Drowning or waving

It has been a long time since I last posted but there is a reason for this, which is, that I have been busy retiring.

It is a funny old business, retirement. You walk out of work at 5 o’clock on a Friday evening and that’s it. It is a bit like being one of those cartoon characters who run off the edge of a cliff, and their legs keep going for a while before they suddenly realise that they are in mid-air and then they drop like a stone. 

 

Of course, you realise just how quickly you become entirely irrelevant to the place where you used to work. This is something that happens whenever you leave a job, whether it is because of retirement or because you are moving on to a new post. An old friend told me long ago, “When you get out of the swimming pool, you don’t leave a hole,” and she was absolutely right.  Depending on how you feel at the time, this can be a consolation or a regret.

When you leave your job to move on to a new one, you take your belongings, and your knowledge and your skills, with you, and you hope to be going to a place where they will continue to be useful and where you will learn new and interesting things. It isn’t quite the same when you retire. You still bundle up all your belongings (amongst them, in my case, all eight pairs of shoes that had been living under my desk, three mugs, and the umbrella which might have come in useful because although it had holes they were only small ones) and take them home. And then you wonder what to do with them. Are you actually going to need them as a stay-at-home retiree? How many pairs of black shoes, with heels, will you need when all you do is potter to the supermarket or in and out of the garden?

And it is the same with your skills and knowledge.  You have brought them home as well, and now you wonder if they are ever going to be used again.  Do they follow the shoes into a corner where they slowly get covered with dust and start to crumble until finally they are thrown away? Is it worth keeping and polishing skills, or shoes, that neither you nor anyone else may want again? Now I have a really really good excuse not to, just how much do I want to engage with RDA and BIBFRAME?

It is interesting to discover how hard it is to lose the habit of work. It feels very odd to have no pressure, no targets. It is shocking to discover how little I actually get done without a deadline. After all, there’s always tomorrow. But all the time it feels as if I ought to be doing something but have forgotten what it is, or that I have put something down and can’t remember where I put it, and that is vaguely and persistently worrying. 

And then there is the difficulty of work life and home life having become intertwined. Although I have walked out of the door for the last time, and with no looking back, what about social media, where the boundaries of private and professional life are blurred, with people tweeting about both their knitting and recondite RDA rules almost simultaneously?  A lot of my contacts – a majority of them – come from work life and to cut them all out would lead to almost complete social isolation. With noone to follow on Twitter, and almost no emails, I would enter a strangely silent world. It would be like not having Radio 4 in the kitchen.

I was lucky in that I had already been asked to undertake some consultancy work, albeit short-term and part-time, and I am also volunteering one day a week. Both of these have acted as parachutes to break my fall into retirement. What will follow, I have no idea but it will be interesting to find out. This year didn’t turn out at all as I expected. Here’s to 2014 – and not drowning but waving!

Living in the moment

New Year being the time to look forward, I find myself doing the equivalent of hiding behind the sofa, peeping through my fingers in mingled fear and fascination at what horrors might be coming my way in 2013. However, Janus being two-faced looks backwards as well as forwards, and I look back on 2012 with all the ghoulish interest of a spectator at a train wreck. It wasn't a good year.

That doesn't mean that I didn't work hard and achieve successes, some almost by accident along the way and some wrested from the snarling jaws of defeat. But, like most people other than politicians, what I remember best of 2012 were the failures. It was the year I pretty much gave up on being a chief cataloguer, not out of choice but simply as the result of Not Enough Time and Too Much Other Stuff To Do. So I didn't do any cataloguing, any classification or any authority control. I didn't think very much about RDA. Heck, I didn't even do very much checking of other people's cataloguing. I didn't count stuff or keep proper records, so I am way behind with statistics, which makes the end of every quarter a nightmare of catch-up and invention. I didn't have time to bother my colleagues with wondering whether we could do things better if we did them differently or even with asking for a reminder as to why we do things the way we do. (It is fair to say that my colleagues were grateful for this, as saving their time as well as mine). When I can't remember something I have no chance of finding it in the morass of disorganised emails. I didn't read enough and I didn't blog enough and I didn't think enough. In Olympic year I didn't succeed in going the extra mile or even the extra 100 metres.

Instead I lived hand-to-mouth, throwing far too many cans of worms onto the back burner and leaving far too many dogs to slumber undisturbed. I barely responded to emails unless they were in block red capitals with URGENT in the subject line. If you didn't shout loudly and persistently, I ignored you. Sorry for that.

