Using Power For...Something

I always start to feel both wildly powerful and semi-incompetent doing original cataloging. It's a heady combination.

We don't do much of it, basically just once a year for the dental school theses, and invariably while I'm doing call numbers there will be a few for which the classification just stalls me.

I mean, if the title is "Evaluation of three types of commerically available dental porcelain," no problem. I can stick that in WU 190 for "Dental materials (General or not elsewhere classified)" without even blinking. Other than to moisten my eyeballs, as one does.

But if it's something like "N-glycosylation of E-cadherin regulation as it impacts cytoskeletal dynamics" I just have to say..."buh?"

So you poke around and try to find something along the same lines that someone else has classified as something, and see if that makes any sense, and eventually you just sort of take a stab at it and figure the important thing is, it's going to be on the shelf somewhere if someone is looking for it.

Oh yes it will. And you know where on the shelf it's going to be?

Wherever I decide to put it, that's where! (Assuming the next people to get it shelve it appropriately according to call number.)

So, not knowing exactly what's going on, but with the power to shape the very shelflist of the library according to my whim? Like I said, it's a heady combination.

Always Use Correct Terminology

MeSH updates for 2012 have been out for a while, so it's time to correct all the subject headings in our OPAC records. Yes! New terms!

We've heard rumors that there may be some way, in some system, to make this happen automatically, but we don't know what it is, in my library, so what this really means is that it's time for me to ask someone else to search for all the old, changed or deleted descriptors (like Indigotindisulfonate Sodium) one by one, and replace them with the shiny new descriptors (like Indigo Carmine).

Someone else will really enjoy that project.

While we're not sure about the existence of a way to have our OPAC talk to MeSH and update the 650 x2 fields automatically, we know there is actually a way to do a sort of 'find and replace' within the catalog that would at least correct multiple records at once, but to be honest we're kind of afraid of it.

What if we changed something in 50 records and then it was the wrong thing? And what if we couldn't just change it back? We could conceivably spend hours disentangling things. And we'd have to figure this out ourselves, because no one else knows how to do it either.

So it's kind of easier to have someone else do it the long way. Sometimes the thing that's technically more efficient is not actually the thing that makes the best use of available resources, that's what I tell myself.

Besides, we're getting a whole new ILS next year, so figuring out the cool tricks in Millennium at this late date isn't really going to help us in the long term. Therefore, heck with 'em.

Things Come in Pieces

We just got in some human anatomy models that some of the students requested. Now we have to figure out how to catalog them and organize them so that people can check them out.

I'm more concerned about the second problem than the first.

For the first part, well, if I can't find the precise models we have in OCLC, no matter--someone will have cataloged something similar, and I'll copy it. There's no plagiarism in cataloging! Just adopting (and adapting) the good practices of others.

But these things come apart into all kinds of small pieces, and so thinking of checking them out is like imagining checking out jigsaw puzzles.

What do you do if they come back with pieces missing? You can't really have someone behind the desk checking every one, but if one person loses a crucial lobe of the brain, that model is going to be less useful to the next person. It's a resource that you can imagine becoming rapidly less valuable to everyone as it's checked out repeatedly.

We once refused someone's request to order a pack of flash cards because we thought that cards would just get lost, so you see we have trust issues. These students are lucky we ordered these models at all. They'll be even luckier if we actually let them use the models, and don't just put them on a shelf for decoration.

I guess this second part isn't really my problem, though. We have a circulation department that can worry about circulation. So lucky me, the harder of the two questions isn't one I have to answer! I love it when that happens.

Just give me the body parts and I'll get them in the catalog somehow.

Occupy the Library

I see via Shakesville that the Occupy Wall Street Library (the existence of which is super cool) has a web site.

They're working on a catalog using LibraryThing, and are archiving documents produced by OWS activities for the future as well as accepting donated books and making books available.

Love it!

They obviously also have a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, as well as a YouTube channel. This is the 21st century, after all.

I love the idea that a library is a fundamental enough idea that a group of people gathering for totally non-library-related purposes will spontaneously put one together.

