Idea I hope will become trends: ask for what you want

In the final installment of my ALA Annual faux-cap, I want to talk about asking for what you want.

The previous installments: user stories, communication, and assessment.

The last session I went to in Anaheim was a panel discussion about how ILS vendors were planning on dealing with the challenges and changes that RDA's implementation would inevitably cause.

When the moderator opened the floor for Q&A, a very different discussion erupted. Basically, the audience called the vendors out on their shenanigans.

Because, while the vendors had, indeed, made provisions for new MARC tags, it didn't seems as if they had really given much consideration to what a post-MARC world might look like. And that's a problem.

The discussion was...lively. Catalogers want tools and mock-ups of what a RDA-driven, post-MARC catalog might look like. ILS vendors don't seem to want to create even a beta version of such a catalog until the landscape is more stable.

What seemed most shocking to the catalogers in the room was that vendors seemed surprised that catalogers were even interested in such mock-ups. And their defense seemed to be that until and unless catalogers make their wishes known, vendors can't create the tools that catalogers want.

It seems to me like ILS vendors and libraries are having a stand-off. It's like they're playing chicken about how metadata will be represented in this post-AACR2, post-MARC world. Libraries are waiting on vendors who are waiting on libraries.

My observation about this stand-off is that if you want to affect real and lasting change when it comes to vendors, convince the people in your organization who sign-off on paying the bills that what you value is worthwhile.

So, my last and final takeaway is to ask for what you want.

At your own institution, talk to your Systems staff and UL about what you want users to be able to do with the metadata you're creating. Find products or dream up solutions to make these dreams a reality. Talk about what makes this metadata so important for users--for searching and retrieving items and for serendipitous discovery--and what would be so devastating for your users about outsourcing cataloging or accepting sub-par vendor-generated MARC records.

At conferences, visit the vendors your library works with. Ask them tough questions about what they're doing to move toward a post-AACR2, post-MARC world. Tell them what you want your users to be able to do with the metadata you're creating and ask them how they plan to make that happen. Talk to them about task forces and committees you know exist where libraries and vendors intersect and ask them what they're contributing to them.

Find your tribe and get involved. Join your state's library association or ALA. Or both. Join a committee or an interest group that's tackling these issues and get to work. Start learning to code and come up with your own solutions to these problems. Use social media to find like-minded folks and start learning about the issues.

To quote Rage Against The Machine:
"It has to start somewhere
It has to start sometime
What better place than here?
What better time than now?"

Be visible. Be proactive. Be awesome.

Ideas I hope will become trends: assessment

This series is, at its core, a recap of my trip to ALA's Annual Conference in Anaheim. But I prefer talking about the practical applications of what I learned to simply recapping programs.

The first installment was about user stories and the second was about communication.

The third installment is about assessment.

I was not planning on attending LITA's Top Tech Trends panel. But, I returned back from an off-campus lunch too late to attend the session I'd hoped to catch and too early for the next round of programs.Having found myself with a few minutes on my hand, I decided to catch a few minutes of the program.

Meredith Farkas was one of the panelists and I found myself nodding in agreement when she talked about how academic libraries can't really stand on the assertion that the library is the center of the academic community anymore. Instead, academic libraries are being asked to justify their impact on those they serve.

Farkas suggested that assessment tracking tools were a good way of managing data that would help libraries build stories of user impact.

But this isn't so much about what Farkas had to say as it is about what people had to say about what she had to say.

It seemed like the Twitter backchannel was musing about how difficult it was to cultivate the kind of organizational culture that breeds an interest in assessment. Basically--nobody teaches this kind of stuff in library school.

The thing is, I couldn't agree more with the notion that academic libraries are being asked to justify their impact on those they serve. It's no longer enough for them to say that they're the center of the academic community. Researchers, both novice and expert, are finding other sources for information than traditional library resources. And many academic libraries grapple with how to stay at the center of the campus community--a completely different challenge.

And I also couldn't agree more with the idea that data helps libraries build stories about their impact on the lives of users.

