OCLC Research has turned out a number of new reports that I’ve been catching up on reading over the last few days.

Taking Stock and Making Hay provides an overview of using collection assessment to guide resource allocation in archives. Probably most useful are the appendices, which identify and summarize several major assessment projects. I’ll be spending some time with these in more detail looking for tools and methods that we can adopt locally.

The introduction refers to statistics from a 1998 ARL survey of special collections, which found that most ARL members have significant backlogs of undescribed material.  Specifically, results there indicated that 15% of printed volumes, 27% of manuscripts, and 35% of audio-visual collections held by the 100 respondents were uncatalogued or unprocessed (depending on the type of material) at the time of the survey. Out of curiosity, I ran some quick numbers on Mac’s special collections books, and the result is (drumroll, please): we’re right there with everyone else. Currently we have just shy of 100,000 monograph items catalogued (98,522) and roughly 20,000 in our backlog. That’s a big number. We’ve made this a priority, including writing it into our strategic plan, but in years of tight budgets it becomes one of many priorities to be balanced.

A second interesting read was OhioLINK–OCLC Collection and Circulation Analysis Project 2011. It’s more an overview of how and why than detailed analysis (hopefully we can look forward to future publications as they analyze the data), but still a worthwhile read. OhioLINK spent several years working with OCLC Research on a consortium-wide study of circulation trends. This is an important distinction: the work is looking at item-level circulation data rather than simply the number of holdings or overlap across institutions. One of their key goals is using this data to help determine how many copies of books in various subject areas are truly needed across the consortium, freeing resources from buying duplicates for the purchase of more unique titles. The data, both collective and for each institution, is also available for study from the project webpage. It would be very nice (OCUL, are you listening?) to see the project replicated for other consortia. Aside from generating comparator data, it would be a useful step toward greater collaboration in our acquisition and management of print collections.

Back in the Fall, McMaster started using OCLC’s WorldCat Digital Gateway to harvest metadata from our institutional repository. OCLC first developed WCDG to work with ContentDM, but has expanded the service to harvest from any OAI-PMH compliant repository.

The Gateway process converts Dublin Core metadata from the harvested repository to MARC and provides some control over the mappings and how frequently harvests occur for various collections in the IR. For items new to the repository, a WorldCat record is created; for older items, the existing WorldCat record is updated to reflect any changes in the metadata. This was exactly what I was looking for: a way to integrate our IR content with other print and electronic resources, both for our own users and for researchers beyond McMaster, without a lot of manual record creation or editing. (It’s also free, so something to take full advantage of.)

After a quick look through the numbers and our Google Analytics on the IR, it appears to be having the desired impact. Our Digital Strategies Librarian and I hope to do a more detailed analysis of the results in the new year. In the meantime, a few thoughts.

Involve a cataloguer

Conversion from a less granular to a more granular metadata format is always a little dicey. The ability to change the mapping on the fly and see the results in preview before running a full sync is handy. Although the interface is designed so that no knowledge of MARC is required, I recommend having someone who understands MARC (and OCLC MARC in particular) look at the mappings in the MARC view. It’s not always obvious from the labeled display where things are going, and some of the coding (is this a text document that happens to be online or is it really a computer file) is readily apparent to a cataloguer in the MARC view. That may seem like an irrelevant distinction but in the age of faceted browsing and discovery layers, coding is what gets resources in the correct bucket. It took us a couple of iterations to get the mappings nailed down.

Editor wanted

While the MARC view is useful for seeing where Dublin Core elements are ending up, it would be even more useful as a true editor. It would have been quick and easy to edit the MARC tags to change a mapping rather than going through the process of turning a mapping off in one place and turning it on somewhere else. The ability to add constant notes or update coding directly in the MARC display would also be really nice. Again, it took several tries to get a constant data note to appear in the right place when I could have very quickly plunked it into the appropriate MARC field. I’d also like to see a way to split long fields after a set number of characters. Many of the summary fields for our digital theses get truncated, but there isn’t a specific character that we can use as a delimiter to chunk them up.

Make a date

Publication dates are imported from the repository metadata to the MARC publication data field (260 $c) but are not reflected in the OCLC-MARC fixed field Date1 element. We’re pulling the records down for loading to our local catalogue and while they go in just fine date-less, it meant that our Endeca-based OPAC couldn’t sort them into the proper year for browses or limits. Since we’re batching the records out of WorldCat using the Connexion cataloguing software anyway, I put together a Connexion macro that grabs the year from 260 $c and plugs it into Date1. It works well, but adds a step. Populating the date field as part of the initial conversion would be better.