Rock on, everyone.

Philosophical Musing

Working on some catalog records, correcting one thing, I stumble across a lot of other strange errors. Misspellings, words jumbled together, etc.

It just reminded me that anytime you do something over and over and over, like typing "Electronic resources" or "Digitized and made available by Springer," you both get really good at it, so that your fingers can just whip out those words without your really even noticing, and get to where you inevitably mess up from time to time without noticing that either.

Like typing "Digitized andmade available by Springer," or "Electornic resources."

This is why I try to type this sort of thing as little as possible. Well, this and the attempt to stave off mind-numbing boredom.

'Copy and paste,' or automatic substitution phrases, can do a world of good. As long as you get it right the first time, of course.

But in general, this just reminds me that human error is ever with us. I might once have harbored idealistic dreams of having a perfect and error-free catalog, but in reality this is pretty much impossible.

We try to make it accurate, obviously, but there will always be many and various imperfections in its multitudinous records. You can't catch them all.

We fix them when we notice, but for the most part, we can't afford to fret about it. In cataloging, as in life, you do the best you can and accept that it won't be without quirks and flaws.

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All Days Are Alike to Me

I had this training event on Advanced Serials Cataloging, today and tomorrow. I planned my travel and time off work and everything.

Only it was July 12 and 13, which, it turns out, actually corresponds to yesterday and today.

I must have read it wrong one time, pegged it in my head as a Wednesday and Thursday, written it into my calendar on the wrong days, and never revisited the date information to notice the error.

I'm on my knees right now, shaking my fists at the sky, shouting out, like an imprecation, the single word:

Braaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiin!!!!!!!!!!

Way to let me down, brain. Way to sabotage my earnest attempts to learn more about Advanced Serials Cataloging. Why do you hate Advanced Serials Cataloging so much, brain?! What has Advanced Serials Cataloging ever done to you?

Perhaps we shouldn't try too hard to answer that question.

On the plus side, I don't have to go out to Wellesley College tomorrow (Wellesley is very nice, but the commute is even longer than my usual).

And the one day of training that I did have today was good (serials: a whole big pile of complicated mess!), and I have the book with all the slides, so I can review the information on my own. I will generously refrain from providing details here.

I can't get over the total date-recognition failure, though. Oh well...I was close, right?

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More Catalog Power

Having the awesome power of the catalog, I today made a sweeping change to our CDs. Please fetch a refreshing beverage and settle in for the thrilling saga I am about to relate.

So the CDs are all stored behind the desk, because of fears they would just get lost up in the stacks, and for some time they'd been listed in the catalog with a special location code set aside for audio/visual materials, that prompted the helpful note "Circulation Desk" in the catalog. This way, people know not to go hunting in the stacks for CDs. Perfectly sensible.

The trouble is, this location code came with a "do not circulate" rule in the system (because, in an added bit of exciting history, the code was recycled from a now-defunct special collection that did not circulate). So about every blue moon, when someone tried to check out a CD, there was a whole process of overriding the rule, which requires a certain login level, so the student employees have to find someone who can do it, and in general it's been a rare but recurrent pain in our necks for years.

We asked the Ultimate Masters of the Catalog to change the rule, naturally, but they are busy, and despite various tearful pleas, it never happened. (Possibly we should have sent better tribute.) Now we're supposed to get a whole new catalog system next year, so you know making changes to this one is not going to be anywhere near the top of anyone's priority list.

So rather than ask again, we just reassigned all the CDs to either the circulating collection or the reference collection, switching them all to those existing location codes and circulation rules, and as far as I'm concerned we shall never use the a/v code again, because of the lingering neck pain issue.

It's all fairly straightforward, especially because we have fewer than 300 CDs anyway so it wasn't even a very large project once I got around to it.

The main demonstration of my vast power is that I co-opted the "volume" line, which appears following the call number in our catalog display (where, in a set of books, we'd say "volume one" or whatever) to say "CD at desk" so people still know where to look for them.

Technically, "at desk" is not volume information, but darn it, the people demand to know where the CDs are*, and since the a/v location code told them, while the reference and circulating collection do not, that information has to be conveyed somehow.