And, while we're at it, I also couldn't agree more with the idea that creating that kind of organizational culture is really, really hard.

But it's not impossible.

So, how do we do it? How do we create organizational cultures in our libraries that embrace assessment and the data it generates?

I think we start by shifting our focus toward things that are measurable. Which means that every project or program needs to have outcomes built into it during the design phase. How else will we know if the project is successful? And, in the case of programs, how will we know if the audience has learned what we'd like for them to learn?

Academic libraries need to think critically about how adopting this kind of culture could affect them for the better. What would it look like to have data supporting your assertions about how bibliographic instruction sessions have prepared student researchers for upper-level research? It's one thing to consider gate count (which is valuable data, indeed), but it's another to show how you've created good consumers and stewards of information.

I think it's equally important for user-centered back room folks to generate, synthesize, and store data as well. If it's true that academic libraries are being asked to justify their impact on the academic community, it's equally as true that many units performing back-room functions are being asked to do the same. And, when the day comes that you have to advocate for your job, it's much easier to do so using data.

So, try gathering some usage statistics after you finish a cataloging project. Did usage of a hidden collection go up after you added it to the catalog? Did analyzing that serial prompt more people to use it? This kind of data collection can help justify some of the most important work you're doing.

Alternately, though, data of this kind can help you decide what to let go of when budgets are tight and time is fleeting. You can see what your users value most and what they can live without and make decisions about resource allocation accordingly.

So...start with an outcome and measure your success accordingly. And let the data do the talking.

Be visible. Be proactive. Be awesome.

Ideas that I hope will become trends: communication

If you missed the first post in this short series, you can catch up here. The first post was about user stories and focused on a presentation that I saw at the Heads of Technical Services IG meeting.

The second idea that I hope becomes a trend is open dialogue between catalogers and, well, everyone else. The genesis of this was a bullet point from the presentation that Scott Piepenburg gave at the Competencies and Education for a Career in Cataloging IG meeting.Piepenburg's presentation was about what Catalogers would need to be able to do in a post-AACR2, post-MARC world. One thing that he suggested is a must is that Catalogers need to not only understand what their ILS can (and cannot) do, but they must also be able to communicate these limitations to others.

It took everything I had not to jump for joy or to stand on my chair and cheer. I didn't, though. It was a small room and kind of crowded.

I think that catalogers do a pretty decent job of understanding the limitations of our ILSs. We spend a lot of time working with them and, as a general rule, get what they do both well and poorly. Where it breaks down, sometimes, is communicating this information to our colleagues. Whether it's our colleagues in IT or our colleagues staffing the front lines, it is our job to communicate well with them.

Having a basic knowledge of coding can help us communicate more effectively with IT staff. We don't have to be coding wizards, but we should be able to talk about how our systems do parse out data in MARC records and, perhaps more importantly, how we wish they did.

Having a basic understanding of how users search for information can help us communicate more effectively with front line staff. We don't have to spend a lot of time on the Reference Desk (though it wouldn't hurt), but we should be able to talk about how users can do more effective searching.

So, how do we become better at communication with others? I have a couple of ideas:

• If you want to learn the basics of coding, Codeacademy can help. They even have a program called Code Year which will walk you through the basics of languages like Javascript. And if you're looking for support, there's a CatCode wiki whose function is to support dialogue between coders and catalogers. In this case, I suspect it's a lot like learning the language when you visit another country. You don't have to be proficient in it, but the natives appreciate that you're trying to speak their language.

• Attend (open) meetings in departments other than your own. At my former place of work, there was a monthly meeting of subject librarians that was open to all interested staff. I didn't go every month, but I tried to go fairly regularly. Attending this meeting helped me understand the challenges that subject specialists faced when helping users which, in turn, helped me think differently about the work I was doing. This meeting was also sometimes the only way that I learned about issues that I could help solve but that nobody thought to tell me about--not because they were trying to leave me out of the loop, but because they didn't realize that the problem could be solved.

