Posted by: Wade | April 12, 2008

Looking Beyond the Library

So, last week we finally finished a project that’s been underway since last summer. Definitely longer than I’d hoped, but it’s the first time we’ve tried this…

We’ve now added records to library catalogue for a collection of books held outside the McMaster library system. The first group to go live in this new venture is the Student Health Education Centre (SHEC), one of McMaster’s student organizations. Read the official announcement here.

Working from a spreadsheet listing basic bibliographic information and ISBNs and using the batch searching feature of OCLC Connexion, we loaded nearly 600 records into the catalogue for SHEC’s lending library. We’re not physically relocating the books to the Library; they’ll stay with the organization, which will be responsible for notifying us of any additions to or removals from the collection and taking care of their own circulation. Links in the public catalogue guide users to SHEC’s website for contact information, location, and opening hours. We’re working with a few other groups at the moment, and with some experience under our belts it shouldn’t take quite so long to get records for their collections loaded.

Why do this, you may be asking.

Most of the books found in SHEC’s collection are titles that the library doesn’t own and is unlikely to buy, so it’s filling a gap in the resources available to our users. It also gives the collection broader exposure, meaning users who didn’t know about SHEC beforehand can still find and use their resources. And, well, just because we should. The Library should be a hub for the information resources available on campus, not just those within its four walls.

Posted by: Wade | March 1, 2008

Promoting Reading

We have a great new website for the Popular Reading Collection at McMaster!

The page incorporates a nifty cover art browse feature, which we used to link visitors back to the catalogue record for details about the book and availability. We’ve also included a space for users to recommend books and to write reviews of their favorite (or least favorite) titles. Vivian Lewis, our AUL for Teaching, Learning, and Research, and I will be presenting on the Popular Reading collection at the CLA Annual Conference in May, so watch for more details to come.

Posted by: Wade | February 10, 2008

Future Cataloguers

Last week, McMaster welcomed a co-op student from the Library Techniques program at Mohawk College.

Nothing unusual about that, we routinely have several co-ops from the MLIS stream at Western. What’s different, though, is that our Mohawk student wanted to learn about cataloguing. We hear frequently about the lack of interest in cataloguing among library students, so it was nice to find one that is. She’ll be with us through the end of May, working with the cataloguers on a variety of different resources as well as spending some time with e-resources and acquisitions.

Welcome, Susan!

Posted by: Wade | January 13, 2008

Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control

LC has now released the final version of the Working Group’s report, so I suppose it’s fitting that I’m finally getting my thoughts on the draft posted. Some day I’ll be caught up. Probably when I’m retired…

Karen Schneider has described the report as a document “at war with itself.” I tend to agree with her that it’s a bit of the old, a bit of the new, and some ‘let’s wait and see,’ but I think that’s reflective of where cataloguing in general is at the moment. Certainly, I find myself firmly in the middle. I don’t think it’s sustainable (or necessary) for every library to check every record that comes into the catalogue. But I’m also not convinced that abandoning all authorities and controlled vocabulary and turning our catalogues into a Google-esque keyword free-for-all is the best way to serve our users.

So what’s to like about this report?

Spread the Work Around

Just accept it
Many of us in cataloguing management roles have already decided that the old paradigm of “LC records are good, everyone else’s records are suspect” is no longer applicable. We need to rely less on LC and trust each other more. The PCC libraries, to name just one example, produce great amounts of high quality cataloguing. If we all stopped proofing PCC cataloguing and just accepted it as accurate, how much time would we free up for areas that really need our attention?

Make collaboration easier
For those records that we do verify, make it easier to share the corrections or upgraded cataloguing with the whole community. OCLC has a major role to play here as our biggest bibliographic utility. Many of us, my own unit at McMaster included, are not Enhance libraries. We make corrections or updates when necessary in our local catalogue but sending them to OCLC requires a cumbersome correction form, often followed by verification. Care to guess how often we send those reports? Much as I would like us to contribute more, the process just takes too long.

Look outside the library
One of the report’s major recommendations is to capture and reuse as much bibliographic data as early in the process as possible. Specifically, they advocate getting data from publishers. I like it, but I also see potential problems. For this to survive in practice, we need to work with publishers to standardize data. Does that mean that we try to push them away from BISAC or BIC subject codes and into LCSH? No. It does potentially mean creating crosswalks between those thesauri so that resources can be collocated. It also means convincing them that supplying a record where, for example, the title data doesn’t match the actual resource really isn’t useful. Neither is having five or six (or even two) different forms of the creator’s name.

