Update and plan

Well, I took a week off last week from my internship because Ralph was on vacation. I probably should have spent more time doing some literature abstracts, but it didn't happen. My cataloging prowess has increased, however, due to some inadvertent mistakes I made doing catalog maintenance two weeks ago. It all started when OCLC added a death date to the name authority record for Nino Rota, an Italian composer whose most notable work comes in the realm of film music. He did the score for The Godfather and a bunch of Frederico Fellini films. Anyway, he's dead, and the good people at OCLC updated the name authority record and all his name/title records, adding that death date. Well, our catalog didn't have these updated records, so I had the joy of updating them. This is more work than I realized, and became even more work after I learned that I had made a slight error in updating both the authority and bibliographic files.

It turns out I forgot to include a period at the end of the {100} and {700} name/title entries on the bib records because while a person is alive and has a birth date in the NAR, the dash at the end of the string of text requires that one leave off the period. Then, on the authority files, I forgot that rather than simply updating the name on each of the name/title records in our local ILS, I should have matched and loaded the updated name/title records from OCLC. Ralph got an email from the database managers in the main library on the day after I "fixed" Nino Rota, asking if I worked for the music library, and why I had thoroughly screwed up. Perhaps I exaggerate here, but I was certainly a little embarrassed. 128 updates later, however, and Nino Rota is fixed and ready to live out the rest of eternity in our ILS, death date updated on every record we have for him.

Unfortunately, I've gotten a little behind in my hours for this internship. I have 53 more hours to go, and lots of work still to do. I think I can do it before I go on vacation in mid August, so we'll shoot for that and hope for the best. I still have four or five literature abstracts to do, but those shouldn't be too terribly difficult.

Update: work and workshop

I didn't write a posting last week, but rest assured, I've been busy. Last week Ralph Papakhian and Sue Stancu hosted a cataloging workshop for music scores and sound recordings here at the music library. About 10 Librarians from all over the U.S. (and one from Canada) came to Bloomington to learn from the best. I was able to sit in on some of their sessions, eat some of the catered goodies brought in for the event, and solidify some of the more esoteric principles of cataloging. Particularly helpful were the sessions on formulation of title proper, uniform titles, and subject headings with free-floating subdivisions. It is in these areas in particular that music cataloging is so challenging.

I worked independently last week because Ralph was busy with the workshop. I actually got through a lot of scores, but now must wait to make sure I did them right before doing the final steps of bringing them into the local ILS, assigning a local call number, and preparing bindery instructions for them. One of the most challenging of these scores was a photocopy of a holograph by Motoyuki Takahashi, for which there was no record in OCLC. I did some original cataloging, creating not only a bibliographic record for the score, but also a name authority record for Takahashi, and a name-title authority record for the work. That was fun.

I've been working on a stack of books that has been on my desk since I started the internship, but with the work by Takahashi, I finished the pile. I tried to use an old list showing the items in our Frontlog (i.e. backlog that circulates) receiving the most use, but the items on the list receiving the most use were no longer in the Frontlog, having been cataloged sometime between now and the last time that list was made. So, I was able to arbitrarily choose some scores from the huge Frontlog. That was really fun; I chose some items that will give me experiences with facsimile editions, collected works items, non-roman scripts, technical manuals on music playing, some Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Stockhausen, and other interesting things. Ralph is also having me catalog some student doctoral and master's degree musical works. The second half of my internship should be full of good learning experiences.

Literature abstract: M. Charbonneau (2006), A White Paper on the Future of Cataloging at Indiana University.

My advisor sent this document to me, recommending that I take a look at what some of the catalogers at Indiana University identified as future trends in the cataloging world. Whereas none of their observations and conclusions surprised me, the general sense I took from their comments was that, as with other library jobs, the profession is in a state of flux, where current professional practices and the demands/needs of the library user may be diverging just at a time when budgets are shrinking and the workforce is aging. While one may argue that this has always been the case in academic libraries, the capabilities of technology and the changing research behaviors of students, scholars, and faculty are presenting new challenges and opportunities for catalogers.

As library budgets shrink and as new formats for information products and services abound, the task group writing the white paper found that the library will have to rely on the work of outside vendors to supply metadata that was once controlled by employees at individual institutions. They write:

Metadata in non-MARC formats from vendors, special collections librarians, and other types of cultural heritage institutions will increasingly be used to populate fields in MARC records rather than being entered locally at every institution... Better technological support for the cataloging process will assist catalogers in removing redundancies among and within institutions, allowing cataloging professionals to spend more time performing expert tasks.

These expert tasks include cataloging of uniquely-held items in special collections, but also in training to understand and use non-MARC metadata formats. I see this as an especially important aspect of the future of cataloging, because although the revision of AACR2 (called Resource Description and Access, or RDA) is coming, and promises to better accomodate digital resources, some resources will inevitably be best served using other metadata formats.

Finally, I was pleased to see that the paper mentioned some of the more innovative ways to easily enhance a catalog's bibliographic records through the inclusion of reviews, detailed contents notes (incl. tables of contents), and best of all, user-contributed "tagging" of resources. This last one has been effectively implemented on many of the new Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us in what amounts to voluntary subject heading assignment. While I don't really see this type of feature completely replacing the need for librarians who may assign controlled vocabulary subject headings, as a suplemental feature that easily satisfies most users, this could have a powerful effect on the way students especially use the library catalog. With a little control over some aspects of the bibliographic record, it is conceivable that students feel a sense of collective ownership of the catalog and responsibility toward fellow students to share knowledge by helping others access and retreive information resources. We'll never know unless we try it out, however. It remains to be seen just how deeply cataloging will be affected at Indiana University as a result of the observations in this white paper.