• Get your hands dirty in projects that involve other departments. Though the bulk of my job duties involved cataloging, I taught in my former place of work's Freshman Writing Seminar. I also worked with our Digital Library Services unit and our Web 2.0 initiatives. I made valuable contacts and learned a lot about what other people the organization do. 

I think the moral of the story is that it's all about relationships and empathy. Learn to speak the language of the people you work with. Be friendly and empathetic and take the time to answer questions that your colleagues have about the work that you do. 

What are your suggestions about developing rapport with other units? How have you opened the lines of communication?

Be visible. Be proactive. Be awesome.

Organizing your time when everything seems urgent

In my current job, I work almost exclusively with electronic materials and it's caused a problem for me that I never had in my previous job where I worked almost exclusively with physical materials.

The problem stems from the fact that these materials often come to me in the form of an email from someone in our Acquisitions Unit. For some reason, these materials seem more urgent than a physical item that has been ordered and which goes into our backlog until someone has the time to catalog it.

In short, electronic materials can't be put on a truck to get to them as you have time. And when "ordering season" is in full-swing, I can get as many as 10 emails in a day.

I sometimes let ongoing projects or low-priority projects languish for weeks on end while I deal with these electronic materials, mostly because I give the electronic materials priority when they aren't materials that are urgently needed by users.

Luckily, this is merely frustrating and not terribly harmful to our users. I hate being a slave to my email. I want to get out of the I'll do it later mentality and work on the things that I really need to get done in any given day.

I've identified three things that can help me do this:
1. Use the "work offline" feature in Outlook if I need to be in my email, but don't want to see new messages. I often find myself stopping what I'm doing when getting new messages while working on a task that arose from an email. It's easy, I think,I'll just dash off a quick response. What I've learned, though, is that dashing off a response is rarely quick. I end up jumping down rabbit holes and before I know it, I've worked on a problem for much longer than I expected. Using the "work offline" feature lets me be in my email, but also lets me address new messages when I'm not distracted.

2. Evernote. Oh how I love thee, Evernote. I love how seemlessly it moves from my work computer to my iPhone to my netbook. I can keep track of everything I want to do, read, blog about, or listen to. For work, though, my favorite feature is how I can make Notes out of emails and flag them as to-dos or as things awaiting a response from other people.

3. My week-at-a-glance worksheet. I made this worksheet that has boxes for each day where I can record meetings or appointments and my "Most Important Thing." The MIT is the one task that I really want to get done and which takes priority over all other tasks. I ususally work on that after checking my email in the morning. I put all of the to-dos from the morning's email in a cleverly named "To do" folder in Outlook. I do my MIT and then go back and work on things in my "To do" folder.

3a. I've started giving each day of the week a designation.
Monday = Plan your week
Tuesday = Electronic stuff
Wednesday = Committee work (non-cataloging work that I need to do)
Thursday = Junky stuff (these are projects that have landed on my desk which are...messy)
Friday = Wrap-it-up day (wrap up projects, update Evernote, send emails, etc.)

These daily designations are on my worksheet and govern how I spend my afternoon. I usually spend the morning answering emails, doing my MIT, and working on some urgent-ish to-dos. So I spend the afternoon working on projects that correspond with my daily designation.

This 3-part system has made all the difference for me. I'm able to do the most urgent task for every day and make sure that no project languishes for more than a week. It's made me more productive and less stressed out.

I think that whatever organizational system you use, it's important to find one that works for you. Having an idea of how you want to spend your time means you're less tied to email and less busy doing work that is important to other people, but not urgent.

Be proactive. Be visible. Be awesome.

Patron-Driven Acquisition, MARC records, and you

I'm going to be all Ranty McRanty-Pants for just a minute. But I've got a point, so stay with me.

You know how Patron-Driven Acquisition is the Big Thing now in libraries? If you don't, check out this post from June 2010 at Go To Hellman's blog for a thorough, yet entertaining explanation of the situation.