I wore myself to a frazzle in 2012 doing whatever I could find time to do but I also spent far too much time worrying about the rest. Which is why I am going to try to adopt the new fashion for "mindfulness" in 2013. Whatever I do, I am going to try to concentrate on it, and not be distracted or bothered by everything else. I will take one careful step at a time, not try to balance on several greasy stools and end up falling between them in an undignified and irritable heap. I shall enjoy doing one thing properly, rather than get frustrated by doing half a dozen things badly. I shall embrace the "slow" movement and live in the moment. And I shall ignore you even when you shout. Sorry for that.

Why can't a library be more like a bookshop?

One of the things I have found most difficult to get my head around – and certainly difficult to explain to other people – is the difference between classification and shelfmark. 

Classification is a representation of the subject (or subjects) of an item.

The shelfmark is the item’s address within the library – and tells you where to find it. 

Very often, because we usually shelve in classified order, the shelfmark is a classification number or has a classification number as one of its elements (along with a filing suffix, for example), which is where the confusion starts to creep in.  It isn’t helped by a tendency to refer to “main” and “added” classification, with the classification which is included in the shelfmark being the “main” number and anything else being “added” (and often therefore regarded as an unnecessary extra). Gradually people start to think that the shelfmark IS the classification; so that when colleagues working in reader services return a book to bib services and ask for it to be “reclassified”, what they usually mean is that they want the shelfmark changed.

What I am beginning to wonder is, whether it should be any part of a cataloguer’s job to allocate the shelfmark – whether this couldn’t be done locally by staff in each library. I take it as an article of faith that classification certainly is the cataloguer’s job – the analysis of the subject of an item and its correct representation in the classification scheme, together with the creation of subject headings and/or subject index entries, should be done rigorously and consistently by staff trained in the theory and practice of classification. But is it up to us to decide where in the library that item is kept?

Why do we think it matters that all copies of a book should have the same shelfmark? Why, if a book is returned to us with the request that it be “reclassified” (i.e. that its shelfmark be changed) so that the users may find it more easily, do we change the shelfmarks of all copies of that book? All copies should be classified the same way, because it is the book that we are classifying, not each individual copy; but each copy can have its own shelfmark without affecting anything at all.

Bookshops do this all the time, of course.  The biography of a footballer may have copies put in both the sport and the biography sections;  a detective novel set in ancient Rome may be found in both the Historical and the Crime sections. In libraries we have always been a bit sniffy about this and prided ourselves upon always being consistent– all our copies will be either in one place or another, not scattered between them.  It's as if we think that consistency of shelfmarks makes a library in some way intellectually superior to a bookshop. But wouldn’t it be better if libraries were more like bookshops and put the books where we thought the users would find them, even if that meant they were shelved in different places in different libraries (or even in different places within the same library)? The casual user browsing along the shelves would be more likely to find what they were looking for and anyone using the catalogue would still be able to find all the copies each with their own shelfmark. 

I suspect what happens now, is that library staff often put their books in places other than at the shelfmark given on the catalogue, because they know better than the staff in bib services where that book will be looked for; but, because we have made library staff think that shelfmarks shouldn’t be altered, can’t be altered, this is done surreptitiously, without the shelfmark on the catalogue being changed – which means that no one using the catalogue will be able to find the book, because they’ll be looking in the wrong place. Isn’t it time that we separated shelfmarks and classmarks and used them each for their proper purpose?

Always look on the bright side...

I’ve always been slightly afraid of dentists. Many years ago, when I was still living at home, I had a wonderful dentist. He was called Mr Ogilvie and he practised in a house in Lime Hill Road – probably downstairs in his own home, in fact. He was quite an old man – or so I thought at the time – and it didn’t seem that he had upgraded his equipment since originally setting up. Everything was rather antiquated.  This certainly put people off, but what really freaked them out was his conversation. I can remember a long disquisition on decomposition; and another on the capacity of the human bladder. You will gather from this that he didn’t adopt a normal chairside manner, but I found him interesting and the incongruity of the topics amused me. And I always thought, and still think, that it was a quite deliberate attempt to distract his patients from their fear at finding themselves in the dentist’s chair – even if for a lot of people it had quite the opposite effect. One of the things he told me was that people couldn’t laugh and be afraid at the same time.