I contemplated putting a 590 note in the main record, but concluded that no one would see it there.

This long and terribly fascinating story is all just to say that you have to try to meet the needs of your users (and your colleagues at the circulation desk) as best you can discover those needs, even if you have to bend the catalog a little to do it.

Also, that I have the awesome power of the catalog, and I'm not afraid to use it.

However, I don't have Ultimate Master of the Catalog Power, or I would have just changed the a/v circulation rule myself, meaning I wouldn't have had to bend the catalog on the "volume" line. I think this is a pretty good argument for giving me more power.

I am totally not chortling in a sinister way right now, either.

Hahahaha! Ahem. Normal non-sinister chortle. Think nothing of it.


*At least every blue moon, when someone is interested in checking out a CD. Most of the time, I admit the people don't really care where the CDs are.

Catalog Power

We mostly do copy cataloging at my library. For non-catalogers, that means that rather than make up a record in the catalog from scratch, we use one someone else made, with minor adjustments according to specific practices at our library.

It's standard library practice. Economies of scale, etc. Saves every single library that owns a book having to catalog it themselves; instead, one library catalogs, and everyone else can just copy their record.

Brilliant!

Now the thing is, very often you don't find a record that's exactly the way you want it for your own library. A frequent issue I've noticed is that ebooks seem to often have different years listed in the most popular catalog records than are listed on the item itself. I don't know why.

But that's merely an example. There are plenty of other irritating discrepancies that must be dealt with in various formats. As a result, there's ever so much tidying up that always has to be done.

Some might say this is the job of a cataloger, in the age of mostly copy-cataloging, but I say it's a ghastly imposition on my valuable time, which might better be spent appreciating lightly armored fighters or worrying about killer robots.

So I've recently decided that the solution is to start throwing away any book that doesn't have a perfect, pre-existing record to use. This will clear a lot of clutter from the shelves, cut down on some of the little details of my job, and bring us closer to a nice, clean catalog.

Hahahahahahahaha!

The catalog seems very formal and official and so forth, but ever since I started working on it, I realized its clean tidiness is an illusion. One constantly strives for perfect accuracy, of course, but it's a goal that is forever out of reach. There's always some strange misspelling or misplaced text or some peculiar code in the wrong subfield.

Always! Embrace the sea of tiny imperfections, strive to make the records at least suggest the holdings of the library, and let it go, I say.

Besides, the library catalog is possibly on its last legs anyway, what with new federated search features. We're getting Primo soon! It's bound to be a whole new world.

In the meantime, I'll keep tidying my copied records, at least until I get approval for my throw-away-all-the-books plan.

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Electronic Does Not Equal Paper

For years, and for no reason that I know of, my library chose to catalog electronic books on the same record as the print version, if we had both, but cataloged electronic and paper versions of journals on different records.

Mostly.

There were always exceptions, so I've always occasionally had to separate a pair of conjoined journals, or squash a pair of books together. For consistency, you know.

As I say, I'm not sure what the original reasoning was behind this policy. I'm sure there was some. Possibly it had to do with counting...for questions asking how many individual titles we have, keeping ebooks and paper books together makes sense. You count the bibliographic records, and you're good.

Why this doesn't make sense for journals, I don't know. We always have to de-duplicate those for the 'unique title' questions.

It matters little, though, because policy is policy. And now, policy is changing: it has been at last decided that system-wide, we're going with separate records all the way!

So now at some point, when I have the time, I'm going to have to track down every book title that we hold both electronically and in paper, and split them up.

I guess it was either that or find all the journals, and put them together. I actually not sure which would involve more work. I'll imagine it's the one I'm not doing, to comfort myself.

I tell you all this because I know you care very deeply.

Also, mostly, because it's what I'm thinking about right now.

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Spring Cleaning

Today I have been keeping busy updating MeSH terms in our OPAC, which apparently has not been done since the turn of the century. No, OK, more like the turn of the decade.