Here's the thing:
In order for a Patron-Driven Acquisition program to be successful, the books have to be found in your catalog. If the MARC records aren't good, they become a barrier to findability.

Here's the other thing:
As far as I can tell, Vendors aren't invested in giving us good MARC records. For them, the records are like one of those gift-with-purchase makeup bags you get when you buy $50 worth of cosmetics at a department store. You pay for access to the e-books and get the records with them. And since the records themselves aren't worth a lot to the vendor, the quality of those records is sometimes sketchy.

The idea that we can put sketchy MARC records in our catalog and expect people to find the books in our Patron-Driven Acquisition program seems misguided at best and seriously problematic at worst. And as libraries are considering implementing Patron-Driven Acquisition programs as part of their collection development budget, it seems like this issue is coming to the proverbial tipping point.

Before you accuse me of wanting "perfect" records, let me be clear. I'm not advocating that vendors give us lovely, hand-crafted records. I'm merely advocating for things like correct titles, correctly formatted authority records for authors, and reasonable subject access.

I know that, in many people's eyes, days are numbered for our friend the OPAC. But for many users, the online catalog is an important tool for finding known items and discovering new resources. To rest an acquisitions model on the shoulders of records that aren't the main concern of the vendor selling them to you does your users a great disservice.

So what can you do? Two ideas:

1.) If your library has a team or committee overseeing the Patron-Driven Acquisition project, volunteer to be on it. Educate your colleagues (in a nice way, of course) about the importance of MARC records as an aid in findability.

2.) Going to a conference? Make time to talk to vendors about MARC records and make quality MARC records a must-have item in any Patron-Driven Acquisition project you pilot.

Be proactive. Be visible. Be awesome.

Creating change by directing elephants and riders

For some reason, I've been reading a lot of "business books" lately. I read Re:Work a couple of weeks ago and I just finished Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

My short review of both books: Both of them were well-written, thought provoking books that will change the way you perceive work and change respectively. Do yourself a favor and check them out, but only if you're ready to have your mind blown and your way of doing things forever altered.

In Shift, the Heaths talk about how our brains are divided into two distinct parts: the rational part (the rider) and the emotional part (the elephant). In order to create change that sticks, you have to make a compelling case for change to both parts of the brain. Additionally, the Heaths assert, you have to shape the path for both the elephant and the rider to be successful.

Change, the Heaths assert, doesn't happen until you can do all three things.

I thought of a lot of ways that I could apply this to my life. Then I started thinking about how this process works (or doesn't work) in libraries.

Despite how often you hear librarians complain about the glacial rate of change in libraries, I don't think that libraries are uniquely dysfunctional when it comes to change.

There area lot of people who have been doing certain things for a long time and are deeply invested in those processes--even when they don't work anymore. This is true in every area of the library, but let's focus on cataloging since this is a cataloging-related blog.

We've been doing the same process for at least 30 years, right? AACR and AACR2 have switched up the game some, as have advances in technology, but we've been producing bibliographic metadata for a while now.

Think about how many things have changed--shelf ready processing, programming languages that allow us to repurpose publisher metadata, web scale discovery systems--and then think about how resistant we, as a group, are to change.

This will never work. We can't do that here. It's too expensive. It doesn't meet our needs.

Sound familiar?

We are so invested in the way of doing things that work for us, that getting the elephant and the rider down the new path seems far beyond what we can do. Even if my elephant and rider say 'let's do this!,' I still have to convince the riders and elephants of everyone else in my department.

Change is hard. I know it, you know it, and the Heath Brothers know it. But that doesn't mean that change isn't worth doing. In fact, I would argue that change is the only way that we, as catalogers, are going to stay relevant.

Take the time to evaluate which changes make the most sense for your organization and then create a compelling argument for making that change. Make sure your argument appeals to both the rider and elephant of those you have to convince.

Be proactive. Be visible. Be awesome

Another tool in the cataloger's trusty toolbelt?

I stumbled upon OCLC'S Classify by way of The FRBR blog's post about it.