And that is the point I want to make about the wave of changes to rules and roles that is breaking over us at the moment. Of course we’re afraid of what is happening to us and our jobs, but one way of coping is to laugh. I don’t mean that we should ridicule it - but do let’s try to see that there is often an amusing side to it.  If we are engaged and interested in the changes that are happening, and if we remember a sense of proportion and retain a sense of humour, I think we will all cope a whole lot better.

A faster horse

I was challenged recently to defend my assertion that we delivered the best service we could. "How can you say that you are delivering a good service," asked my challenger, "If you don't ask your customers what they want and then give it to them?" There was something about this that felt viscerally wrong to me, but I'm not a quick thinker - I'll never manage an elevator pitch unless the elevator breaks down - so it took until today for me to wake up with the answer.

Why should we think that what our customers want is necessarily the best thing for the service? Henry Ford famously said that he would never have developed the motor car if he had asked what his customers wanted, as what they would have asked for would have been a faster horse.

I find that all the time I am being asked for what in effect are faster horses, and I suspect that this is the position that most of us find ourselves in. Is it lack of assertiveness on our part, or lack of imagination on the part of our customers, that leaves libraries clip-clopping along on Dobbin?

In, out, shake it all about

Gradually we, as cataloguers, are getting used to the idea that we do more than just create data - more than just record bibliographical information accurately and consistently and put it into a store (whether card catalogue or database) where other people can get to it. This is pretty much where we were thirty years ago - our job then was to get the information set down correctly and we let people use it if they could work out how. Our way of doing things was the right way, and they had to learn to understand, or at least to recognise, it.

Gradually we have got used to the idea that our responsibility goes beyond merely enabling people to access the catalogue, to actively helping them to find what they want in it - nowadays we are involved in how people search, how information should be indexed and how it should be displayed. So we are involved with the output of the information, as well as the input. And this means that we have got much more involved in database structure and all sorts of technical stuff that has more to do with IT than AACR. But we still think of our users as being readers, public or students, people who come into our libraries as customers of one kind or another.

I am starting to think that we have - or could have - another sort of user amongst our colleagues and managers. Here we are, creating and managing big databases full of information about our collections and our customers. They are not just public catalogues, but also mines of information about our library service. We can find out all sorts of useful stuff - yes, we can provide management information. Before cataloguers became IT-savvy, this was the job of the system manager (even if the first thing they did was to come and ask a cataloguer where to find the information they were looking for); nowadays you can buy expensive software to run standard queries for you (as long as a cataloguer has told the programme where to find the data).

Why isn't the cataloguer building the queries in the first place? We know what information is available, how it is structured, and we know what questions to ask to get the right answer out. We know how to build shelflists for stock checking, lists of new acquisitions for publicity, we can manipulate data about stock, funds and borrowers. Let's start unpacking all this data so that our colleagues and our managers can use it to improve the whole of our service. It is valuable information and we should be the ones to release it. Suddenly our role might become a whole lot more visible and relevant.

Why is classification a dirty word?

I have been brooding on this for a while but have been nudged into expressing it by Karen Coyle's post. I can't articulate, let alone understand, the argument as well as Karen can; but I think she strikes the nail on the head when she says that we have forgotten about classification and about the importance of subject retrieval.
When, and why, did we suddenly get ashamed of classification? Most library users don't understand how classification works; a majority of librarians don't understand how classification works; but when did we get to the point where even a majority of cataloguers don't understand how classification works? Many cataloguers think that classification is all about shelf arrangement - that classification is only the number on the spine label.
Keywords just don't do it and never will. Do a keyword search for "pain" in our catalogue and you'll find some books about pain and pain relief; a number of novels which happen to have "pain" in the title; and a book in French about bread. And yet somehow, and largely I suspect because of Google and its ilk, we have come to think that's OK.
In libraries we will never be able to out-Google Google because we don't have the enormous resources that it would take, but that's not the problem. Why do we want to follow Google instead of doing something better?
Somewhere along the road we seem to have decided that users don't understand classification and therefore we shouldn't use it. Now there is absolutely no reason for users to understand classification, any more than there is for every driver to understand the mechanics of the internal combustion engine, or for every concert-goer to be a expert music theorist. Our job as cataloguers is to provide the engine, plus just enough guidance to enable our library users to get the best out of it. And anyway, people do understand classification otherwise they would never be able to find their way around the supermarket - almost every part of our public and private world is organised in some systematic way.
Classification isn't elitist, it is an absolutely essential tool for organising knowledge. We should be proud of it, not ashamed of it.