Reporting back

Each time a collection in the repository is synced to WorldCat WCDG auto-generates a report available in an online view and for download in Excel and XML. This is great for keeping an eye on the process, making sure that scheduled syncs are happening when they should, and getting OCLC numbers for records created or updated. Additional reports that contained only the OCLC numbers in a plain-text format for easy batch-extracting or, better yet, a file of the MARC records themselves would be really handy.

Stay tuned

More details to come! If you’d like to have a look at the records created through the Gateway process, you can see them in our catalogue.

As is my wont, I’m late to the party commenting on the SkyRiver vs. OCLC battle. Chalk it up to a busier than usual summer; I read the complaint shortly after the lawsuit was filed, but haven’t gotten around to writing about it.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been wrestling with the budget, trying to pin things down before we really get into purchasing-mode. Every time I’ve bumped into that OCLC line, I’m reminded of OCLC’s role in my library and other library’s operations. Karen Schneider has posted two thoughtful commentaries (1, 2) on the suit, and I think she gets it right.

OCLC stumbled onto the “cloud” model 40 years before it became cool, and at least 30 before it became truly practical. Forty years ago, just building the infrastructure to support that network claimed the bulk of OCLC’s resources. Today, the internet solves the connection problem and inexpensive servers take care of the need to store and deliver 199 million records. Resources can, and should, go to doing new things.

While OCLC has to defend the integrity of WorldCat, in the past few years I’ve watched their focus increasingly shift from WorldCat as the product to products that leverage WorldCat. The web-scale ILS is just the latest in a chain that started with Open WorldCat nearly a decade ago. WorldCat continues to be open to Google indexing, and all those “Find in a Library” links scattered across the web depend on having a massive bibliographic database with even more massive library holdings information. I find pushing users from Google and the open web (where we know they’re starting anyway) back into our collections to be a good thing. But maybe that’s just me. WorldCat Local and the OCLC ILS are steps in tearing down silos between libraries and reducing duplicative work in our operations by pointing to a unified database of bibliographic records. If I’d had that opportunity when I had a full cataloguing staff I wouldn’t now be struggling to address decades worth of uncatalogued materials in our special collections unit.

But aye, there’s the rub: you need the massive database before you can build services around it. SkyRiver and III would like a free copy of the database delivered to their door (or at least to their servers). No one will, or can, prevent them from constructing a bibliographic database to compete with OCLC in the same way that WorldCat was built–one record at a time by lots of cataloguers in lots of libraries, by forging agreements with national libraries for copies of their records, and yes, in some cases through the acquisition and merger of other bibliographic utilities. I can understand wanting to skip that slow, painful building stage, but should III and SkyRiver get a free ride on 40 years of someone else’s work?

I’ve looked at that OCLC line in my budget and thought “what if,” but also quickly realized how integral OCLC services are to our operations. I have my grumbles with OCLC’s bundling of things and their opaque pricing models, but they’re hardly alone in that… Unlike some of our other content and service providers, though, OCLC has held the pricing flat for the past few years, a fact which helps me in these lean budget times. So yes, our OCLC membership goes on. But it is a membership, and we have a voice through our respective Regional Councils and the Board of Trustees. If we as members think OCLC is on the wrong course, is charging too much, or is just a big meanie, it’s up to us to do something about it.

Do blogs and book approval plans go together? At first glance they don’t seem like a natural pair, but I’m giving it a try.

McMaster has been without approval plans for the better part of a decade. Our first venture back into approvals started last year with a small profile for our Business library. Since going live, the plan has supplied about 200 books and valuable experience in making the process work.

Now we’re looking to expand the use of approval plans to cover a broader range of Social Science and Humanities subjects. I spent a lot of time last summer and fall combing through historical acquisition statistics, revised collection policies and program changes, and vendor “retro” reports. It was actually quite interesting to review our purchasing patterns and puzzle over why we might buy lots of books in one LC class range and almost nothing in the adjacent ones (and whether we should be buying in those, too…).

With a draft approval profile created, it was time to test. The folks at YBP worked their magic and set our plan running in “virtual” mode. This is a great way to refine the profile since we get results using live data but not books (YBP supplies our books shelf-ready–a.k.a., non-returnable).