Using any number of identifying characteristics (UPC, OCLC no., ISBN, ISSN or Author and/or Title), a user can identify the most frequent and most recent call numbers for both Dewey and LC Classification for a (for lack of a better word) work.

I got really excited thinking about the implications of a tool like this. I couldn't help but think that, sitting next to Worldcat Identities, that this might be the Next Big Thing for catalogers.

Upon further consideration, I wondered what exactly one might do with Classify and the use I kept coming up with was certainly not what OCLC had in mind.

Imagine being a small library without the funding or resources to purchase a copy of DDC. Imagine being able to use a freely available web resources to assign a call number to something you own.

Given the stranglehold that OCLC seems to have on DDC, this was certainly not the intended use for this technology.

But what if it had been?

In light of this argument for setting classification free, Tim Spalding's idea about Open Shelves Classification doesn't seem so radical after all.

A library's ability to catalog it's collections shouldn't be tied to how much money it has. Period. End of story.

It's one thing to choose not to catalog a collection. It's quite another to not be able to because you don't have the means to do it.

Spalding's OCS (well, our OCS, if you take adhere to the truly open nature of "open" anything) puts part of that decision back into the hands of libraries.

I still think OCLC's Classify is a neat and potentially useful tool. And it has the ability to do a lot of good if it remains freely available. But, if it goes behind the wall of subscription services, it doesn't give us a whole lot more than what we've already got or what we can get by way of worldcat.org.

OCLC's Classify: shiny toy or useful tool?

"Basic" cataloging and the training-wheel culture (with a nod to Dorthea Salo)

When I took my school's required cataloging class, I fell into cataloging because I "got" it. I enjoyed the idea of putting an item into a neatly classified box.

Admittedly, it was a naively simple understanding of cataloging.

Shortly after I finished my beginning cataloging class, I secured work as a paraprofessional cataloger at a public library. When I started, I didn't really understand very much about cataloging, but I knew that I had all of the tools that I needed to gain a better understanding.

I'd worked as a paraprofessional cataloger for about six months before I took an advanced cataloging class. The advanced class covered music, serials, e-resources, videos/dvds, and maps. By the time I took the class, I'd had on the job training on cataloging videos/dvds, music, and serials.

Basically, for lack of a better metaphor (and to steal one from Caveat Lector's Dorthea Salo), I beat cataloging with rocks until I figured out how it worked.

Speaking of Dorthea Salo, she talks about the "training-wheels" culture in this post at Caveat Lector.

Salo seems to have lost her patience with those who aren't willing to figure things out on their own, but rather wait with baited breath for the training session. She uses cataloging as a prime example of the "training-wheels" culture in action.

Library schools are offering fewer and fewer cataloging classes, it's true, which means that catalogers-in-training will be more responsible for teaching themselves the nitty gritty of format-specific cataloging.

I think that library schools owe their students at the very least a basic understanding of how library catalogs are designed to work in terms of search and retrieval. They also owe their students as basic understanding of subject analysis and classification schemes.

Knowing how these things works makes you a better librarian no matter what area of librarianship "calls" to you.

But I've never been certain that asking a person who has no interest in cataloging to create an "original" record has any significant value for the student beyond turning them off to cataloging.

If I were teaching a "basic" cataloging course, I would teach students how to "use" a library catalog. I would teach them search strategies that can be used with all catalogs, regardless of vendor. I would teach students about controlled vocabulary and how subject headings are formed. I would teach students how to read bibliographic records. I would teach students about DDC and LC in general terms, and get them familiar with what goes where.

Librarians of every kind learn a lot on the job. Why should cataloging be any different?

Genre headings ahoy!

I was thrilled to be tipped off by this post at Catalogablog that genre headings are now showing up in the Library of Congress Subject Headings weekly list.

You've always been able to add form/genre headings by way of GSAFD (Guidelines on Subject Access to Individual Works of Fiction, Drama, Etc.) terms.

