding to get involved with on their own initiative. If cataloguers wait to be asked, then we'll soon be extinct. Cataloguers need to be "re-skilled"? Nonsense. We've got the skills, all we need is the courage to use them.

"Should we even still be using the term ‘cataloguing’ for what our role will be in the future?" Yes, there's nothing wrong with the word. Metadata is data about data - and it's what you'll find on a catalogue card. The added value that we bring is largely brought from rules and rulers, whether or not the cataloguer is sitting in a dark corner.

I don't have the word "cataloguer" in my job title, but I quite often introduce myself as, "the nearest thing you'll find round here to a chief cataloguer". I said exactly that in a meeting last week. And bless him, a senior manager spoke up and said, "Oh no, you're much more than that - you're one of the innovative people". That doesn't stop me being a cataloguer - I hope it makes me a good one, but a cataloguer is what I am and a cataloguer is what I'll remain. Not a metadata manager.

We'll redeem cataloguing when we explain what we do and why it matters, not when we change the name.

RDA and OPACs

Following on from my previous post, about the gap between the standards we apply when creating data and the ways in which we want to use it, I would like to give some thought to what lies in the middle - our OPACs.

We are all data creators - we all create data and edit data and hold it in databases - and we all follow some sort of rules (AACR, RDA, ONIX, DC or whatever) to structure that data.

Equally, we all have views on how we want to make the data usable, the ways in which we want to make it available, the things we want people to be able to do with it.

We don't necessarily agree about either the kind of data we want, or what we want to do with it. But the fact is that in the middle, for most of us, sits our OPAC - which dictates both the structure we use and what we can do with it.

I often curse our LMS supplier into heaps - why can't our OPAC do this, or that? Why does it take so long to persuade them that this (or that) really is important and something our users are waiting for?

Sometimes I feel sorry for our LMS suppliers - if we can't, as a cataloguing community, agree about our data and its purpose, how can they possibly develop the means to satisfy us?

But for most of the time we are all making our decisions - about what our data should be like and what it can do - on the basis of the product in front of us at that time. Should we ensure that our data is to the tippest of top standards because one day an OPAC will come which can actually use all that data to its fullest potential? Should we tailor our data to what our OPAC can actually do at the moment and tweak and twiddle and bodge the standards to get the result we want now, never mind what happens five years down the line? Or do we make our data according to what we think we and our users will want in the future, even if we don't, and can't, actually know what we or they will want then?

You see, I think that is what RDA is trying to do. I think RDA is looking into the future and predicting what we will all want and trying to make provisions for it. We (some of us, including me) criticise RDA because it neither sticks with the standards we've already got, nor offers anything our present OPACs can make use of in any kind of a helpful way. And prediction is a sticky business - look at the predictions made 20 years ago about how we'd all be living now and they are mostly wrong.

What do we want, really really want - something that used to work, something that works now or something that might work in the future?

RDA and standards

I have thought for a long time that there are two sorts of behaviour displayed in people who do cataloguing, with most people doing some mixture of both.

The first is the organising temperament - liking to sort things out, make things clear, set things out neatly, resolve muddle. This is the mindset that likes rules and clarity and consistency, that enjoys data creation and input.

The second is the mindset that puzzles out what to do with data, how to get it out, how searches and indexes work or ought to work, who want to use the data to produce answers.

As I said, most cataloguers are a mixture of both, and both are important. If the data isn't good, then you can't use it effectively. Rubbish in, rubbish out. On the other hand, there's no point in having data if you don't, or can't, use it. But although most cataloguers are a mixture of both types of mindset, and use both in their work, most cataloguers incline to one more than the other and are either data creators by instinct, or data users.

The whole RDA argument seems to be between those two ways of thinking. Opponents of RDA often worry about what will happen when the rules change, what the effect will be on catalogues which contain both RDA and non-RDA data, whether it will be possible, let alone desirable, to maintain consistency and order. That is the voice of the data creator.

Supporters of RDA believe that it will enable us to make more of our catalogue data, spread it more widely, combine it more easily with other types of data. That is the data user speaking.

Most of us are both data creators and data users and therefore end up divided on RDA. Is some of the heat in the debate generated by the fact that we are all arguing with ourselves?

I've got no time for RDA

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!

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?

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?