I don't know why not, because it's totally awesome. It's like there's a party in my office, and only me and a few hundred new and old MeSH terms were invited. I get to pass down the ruling on all of them.

So long, Hermaphroditism. You had a good long run. Now get the heck out and make way for Disorders of Sex Development!

The term change affecting the largest number of records so far has been Biological Evolution, replacing Evolution.

My personal favorite, however, is Siphonaptera, replacing Fleas. I like it because it has 'siphon' in it, and it makes me think of a flea with a tiny siphoning mouth.

And then, having done that for a second, I shudder and decide I need a new favorite. The word is a lot cuter than the reality.

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Work Notes

I have been doing a lot of copy cataloging lately, and I would like to make the following observation:

The t subfield in the 505 line is a pain in the butt.

505, as I need hardly explain, so widespread is our cultural understanding of MARC in this wonderful world, is for contents notes, like chapter titles and so forth. That's great, so I'm always happy to see a 505, but when a chapter title is prefaced with |t our OPAC picks up that chapter title when it runs a title search.

So if you want the book The Eight Labors of Hercules*, and you type it into our catalog search bar and specify that you want to search for titles, it will also bring back a bunch of books that may be about other things, but have chapters about the labors of Hercules.

Our current theory at the library where I work is that users shouldn't get anything but book and journal titles when they do title searches. We figure few enough people use that feature, since most of them use keyword searches, which will pick up chapter titles where relevant, so if they go to the trouble of actually saying they want to search for a title, we ought to try to make sure that's all they get back.

So I have to go through and delete every single subfield t when it shows up, and that slows me down.

Fortunately, it doesn't show up that often. And I'm sure it serves a valuable purpose in someone else's catalog. That's why I'm only expressing mild complaint, rather than calling for a worldwide ban on the use of t.

This concludes today's cranky cataloging observation.


*This is an abridged version of the Hercules legend, featuring just the more exciting of his 12 achievements, because you are a busy person.

Sad Work

It's just a fact of libraries that books sometimes turn up missing. They get lost, they get stolen, they sprout legs and walk away.

Then you have to make sure the catalog doesn't keep saying you have things you don't. Delete records, remove duplicate items. I keep thinking "but we should have this!" We can't delete this record from the catalog!

Oh, right, but we don't have it, so we have to delete it if we don't want the catalog to be a liar. Sigh.

The 'workyear outline' my predecessor left me suggests doing this three times a year.

I just did it for the first time since I took this position last August. Oh well. Outlines are made to be scribbled around the edges of.

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We Bear a Heavy Burden

Interesting news on Salon about Google Books, which apparently is riddled with interesting quirks, such as:

Sigmund Freud is listed as a co-author of a book on the Mosaic Web browser and Henry James is credited with writing "Madame Bovary." Even more puzzling are the many subject misclassifications: an edition of "Moby Dick" categorized under "Computers," and "Jane Eyre" as "Antiques and Collectibles" ("Madame Bovary" got that label, too).

Indeed.

Librarians will instantly nod when we learn that this is a metadata problem, where the information in the record representing the item is faulty. Oh, metadata, we meet again. Where did I leave that blog I did in that class?

Hm...it seems to have vanished (serves me right for leaving it unattended on the UA server), although a Bloglines preview has preserved some of my remarks. It just goes to show that the internet is a land of contrasts.

You can't assume that something you put online will just stay out there forever, because many times no one cares about it, servers fail or are cleared, and your not-so-deathless prose vanishes into a digital grave.

At the same time, you can't assume that something you put online won't just stay out there forever, because if anyone does care about it, whether to laud it, deride it, or use it as evidence in a lawsuit, it will be copied, stored in multiple locations (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe!), and become nearly impossible to eradicate.

One must be constantly prepared both for immortal infamy, and for unbroken obscurity.

Anyway, the larger point is, yes, that Google Books needs catalogers. Of course they do. Everyone needs catalogers! When will the world shower us with the adulation, money and chocolate we so richly and obviously deserve?

I got this from Aunt B. at Tiny Cat Pants, who linked it with the astute observation, "Well, Some Librarians Will Have Jobs in the Future."

