Culture clash

I just had the opportunity to attend Open Repositories 2007 back to back with ALA Midwinter. This was a very interesting juxtaposition, but it illustrated with alarming clarity the fundamental problems facing the library profession in general and cataloging in particular.

Since I am now the Boss Lady of Cataloging, this trip to ALA involved more attention than usual to cataloging-related programs. Two that particularly stood out were the Electronic Resources Interest Group discussion forum on RDA (the set of content rules that will be the eventual successor to AACR2) and the ALCTS Forum on the Future of Cataloging.

The path to RDA certainly seems to be an arduous one. The framers are taking a lot of criticism from the core audience (catalogers) for altering long-standing content rules for no particularly compelling reason. The digital library community finds the new rules so print- and MARC-centric that they don’t have much utility beyond the traditional catalog. My principal complaint about RDA is that it is so mind-bogglingly complex [cough FRBR! cough] that by the time it is actually published it’ll be 10 years out of date. Altogether, this is a terrible outcome, because the existing cataloging rules create some big problems for modern catalogs that a new set of content rules could solve and the digital library environment desperately needs rules that could be adopted in a straightforward way. I wish RDA had been built as a crisp, pragmatic set of rules that anyone could follow, with modular additions of more complex rules by and for the specialized communities of practice that need them. This, I think, would have been more agile in the short term and more sustainable in the long term than the behemoth that is presently taking shape.

The ALCTS Forum on the Future of Cataloging was as sobering as I anticipated. This is not a group that gets excited about technology; in the packed ballroom I saw two laptops. Casey Bisson’s segment about making our catalogs compatible with users’ preferred tools was great, and kudos to the organizers for inviting him, but he followed another speaker whose message was “Don’t worry so much about digital stuff, because lots of users would rather use print. Which by the way we should keep around in case the power goes out” [mad strategerist rends garments in despair].

Open Repositories was sure a sight for sore eyes. It was exciting to see creative people solving the biggest problems with open source repository technologies, namely that they are clunky and demanding to configure and use. Both Fez (Fedora) and Manakin (dSpace) are nifty web interfaces that dramatically extend the power and versatility of these systems, and it’s great to see these tools evolve and mature.

This was a technology conference and yes, there were laptops aplenty in the audience, but the most striking difference between this conference and ALA was cultural, not technological. The open source community has a palpable aura of confidence and a problem-solving mentality. If you have something to add to the solution you can be part of the community, and ambition and creativity are noticed and admired. This is a pretty dramatic contrast with traditional library conferences, where technology is largely regarded with suspicion and a whole caste of volunteer bureaucrats seems to exist to enforce arcane procedures and haze newcomers. I’m on the fringe of that bureaucracy and I try to use my powers for good, but come this fall I’m going to see what’s being offered in the department of computer science.

Planning to plan

Our e-only subscriptions for 2006 are starting to trickle through, so quite a bit of random cataloging popped up in addition to what was held over from last week. I anticipate the first quarter of 2006 will have a lot of these kinds of changes.One of my major goals for this year is to get the journals back onto a systematic review schedule. So many of our journals are e-only now, and we can’t afford to have access lag behind the coverage.

I finally got the ball rolling on redesigning the e-resource list. The existing list leaves much to be desired on both the front end and the back end, and we want the new version to play nice with our subject blogs. This will be the first step of a much more sweeping redesign. Meanwhile, I haven’t updated site metadata for ages. User testing starts next month, so I need to get descriptions and keywords up by then.

I’m also responsible for leading the preservation metadata recommendation for the Texas Digital Library, so I’m starting to research that. Experts agree: preservation metadata is hard. It’s impossible to know how much information to gather, and it sounds like a lot of digital projects are starting with a comprehensive schema and then discovering that they can’t keep it up. I haven’t dared to look at the PREMIS data dictionary yet…

This week involved a lot of procedural discussion about the strategic planning process. The working calendar is up, the announcement of department meetings will be ready to go out first thing next week, and questions for the test group are up on the project site for discussion. Cataloging has agreed to be the test group for the facilitated meetings, so we’ll see how those questions go. I’ll feel a lot better about this process once we move past all the procedure and start working on the recommendations. I’m open to surprises and it’s always good to have hard data to fall back on, but I don’t think we’re going to hear anything too unexpected in our series of facilitated meetings.

Happy New Year!

This week was spent entirely on cataloging, and we have caught up with our 2005 backlog at long last. My new assistant is awesome and is ready to catalog without my systematic review. Over the next year I’d like to ease most of the cataloging over to her so I can concentrate on IR development and other work.