Here’s where the blog comes in. I was casting about for an easy way to get the results out to our Liaison Librarians and collect their comments. Preferably one that didn’t involve a lot of e-mail going back and forth. What I finally came up with was creating a blog on our local WordPress site where I could post the new results each week. Posting is a simple copy and paste, all of the Liaisons have quick access to the results, and comments are easy to associate with the right batch of titles. The blog was also a handy place to stash the various parts of the profile, so there is always context for the results.

I’m curious to see how this particular blend of library operations with web 2.0 technology works out!

In my last post I mentioned that we were running a contest at McMaster to find ten students to help us refresh our Popular Reading collection. Over the last two weeks we visited Titles, our campus bookstore, and Bryan Prince Bookseller, a local independent bookstore that the Library regularly works with.

Let me jump immediately to the moral of my story: if we do this again, I’ll invite everyone who expresses any interest.

Things started off promisingly enough, with 50 or so entries in the first week and a few more trickling in after that. We ended up with around 60 entries in total. From that list I sent invitations to 25, expecting that there would be scheduling conflicts and such. Most I never heard back from. When it came time to shop, a grand total of four (yes, that’s four) actually showed up: two on each bookstore trip.

Timing is likely part of the poor showing. Running it earlier in the term (and before Reading Week) would probably have helped. We picked up some good titles, but I ended up doing as much or more selection as they did, which really wasn’t the goal. I was also the only male involved and being (somewhat) older than most of our students, wonder if we chose any titles that will interest a twentysomething guy. It’s a tough demographic to attract.

Still, good lessons for next time!

McMaster’s latest user-driven (aka patron-driven) acquisition activity is aimed at refreshing our Popular Reading collection. We’re running a contest to find ten students who want to go shopping with us. Two groups of five will venture out to local bookstores in search of new books that their fellow students will love. You can read the announcement here. I’ll let you know how it goes!

I’ve been reading the report prepared by R2 Consulting for the Library of Congress, Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace. I’m left wanting more. As Diane Hillmann notes in her commentary, it has a certain fascination as a snapshot in time. Which, really, is what they were commissioned to do. But I would like to have seen more discussion of moving forward.

I’ve never staked a claim in the “MARC must die” camp, but in the era of Web2.0, mashups, and massive reuse of data, MARC looks increasingly geriatric. Clinging to MARC isolates the cataloguing community as other metadata activities move to various flavors of XML. The report makes a passing mention of MARC crosswalks, but doesn’t seem to think there’s a future there. Maybe there isn’t, but attempting to keep MARC going for another 40 years isn’t the answer either. No mention is made of OCLC’s Next Generation Cataloging project. Whatever your opinion of the Big O (and let’s be honest, we all have at least one…), I think this is absolutely a step in the right direction. Getting our knowledge and experience, together with some understanding of the needs of libraries, into the metadata stream at the beginning rather than the end can be a benefit to everyone, as can moving to a common metadata format. If you haven’t seen it, Renee Register’s presentation from Midwinter 2009 is worth a look. The short version: crosswalking from publisher to library systems can be done successfully, and we have a lot to contribute.

That’s the long-term, but what about now? I don’t really buy into some of the poor LC tone. Yes, LC’s tech services budgets have been cut and their staffing reduced. Welcome to our world. Nor do I entirely buy the “if only you’d all stop leaning on us” argument. LC began creating the very reliance they’re now lamenting on the day they started selling printed cards. I’m sure it would be better for LC if they could charge what it costs to create rather than distribute the record. Being the Library of Congress, though, they might know a few people who can change the offending 1902 statute. The impact of that would not be trivial, but LC isn’t, in terms of their own mandate, obligated to provide free cataloguing for the rest of the world.

All of that said, I do think that we need to take a hard look at what we’re doing and ask if it’s the right thing. According to R2′s survey, 80% of libraries are still editing records for English-language monographs. There’s another level of questions in that statistic: chiefly, why? In some cases, the editing is necessary (Level 3 records, anyone?). In others, maybe not. Another question: what is being edited? Are we adding or fixing things that make a difference to access? Or, are we checking call numbers on our shelf-ready books and re-Cuttering in an effort to keep the shelflist pristine? If that’s the case, it’s time to let go…our users don’t care if “Adams” and “Adamson” aren’t in perfect order (and probably have no earthly idea how shelflisting works anyway).