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Spelling It Out For Us

Catalogablog reports that the Library of Congress is contemplating a change in listings from the abbreviation "Dept." to the fully spelled "Department."

This is a big job:

OCLC has agreed to change the approximately 48,000 1XX fields in name authority records, and the Library of Congress would change its approximately 200,000 bibliographic records and re-distribute them, beginnning no earlier than March 2, 2011.

The Library of Congress invites comments on the proposal. It sounds fine to me.

I like things spelled out. I'm horribly inefficient with text messaging, because I insist on using full words and punctuation, rather than the many amusing abbreviations that are featured in all the commercials.

That's bad for limited-character situations, and obviously for catalog cards in the old days, but if you have the room, I'm all for writing out words.

Do it, LC! Do it!

That's just my take.

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Journal Learnin'

I'm taking a short workshop on serials cataloging, and learned the following important things that define a continuing resource as a serial:

1. It is issued in "a succession of discrete parts"*
2. These parts are usually numbered (though occasionally other means of distinguishing said discrete parts may be seen)
3. It has no predetermined conclusion, but is intended to continue publication indefinitely

I started thinking about things in daily life that might be cataloged as serials, and decided that breakfast is a good bet.

Each incidence of 'breakfast' will be a discrete event, with the possibility of sequential numbering according to the day on which the breakfast occurred, and there is no predetermined end point, since I plan on eating breakfast on a regular basis into the foreseeable future.

Cataloging 'breakfast' as a serial will save a lot of effort over considering each separate event as a monographic item that needs its own record.

This is what I think about, when I'm refreshing my cataloging knowledge while anxiously waiting for the muffins to arrive.


*Basic Serials Cataloging Workshop: Trainee Manual. Library of Congress, 2010.

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Get It On Record

I loved this moment of librarian geekiness from Anna at Future Feminist Librarian Activist, relating how she was looking at the Library of Congress Authorities one day (as one does) and looked up her own grandfather, who was there.

Nice! It must be interesting to see a name you know well from personal contexts listed in this very formal LC style for the whole world to see and copy into its catalog records.

I don't have any relatives in the LC Authorities as far as I know, but we do put some of our graduate and PhD theses in the collection, so I've come across a few names in the catalog and thought "hey, I remember that student!"

It may be sort of the same thing. A kind of putting together of pieces, something you know in one context, someone you know in another. Almost like getting a joke, in a way, though not with the funny haha aspect.

A little mental snap, things coming together to look a bit different.

Some of those students may well go on to be listed in the LC Authority Files, too. They're not related to me, though, so heck with 'em.

It's up to me to get an authority record in the LC files to bring honor to my family name!

Great, pressure.

I have also looked up my own last name in PubMed, and there are some of us in there, though again, none related to me as far as I know. But at least whoever those people are, they've got us covered so I don't have to worry about writing up a medical research project.

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Challenges: Overrated?

A nifty deal with Mary Ann Liebert means that we get extended back files on about 50 journal titles. Nice! Up to ten more years of online access! Love it!

Turns out that about half those journals have changed titles, sometimes multiple times (sometimes in mid-volume, sometimes back to the original title) in the time represented by the new coverage.

In the interests of accuracy, each variant of the title must of course have its own record, so basically we not only have more years of coverage, we have a bunch of additional journal titles for the collection!

It's kind of a pain to sort them all out, but it's nice for the stats.

I guess I should say, to be more accurate, that it's the kind of thing I actually sort of enjoy (tracing the course of titles, putting in 'continues' and 'continued by' notes, carefully detailing volume and issue numbers) but which is time consuming and therefore kind of a pain because it impedes my progress on the massive ebooks project.

A lot of things are like that. In theory, I enjoy the bits that are somewhat more challenging. Coming across a record with no Medical Subject Headings so I can find some for it, untangling the twisted web of mutated titles in a journal's history, that sort of thing.

In practice, it just takes up time, and that means more hours spent under the looming shadow of some project or other than you want to finish up so you can dive into the looming shadow of the next project.

