Not for the want of ideas ...

Please accept my humblest apologies for it being ages since I last blogged. As the title of this post implies, it's not for want of ideas, but more due to lack of time, or, I suppose, if I were being honest, I've chosen to spend my time on other activities - like my other blog, going to lectures and events and generally trying to spread myself as thinly as possible!!

So, some of the things I thought I might blog about included:

• annual development reviews
• one2one meetings
• evaluation (or so it appears, having read my last but one post!)
• RDA - adoption of, or lack of adoption of!
• volunteering in public libraries
• local studies collections
• my team's READ-ability Initiative and PIC Project
• process reviews
• project work
• how cataloguers are a public good
• the super-library concept
• CILIP involvement
• library budgets
• customer service
• e-book collections

but I'm having difficulty choosing and honing in on just one idea! So, what shall it be? For a blog entitled "Blogging Cataloguing" I seem to be veering away from the topic, but that could be because I actually haven't done much cataloguing for quite a while now, as our backlog receded and the cataloguers are generally able to keep up. Having said that, I have been reliably informed that we have doubled the number of orders we would normally place in November, this year, so I'm expecting a flood of new books to come in, and I might just have to dust off my Dewey login, and update my RDA knowledge!

Actually, new books have already started to roll in to the office, and are causing quite a stir. The "holding" shelves are stuffed, the trolleys are teetering and there are enough cardboard boxes to build a substantial dwelling.

The way we work is to split the acquisitions/cataloguing process into small parts, and have staff working on different bits at the same time, in order to ensure a steady flow of new books through the office. However, if one person is opening boxes, then this person can't also be doing spine labelling, or if another person is paying invoices, they can't be jacketing new books. So, we're ending up robbing Peter to pay Paul, and then robbing Paul to pay Peter, clearing a blockage in one part of the system and then creating a blockage in a different part of the process!

Still, it's only a temporary blip! We seem to be keener than ever to spend our money as quickly as possible, so I'm sure it'll soon run out, and we will be able to reinstate all those database maintenance jobs that we try to do in the background, those little things that can make the user experience so much better. Things like, improving the quality of LCSH in our records, improving the quality of our name headings, updating our classification numbers to reflect the latest edition of Dewey, ensuring that all our hotlinks still work and generally improving the quality of our bib records.

As you might expect, all this frenzied activity on the new book front is coinciding with other work which is to do with upgrading our OPAC, introducing a discovery product, introducing new software which will help to improve our ways of working, particularly in the field of ordering, and working out how best to integrate a new-to-the-team, but established operation, and the staff associated with it.

Personally, although it's still November, I'm looking forward to the Christmas vacation!
        

Post-31st March!

Hard to believe we are already into April 2013, when it seems like the year only just started!

So, RDA is now longer coming our way - it has already arrived! With a bang? Well, no, not for us really, since some major bibliographic record suppliers have been providing records in RDA format since January of this year. What we have had to do in relation to our own cataloguing work is look at the RDA standard and see what we can and can’t currently adopt, due to limitations not in our cataloguing software, nor our cataloguers' abilities, but in our OPAC.

Decisions made at a cataloguers’ meeting earlier this year will remain in place until our OPAC has the capabilities to display all the new RDA-specific fields, and that, unfortunately, means that wherever possible, the cataloguers will be avoiding importing RDA records. Where an RDA record is the best record available, then it will be imported and modified to suit us, but the resulting record will not be shared with the cataloguing community at large.

Problematic fields for us include the new 264 field, so we will not initially be adopting this, but we will retain fields 336, 337 and 338 if they are in the record. We have had much discussion about 245 $h and have reluctantly decided to adopt this practice, and are hoping that users will find the item-type icon acceptable as an indicator of material-type, until our OAPC is improved.

This situation does, of course, mean that our knowledge, skills and experience of using RDA will lag behind the rest of the cataloguing community, though we are dipping in and out of our toolkit and looking out for suitable training.

Here’s hoping for a speedy resolution to our display problem!

Discoverability

Promotion is part of discoverability, but it is only a part!

Libraries are vast sources of information, contained in a variety of formats, shelved in a variety of ways and locations. So how do [potential] users find the information they need?

In our library we have many different locations, from collections housed in different buildings (including an off-site storage facility), through collections in the basement (hard-copy journals, media items, missing pages/offprints, the archive and the rolling stack) the ground floor (short loan items), the first floor (reference section and Dewey sequence 001-615) to the top floor (Dewey sequence 616-999, oversize items, pamphlets and vulnerable items in secure glass display cabinets). How on earth do we expect users to be able to navigate through our valuable information resources when we spread our stock throughout the buildings in jigsaw-like fashion? If you have the picture, it’s easy enough to do, but if don’t have that useful aid, what do users do, and how can we help them?