At the same time, the survey results show backlogs growing in more than half of responding libraries, and growing in nearly every category among academics. I question R2′s inclusion of video and sound recordings as “mainstream” since they, like scores and other special formats, often demand more experience than is usually true with books. But again, there’s a whole stack of questions that need to be asked in order to really understand the backlog question. The implication seems to be that we’re all editing the same mainstream stuff. Maybe so. Maybe backlogs are growing because our workflows need to be rethought. Maybe they’re growing because we lack expertise in certain areas.

Enter the vendors… What can I say, “vendors” is such a large bucket that it’s difficult to draw too many conclusions. Used wisely, vendor services can be a great help. At McMaster, we’ve contracted with OCLC to handle our foreign language monographs. We get excellent records, fast service, and fully shelfready books. It works because we trust them to deliver a good product. Shelfready from our English-language vendors is good enough that we don’t do extensive checking, but is not without the occasional hiccup. I suspect when many of us in the cataloguing world hear “vendor” we equate it with the aforementioned Level 3 records. We shouldn’t. Vendors can be a tremendous help in areas where we lack knowledge or experience. And the costs generally aren’t outrageous, we’re just less accustomed to seeing them in that way.

But again, there’s a caveat. Vendors are not a magic bullet and the key is using them wisely, not blindly. For our part, we have to work with our vendors to build the sense of trust (and quality, if necessary) to make their services worthwhile. There’s little point in using a vendor if we second-guess everything they do. For the vendors: stop trying to own the records. We paid for them, either in hard currency or in time spent creating them (or both, if you consider OCLC membership fees). We have neither the time nor the inclination to police the use of records from our catalogues. Both sides need to take a step back and accept that the world has changed. We’re not quite to the level of radical trust yet, but maybe we can get there if we all work together.

Before anyone gets worried, let me reassure you that I haven’t sent my real estate-selling partner off to hang his shingle in front of the building (how would one do a market analysis of a library, I wonder).

While you can’t buy the building, thanks to the folks at Kirtas Technologies and OCLC working with us on our mass digitization program, you can buy more than 90,000 titles from McMaster University Library’s collection. The digitize on demand site for our collection pulls the pieces together: Kirtas populates the site and manages the sales and order processing (saves us worrying about credit cards and shipping), OCLC provides the metadata (see, cataloguing is beneficial), and we provide the books and the digitization.

The site has been up for a few weeks and we’re getting a steady stream of requests. There have been a few bumps: the record pull wasn’t filtered quite as much as it should have been (no, we really can’t digitize those microform versions, and I suspect EEBO would be cranky if we tried to re-sell their files), and we said good-bye to our scanner operator when he decided to go back to college. But, with a new operator in place and the workflow getting sorted out, we’re ready to start promoting this service and see if we can’t  boost our numbers.

So if you’re looking for that perfect Christmas gift (and, like me, you haven’t even thought of shopping yet), how about a copy of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, Charles Kingsley’s At Last a Christmas in the West Indies, or maybe  The Holy Time of Christmas Defended Against Non-Conformists and all Others its Prophaners and Opposers, published in 1676? Each copy printed just for you. They make great stocking stuffers!

For those who may be interested (or sufficiently bored), my latest story for McMaster University Library’s News Blog: “How a Book Gets on the Shelf – It All Starts With You.”

Ah, another day down…where does the week go?

Another some of this, some of that kind of day.

AM

• Try to weed through my inbox. How exactly do I get so much e-mail between 8pm and 8am?
• More EBL loan requests to process.
• Realize I haven’t sent our original cataloguing to OCLC in a while. Extract two months (!) worth of records from Horizon and batch them up to WorldCat.
• Process some recent book donations.

PM

• Work on records for the latest external (to the Library) collection being added to the catalogue, McMaster’s Centre for Leadership in Learning.
• Help my acq staff on a wrinkle with our Business approval plan. Am reminded that automation only makes things faster and/or easier when all the pieces actually work. Contact the vendor about needed changes.
• Continue reviewing the older open order reports. Decide which orders to cancel, which to reorder somewhere else, and which should be given a little more time to show up.
• Print some articles and reports to read over the weekend.
• Pack up and head home.

Well, that’s the end for me–Wednesday is my Friday this week. Tomorrow will be spent madly cleaning the house before the folks arrive for a few days. Of course, there will still be e-mail to keep up with (so much easier than coming back to 200 messages next week), but it will be nice to have a few days (mostly) away from the PC.