It's just nice to see the LoC getting on board.

Intelligent design @ your library

A cataloging listserv I subscribe to brought the Darwin Day Petition to my attention.

Barbara Shaw, a graduate student at Portland State University, is drafting a petition requesting that books on creationism and intelligent design be moved in bookstores and libraries from the science section to the religion section.

Ms. Shaw presents the idea that the placing of intelligent design texts in the science section comes not out of malice, but out of misinformation. She writes, "Categorizing books is both a science and an art. We respect the enormous task they have, and our efforts are to support them, not in any way to undermine them."

Ms. Shaw places the blame squarely on the shoulders of scientists. She argues that they must do a better job of teaching the public "what science is, and what science is not."

As someone who classifies library materials as part of her job, Shaw's petition shows a weakness in the process. For both Dewey Decimal Classification and LC Classification, the classifier has to use his or her best judgment when assigning a class number. If a book is about one topic and it is mis-classified, it's an error on the catalogers part. If, though, the book is about two topics, the classifier must decide what the book is more "about."

For instance, if a book "about" both intelligent design and evolution, the classifier has to decide which topic the book is more "about." He or she must often look beyond the title page to get the information needed, like the author's background or argument.

As Ms. Shaw states, it's both an art and a science. And sometimes we get it wrong.

I think it's neat that Ms. Shaw and her colleagues feel so strongly about the situation that they are willing to work for change. I respect that.

It is a reminder for me, as a cataloger, to always be vigilant when making decisions.

Harry Potter and the various editions

William Denton writes in this post on the FRBR blog that Amigos Library Service is offering to its members the option of applying parts of the FRBR model to their WorldCat comparison.

Amigos Library Services says on its WorldCat Collection enhancements page that "Applying elements of FRBR groups various editions and formats of the same title together."

I jumped a little in my seat and said "Woo!" I woke MollyDog up and she wasn't amused. Then I realized that I had no idea, in any sort of practical way, what that meant.

I Googled "WorldCat comparison" and ended up at FirstSearch's help page where I learned that "A WorldCat comparison compares your Aggregated Group Analysis to all of WorldCat."

Okay, great, but what does that mean?

Next I found FirstSearch help's definition of Aggregated Group analysis and learned that "In an Aggregated Group analysis the combined titles of all member libraries, with duplicates removed, are presented as though the group were a single institution."

So if I'm reading this right, WorldCat comparison analyzes your library's holdings against other library's holdings so that you can see which titles you have are unique?

Add that to the idea that Amigos Library Services will help your library display these results in a FRBR-friendly way and what do we get?

Probably some very happy collection-analyzing librarians.

Let's take our old friend Harry Potter and his various editions. If you're trying to do collection analysis, it doesn't seem very useful to have to wade through all of the various editions to find out where you stack up. Unless it's a US vs. UK edition, I'm guessing that the differences have very little to do with content and more to do with presentation.

FRBR-izing your WorldCat collection analysis might be less useful for institutions or instances like Special Collections where the difference between editions is significant. This tool's usefulness might also depend on how many of your holdings are unique and how much of your collection consists of various editions of the same title.

For public libraries, I suspect that approach might quickly a big difference in how they do collection analysis. If you were analyzing your collection, this FRBR-ized approach would quickly give you a clearer picture of what you have in your collection. And by having that clearer picture, you would be better equipped to build on certain areas of your collection. Better collections mean librarians better equipped to help their users. Happy users means successful libraries.

It's not a one size fits all solution, so that display doesn't supersede your original display and Amigos Library Services doesn't force their members to adopt this display. But they are offering the option.

I think that by making easier the job of collection-analyzing librarians, you sell the idea of FRBR as way of looking at the relationships between items being displayed in your public catalog. It's a good way to get people other than catalogers and metadata specialists talking about FRBR. Furthermore, these discussions happen in a way that makes sense for people who don't speak Cataloging.

So good on you, Amigos Library Services, for finding a way to make collection analysis easier for your users.

-Erin