Fortunately I'm good with looming shadow, because I burn easily in the sun.

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Time for Unification?

So the library where I work has close to 2,300 electronic textbooks (and another couple of thousand we just got in a couple of packages and are super excited about getting to process).

They're all highlighted on a special e-books page of our website, where they're searchable by title, author, year, or by which of our 120-ish subject pages we've stuck them on.

They're also accessible through the library catalog, of course. And we know that multiple points of access makes an item's existence extra awesome, so I want them in the catalog, but I've begun to think that at some point it no longer makes as much sense to separate out electronic books on their own page.

It makes sense if there aren't that many of them, and you want to say, "hey, look, this is a special thing we have: e-books! Check 'em out! Or rather, you don't have to check 'em out, because they don't circulate! Hahahahaha! Librarian jokes are the best!"

OK, maybe we really only wanted to say the first part, since everyone already thinks we're huge geeks. But anyway, if e-books (and e-journals) are sort of a special feature, then yes, you want to point to them specially.

And a few hundred electronic titles, categorized by subject, makes sense. You can even browse through a list like that to see if anything looks good--it's a way to differentiate a certain type of resource so someone could take a quick look and see if there was anything on their topic available online.

Lately, though, e-books are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the collection, and I'm not sure this model still works. We have around 25,000 titles on paper, so e-books are already more than 10% of the collection, once we finish adding the mountain of new titles. An even larger percentage of newer titles will be electronic, since some of our print volumes are very old (some kept intentionally for historical interest, and some just still on the shelves because we haven't had time to do a good weed in a while).

And 5,000 titles, even broken down by subject or alphabetically, are not really that easy to browse on a web screen, so it becomes less likely that someone will be immediately able to see what they're looking for by consulting the e-books page. Ease of access, as well as advertising, was presumably the initial purpose of the separate e-books page, and I'm not sure how well it fulfills the former purpose anymore.

I'm thinking that at some point we might want to simply eliminate the "e-books" page, which is already becoming unwieldy, and let e-books, like all our books, just be accessed through the catalog. (This is even more true of journals, where we have almost no current print subscriptions and an enormous, bloated list of titles on the e-journals page, but I'll think about journals another time.)

The problem, I guess, is that people might not find them there, but that's no more a problem for e-books than for any books, as far as I can tell.

Again, it comes down to a question of whether these are a special resource we offer, that needs special advertising, or just a resource we offer, that gets the same attention as any other. And the way things are going with our collection development, I don't really think e-books are a big special deal anymore. Everyone has them, people know about them, they're just one of the ways we try to make stuff people might want to use available for them.

I'm only partly having these thoughts because it would save Tech Services a lot of time if we didn't have to put all these titles on the web page as well as in the catalog.

I swear, it's also a sincere question about how we can best serve our core audience!

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MARC-Up Language

David at Catalogablog passes along the exciting news that MARC 21 Update 11 is now out!

I'm automatically excited about this. It's big news. Who knows what may be different next time I go to look something up?

I could go read about the changes right now and find out, but that would spoil the fun.

It's not as if I have time to make any wild retrospective changes, if something should turn out to be dramatically different.

I'll just wait until I happen across it, and then exclaim in wonder. It's how we roll, in my Tech Services.

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Advice: So Hard to Follow

As both a cataloger and a reference librarian, I am intrigued, yet also troubled, by this advice from A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette:

At least once per year, one of your library's catalogers should walk up to the reference desk and shank a reference librarian with a letter opener. These public shows of aggression will earn you the respect of your colleagues and help maintain the social order in your library.

I'm definitely all for ensuring the prominent place of cataloging in the social hierarchy. And since I'm the sole librarian representing technical services at work, I theoretically don't need to worry about getting shanked with a letter opener at the reference desk myself.

On the other hand, I might get shunned. It's lonely at the top of the social ladder, and I can accept that, but then who'd share chocolate with me?

Besides, it sounds like a lot of work (stabbing? I'd have to raise my arm and stuff) and I don't have a letter opener.

You can see where this is a bit of a dilemma for me.

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