A roadblock I see here is that we’re already getting off on the wrong foot with this approach. Anyone who has followed the discussion of all the Encoding Level 3 records being dumped into WorldCat will need no further explanation. For those of you not familiar with this particular brouhaha, suffice it to say they generally make starting with a blank workform look attractive.

There is no “typical user”

Hallelujah! After seeing many a future of cataloguing/libraries report describe “the user’s” needs, I’m glad to see WoGroFuBiCo state explicitly that there is more than one category. “The User” in these reports seems always to be Jane Doe undergraduate for whom anything remotely relevant is good enough as long as it’s online. My own experience on our Reference desk is that this simply isn’t the case. Undergraduates often have very specific topics in mind and are even willing to use real books. And certainly faculty and graduate students have in-depth and specific research needs that libraries must be able to meet.

A few stumbles:

Impact of increased efficiency

The report postulates that “greater efficiencies will enable libraries to redirect effort from enhancing the cataloging of mainstream materials to other activities that contribute to bibliographic control.” Specifically, they cite more authority work and special collections cataloguing. Omitted is what seems to me another likely outcome–reductions in technical services staffing and resources. No, I’m not suggesting we go back to typing and filing cards in order to boost our numbers, but their read of the impact is definitely the optimistic one. Greater efficiencies in routine cataloguing won’t produce greater amounts of original cataloguing unless library leaders support that goal.

What to do with LCSH?

Yet again we’re tackling this one. The usual grumbles about LCSH are all here: it’s big (yes, it’s a large, multidisciplinary thesaurus); vocabulary often doesn’t match common usage (honest question: how many thesauri do completely match common terminology?); it takes time to apply (true enough); “novice users” don’t understand it (again, true enough, but how many novice users do LCSH searching and is this sufficient reason to take it away from expert users?).

What I find curious here is that the report seems to shy away from authority records after supporting them up to this point. Authority records are fine to disambiguate an author’s name but not to guide users from common terms to LCSH terms? And since we’re talking about less reliance on LC anyway, can’t the rest of us add the references necessary to accomplish this to authority records?

The desired outcome of making LCSH terminology “more current and consistent” is a good one. It assumes, though, that we will all retrospectively apply the changes to existing bibligraphic records. Failing to make retrospective changes will produce a catalogue that is anything but “current and consistent.” Indeed, the results of subject searching would be misleading as to the library’s resources if vocabulary changes are made without modifying older records or guiding users between terms via authority control.

And then there’s RDA. I confess, I haven’t read the RDA drafts in a while. Ultimately, my fear is that the division over RDA will result in less standardization of description, not more. After all, the JSC can write it but can’t compel anyone to use it. Here’s hoping that further discussion will produce a standard we can accept, if not one that we love.

Posted by: Wade | December 15, 2007

Long, Long Ago

So, it’s been two months since I’ve posted anything. I didn’t really intend to be silent all this time, and it’s not for lack of things going on:

Books are here!
We’re in the busiest time of the year, and the New Books shelves are full again! I’m always happy to see the next shipment of books arrive. Both of our major vendors are now delivering pre-processed books, with our barcodes, property stickers, and security strips attached. There’s still a kink we’re trying to work out, and have had to make some inconvenient workflow changes to get around it for now, but overall it’s been very successful.

In the catalogue
We’ve made great progress on a collection of books and pamphlets documenting the Spanish Civil War held by the Division of Archives and Research Collections. The current cataloguing has been sorted and relocated, and we’re trying to keep focused on those books that can benefit from a cataloguer’s attention. We’re getting the gov pubs sorted out, too. A portion of them are still being CODOCed and need to be separated from the LCC cataloguing.

I’ve also recently signed us up for OCLC’s Bibliographic Notification Service. BNS provides files containing records with our holdings attached that have been updated in OCLC. I like the idea of BNS–that we’re putting our time toward improvement by loading fuller or corrected records into the catalogue. We’ve only received a couple of files, though, and I’m still evaluating what we’re getting, how much work it will be, and if it’s worth continuing. One nice thing is the cost: free with our regular OCLC subscription.