The online catalogue

The catalogue is a huge part of the library’s public face; it needs to be clear, accurate, easy to use and reflective of the information resources that are available. At collection level, some of our resources are discoverable through their site code on the online catalogue (e.g. Law Library, Short Loan Collection), whilst some through their sequence (e.g. Reference, Media, Special Collections), and most are discoverable by old-fashioned serendipity – walking the shelves, finding something that catches your eye and turns out to be relevant!!

But what of title-level discoverability, or content discoverability? This is where, I believe, lies the strengths and skills of the cataloguer. An online catalogue can only ever be as good as the cataloguers who got the information onto it in the first place! If that information is wrong, sloppy, or partial, or the access points are too few or badly assigned and aligned then that title/content discoverability will be compromised.

As cataloguers in my workplace, we all recognise the importance of access and consistency, but we know our catalogue is far from perfect, so we are working on cleaning up our data, thus helping to ensure successful discoverability for our users  

We currently have a couple of projects on the go to enhance the discoverability of our resources by ensuring that we have adequate/copious/excessive authorised subject headings in our records, and that all our name headings are consistent according to our chosen authority list. Our jury's still out on the value of the 505 and 520 fields (at least until we get an OPAC display we have more control over), but couple our enhancement work with cataloguers answering users’ questions when on frontline enquiry work, and you have a recipe for success, at least for the regular stuff – if you’ll pardon the expression!

Other collections

However, not all our collections are catalogued on our library management system, and therefore they don’t appear on our online catalogue. The institutional repository uses different software, but, as cataloguers are involved in helping to create entries, it is possible, to a certain extent, to ensure discoverability through naming conventions, use of consistent keywords etc., where possible using the same conventions that are used in our catalogue records which can help to make more things more easily discoverable. 

The other area where information discoverability can be enhanced is in our archive collection. Again, consistent naming conventions, keywords and classifications all help users to find the information they are seeking, and if these are consistent with records in our other systems then this can help to link disparate collections of resources and therefore information.

And that’s what we want to do! Help our users to access information held in our resources that will help them to achieve their degree, their postgraduate qualification, or keep up with developments in their chosen field.

As cataloguers, I get the feeling we do all this with little thanks and little recognition, from colleagues, of the skills, time and effort we put in. We may hide in the basement, and we may not shout out about our achievements, but our work is omnipresent.

Classification - a bit of a rant!

A book classified is a book lost … if no-one understands the classification scheme!

When I started at university one of the first big words I heard was “serendipity”. At the time my understanding was that the lecturer concerned was referring to the joy people experienced on browsing among the bookstacks and happening upon some exciting book they weren’t looking for but were keen to read, now that they'd come across it.

Today we could equally well apply this browsing to the [online] library catalogue. There are so many opportunities for users to happen upon something of interest, through almost any search of the catalogue – author, keyword, related search etc..

I went into librarianship because I wanted to help people, but was bothered by the sight of blood and the smell of hospitals, was not comfortable with the formality of teaching, was ill-prepared for a career in social work, but wanted to do more than work in a shop. I didn’t enter the profession because I loved books! For me, the excitement was always in tracking a book down - and not often about reading it - and seeing library users go away happy!

Do you need to understand Dewey (or whatever classification scheme the library uses) to know where to find your books? I would argue that you don’t. As a cataloguer, however, I do need to understand Dewey so I can assign your books with a number that suitably reflects the subject of the book, so that when you are looking for books on that subject you will be able to find them. And, yes, it would be nice if all the books on your subject and related subjects were on the shelves together, but this is virtually impossible to achieve, whatever classification schedule the library chooses to use. This is because in some way all subjects are related, either through their discipline, their subject, or in your own mind! This is perhaps where the internet has lead us to false expectations: Yes, if you are reading an article on the web about one thing, it will have links to articles on related topics, which you can easily navigate to and read, and then return from whence you came. That’s because computers are built to store and retrieve things in a particular way, which just isn’t possible with tens of thousands of physical items – in this case, books.

So, books are ordered on the shelves according to a specialised classification scheme. This could be a sequence of numbers, or letters, or a combination of both, and to the untrained eye, could be seen to be random. A classification scheme is designed with a couple of things in mind: It helps to a certain degree to collocate related subjects and it helps you to find the one book among the thousands on the subject you are interested in.

But, if books are hidden in some, seemingly, peculiar order on the shelves, how do you unlock the secret of that order? Well, the way in is through the OPAC; OPAC is your finding tool. If the library has it, it will be listed on OPAC and by typing in anything you already know about a specific book, or about a specific subject you can find the location of any book in the library. Library staff at the enquiry desks are always able to help you use OPAC and find what you are looking for.

That’s the easy bit! Once you’ve found your classification number, knowing how the books are arranged on the shelves and being able to find the one you want can be rather difficult, if not daunting. And that’s why we have library staff roving the floors, and who can be called upon to help you find books on the shelves. They are expert at it; this is their job!

We also provide leaflets aimed at explaining to you how to find things on the shelves – written by experts, with you in mind! However, when those experts question the choice of classification scheme, I do begin to despair …