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.

AM

• E-mail. (Enough said.)
• Load another file of MARC records from OCLC. French this time.
• Update Balanced Scorecard measures document.
• Update my acquisitions expenditures spreadsheet to deduct the cost of “found in library” titles.
• Drafted a proposal for UofT FIS practicum student placement.
• Started a student assistant on a new project.
• Reviewed call numbers assigned by acq staff (part of their cataloguing/classification training).

PM

• Vendor demo.
• Updated new title notifications for two departments.
• Sent info messages to Liaison Librarians and faculty.
• Ordered a couple of rush books.
• Heading home.

Later

• Still more e-mail. Will it ever end?
  

Sent to me by a blogging librarian colleague: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/.

Here’s a look at Monday, July 27.

AM

• 8:00AM…Back in the office after a couple of days off. Sort through the accumulated e-mail, moving things off into the appropriate folders, and leaving far too much to answer later…
• Load three files of MARC records from OCLC for foreign language book acquisitions.
• After several questions, go figure out what the three four giant boxes addressed to me contain. Discover they’re the hundred-odd Chinese titles requested by Religious Studies (and described in one file of said MARC records) shipped from OCLC. Shift them to the receiving room.
• 9:00AM: Off to Archives and Research Collections for my weekly shift on the desk. Usually my only cataloguing time for Res Coll out of the week.

PM

• Sort through some of my Gobi folders and create purchase lists for my acquisitions staff in an attempt to shift some of the outstanding requests from last fiscal (before filling them up with new requests from the current fiscal).
• 3:00-5:00: Meeting with Director, 21st Century Fluencies about assorted topics.
• “Home, James!”

Later PM

• Clear out the last few EBL short-term loan requests.
• Answer some of the e-mail left from the morning (or earlier…if you’re waiting to hear from me, my apologies…)

No, it’s not what you’re thinking…

PDA, Patron Driven Acquisitions (a.k.a. User Driven Acquisitions), was all the buzz in the collection development sessions at ALA again this year. Several very good sessions talked about libraries’ experiences using such things as on-demand e-books through the EBL short-term loan service or purchases from MyiLibrary. In the print book world, there was more discussion of using ILL requests as the basis for acquisitions and even some talk of using circulation study to see which books are moving and which aren’t.

That other bugaboo, outsourcing, was also on the program. A couple of interesting points were made on this topic (unfortunately, due to my sporadic note-taking I can’t properly attribute them, so if you said this, thank you!):

• UNLV found that books received through their approval plan have higher circulation than those selected by librarians for firm ordering [good to know, since I'm in the midst of developing approval plans...]
• Librarians [and presumably faculty as well] sometimes have perceptions of usage that don’t match actual usage shown in reporting [I suspect we've always know this, but have been less willing to accept it]
• Vendors can put things in front of librarians that we don’t always see, such as hot new topics or developing fields [makes sense...if our vendors saw a rush of sales in some new subject area, I'd like to know about it]

I’m finding it surprising that the shock value of some of this is still so high. It’s true that academic libraries have traditionally done acquisitions on the expert selector model and perceived our role as building collections for the ages. Indeed, what we’re finding as we look more closely is that many of our books have spent the ages untouched on a shelf. In a time of flat or declining materials budgets, is continuing to guess at what will be used really the best course?  If our users can tell us what they want, shouldn’t we be listening?

McMaster has been using a few PDA streams for the past few years, and they generally work well. EBL short-term loans have been heavily used, if not universally loved, at Mac. So much so that we had to pull them for a time and re-work our profile down to something manageable. Admittedly, the process of mediated loans is a little clunky (but necessary since we don’t have millions to throw at this) and e-books are, well, e-books–good for some things, not as good for others. Still, in the last three years or so, we’ve processed more than 6,000 loans and purchased some 600 titles. Clearly it’s filling a need, and is giving me a rich source of data for use in developing approval plans.

Mac has also been purchasing based on ILL requests for several years. We’ve kept it focused on current materials published in the last couple of years, though after the discussion at ALA, I’m wondering about opening it up more. We also look at whether the item being requested fits our collection policies for purchase, so we’re not throwing the gates open. (Though off the top of my head, I can only think of one instance when I said no. The book on how to pack a suitcase to fit a month’s worth of travel kit into a carryon was just too much of a stretch and went back to ILL.)

We haven’t done as much with circulation studies yet, but it’s something I would like to work on. Now if I can just find the time…

Summer is here. This is supposed to be the quiet time on campus, right? Hmm…

Well, quiet or not, I’m spending some time over the few months between terms doing a bit of research on monograph budget structures and allocation formulas. There are some interesting models in the literature. Adelphi University reported moving to a percentage-based budget that ties library allocations for a department to the university’s allocation to that department (Smith, 2008). Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, adopted a “cognate discipline” approach, grouping departments together (Paris, 2007). And Monash University in Australia described (some time ago, now) their practice of allocation to each of the branch libraries on their campuses rather than specific departments (Evans, 1996).

Some of the less traditional methods I’ve found in my reading so far came from the University of Hong Kong Libraries and Texas A&M. HKU adopted a modified zero-based budgeting approach in which deans were asked to justify increased spending for library resources in their area. Requests were vetted by a committee in the library (Chan, 2008). To me, this seemed like an awful lot of work for all concerned to distribute only 5% of the budget. Texas A&M opted to structure most of their monograph budget into five larger funds, down from more than 200 budget lines (and I thought my 60-odd funds were cumbersome…) (vanDuinkerken, 2008).

What’s been interesting is the diversity of approaches. The methods of structuring acquisitions budgets and allocating dollars (pounds, euros, what-have-you) among them are as varied as the libraries themselves. Indeed, I haven’t found any model that I would adopt wholesale, but find pieces in many of them that I like.

So what about your libraries? Does anyone have a great way of doing this that they’d like to share?

OCLC recently announced that they were beginning a pilot project to provide “Web-scale delivery and circulation, print and electronic acquisitions, and license management components to WorldCat Local, continuing the integration of library management services to create the Web-scale, cooperative library service.”

In other words, OCLC is going to build a web-scale ILS based on the WorldCat Local platform. The list of proposed features covers most of the basics, including print and e-resource acquisitions and management, circulation, and, of course, metadata/cataloguing (though from the academic library perspective, we also need reserves and recalls, which aren’t mentioned in the current plan). More from Andrew Pace here.

It’s a cool idea; I’ll be interested to see how this develops.

Yes, yes, I know. I’m behind again, and everyone else in the library blogosphere has commented on this and moved on. What’s a busy librarian to do?

If you’re one of the handful of people who haven’t read the Darien Statements yet, I encourage you to check them out. Admittedly, there are one or two things that I think are a bit of a stretch (e.g., “The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.” Um, OK. Maybe this is the go big or go home theory of libraries.). Overall, though, the authors do an admirable job of laying out a philosophy of libraries for the future.

What I really like about the Darien Statements is their positive outlook. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m sick to death of talking about all the things we’re NOT going to do–”we’re not going to catalogue”, “we’re not going to have collections”, “we’re not going to do in-person reference.” Bah. These are the same “we won’t be” statements I was hearing in library school ten years ago (and I stayed in the program anyway…not sure what that means). But guess what: we’re still doing all of them.

Are libraries changing? Absolutely. Is that change necessary? Definitely. Is it all doom and gloom? No. Libraries are in a period of very rapid evolution, and yes, there will be things that we stop doing. Does that really have to be our focus? As the Darien group put it, “Why we do things will not change, but how we do them will.” Let’s pick up the conversation from there.