Amazon Associates
The Amazon Associates links in the catalogue continue to be heavily used and we’ve just received our first giftcard from the program (which I need to spend).

Popular Reading
I’m working with Vivian Lewis, our AUL for Teaching, Learning, and Research, on a presentation for the 2008 CLA conference about our new popular reading collection. We’ve been looking at circulation statistics for these books, and the amount of use they’re getting is astounding. Watch for new books to be added in the new year.

I have a lovely two weeks off around the holidays, during which I hope to get some reading (and posting?) done. Wish me luck.

Posted by: Wade | October 14, 2007

LibraryThing at the Library

I’ve finally gotten around to reading John Wenzler’s short article on LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL).

The idea of adding tagging to our catalogue has come up before, but we’ve not yet acted on it. That may, in part, be because prior to LibraryThing for Libraries, it was largely do-it-yourself. (Which can be quite cool–see Ann Arbor District Library’s catalogue–but also takes time.) LTFL simplifies that to uploading a list of ISBNs and configuring and installing a LibraryThing widget for your catalogue. LTFL also stores the user-applied tags outside of the catalogue, which makes me happy (I am a cataloguer, after all…) and feeds up other titles from the library’s collection that the user might like.

I had a look at the two examples Wenzler talks about, Danbury Public Library and San Francisco State University. Both incorporate the LibraryThing tags pretty seamlessly, and I found elements of both that I liked. Danbury Public has the LT tags appear on the item display provided when you click on a title, which I preferred. SFSU’s catalogue puts them on a second-layer Details tab that the user has to click into.

Both catalogues incorporate the usual growing and shrinking font sizes to indicate frequency of tag use. To be honest, I found this distracting, though less so in the SFSU catalogue. I’m not sure if this is just a difference in page layout or if the relative font sizes are different between the two. Would be interesting to know. I also wonder how users would respond if all the tags were the same size.

Posted by: Wade | September 9, 2007

Amazon, The First Month

For what is perhaps the slowest month on campus (classes at Mac just started on September 6), we had promising results with our Amazon links.

The Amazon.com links that we added at the beginning of the month were clicked 204 times by 130 unique visitors. Near the end of the month, we also added links to Amazon.ca. These were active for less than two weeks in August, and still generated 86 clickthroughs by 59 unique users. Overall, not a bad beginning, and the numbers for the first week of September are encouraging.

We’ve also heard from a faculty member that they appreciated the ability to easily reach the book reviews, sample chapters, and other evaluative content available from Amazon but not in the catalogue. Students are likely using the links this way as well, but to my knowledge we’ve had no direct feedback from them yet. I’d love to hear what they think, though!

Posted by: Wade | August 26, 2007

Amazon Update

On Friday, we made a change to our Amazon links in the catalogue.

Responding to feedback from members of the McMaster community, links to Amazon.ca are now available alongside the existing Amazon.com buttons. These links provide a Canadian alternative to Amazon.com for those who desire it and give our users another option when they’re choosing how to access the Library’s holdings.

Posted by: Wade | August 11, 2007

Train the Trainer

I learned last week that I’ve been selected as a trainer for a new Library of Congress Cataloger’s Learning Workshop. The new course will teach the basics of LCC. I’m off to Washington at the end of October for a day of instructor training. A colleague from the University of Western Ontario Libraries was also selected as a Canadian trainer.

Posted by: Wade | August 11, 2007

Associating with Amazon

Jeff Trzeciak, our UL at McMaster, talks in his blog about our decision to join the Amazon Associates program. Associates provide links from their website to specific products or categories of products on the Amazon site.

At McMaster, we’re linking from our catalogue. When a user clicks on a title in a search results list, they see a detailed information screen. We’ve inserted the Amazon link into this window as a button. Clicking the button opens a new browser window (preserving their original search results) showing the Amazon information page for that book. Associates earn a small commission from Amazon for each sale made through their links, which we will put back into our book budget.

I had a hand in getting this started (and feel a certain urge to duck as I say that), so I’m keen to see if our users take to it. We’ve been live less than 24 hours and are already seeing some activity. I’m hopeful that this will be viewed as positive addition to our services.

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