Forward Into the Past

Now that I’ve had a few days to let the MLA conference sink in I’ve come to a troublesome conclusion, the cataloging community is being held back.  Maybe this is just because I’m a Gen X/Gen Y cusper who tends to be impatient with the lack of progress, but I think we really have a problem.

So, on Thursday I attended two presentation that are really at fault for my pessimism.  First there was the “next generation” cataloging and metadata creation pilot (the quotes are from the program, not from me.  This was about an OCLC project based around the central premise that MARC data lacks relevance to many outside the library community, in this instance publishers specifically.  Good so far.

However, OCLC solution to the problem is to find ways to make MARC interact better with other systems.  In one sense this is OK, finally acknowledging that we’re not going to convince anyone else to do things are way so we should find a way to compromise.  But there still seems to me to be a sense that we don’t get why MARC is unimportant to the rest of the world, and that maybe if we keep emphasing it people will eventually get with the program.  Sorry, that’s not going to happen.

The Getting Ready for RDA presentation left me with many of the same thoughts.  Now I’m hardly the first to get on the RDA has gone horribly wrong bandwagon, but this presentation really put things into a new perspective on me.  Now RDA is meants to be a dramatic update of AACR2, so different in nature that the name had to be changed to illustrate it as being an entirely new standard.

So what is so revolutionary about this.  It’s based on FRBR, yet rooted so strongly in MARC that we’re adding new fields to the poorly aging standard (one of which, the 337 for media type, the designers already feel will prove to be redundant).

RDA is squarely rooted in IFLA’s international principles, such as the universal principle of maintaining standards and consistency.  Which doesn’t explain why the infamous rule of 3 will now be considered optional.

RDA will be geared toward the digital realm, mainly because it will force users to purchase access to the manual as an annual subscription.  The manual will have many features (the presentation I saw wasted two slides to illustrate that it will include scroll bars), or so the designers hope as nothing is finalized yet.  Similarly nothing will happen with RDA until the ILS vendors get on board, and incidentally those conversations have not occured yet.

Did I mention this is meant to launch by the end of the year?  I am not feeling full of hope.

MLA Day Three

I’m back for a second day of conference blogging fun.  Once again I’ll be posting updates here throughout the day.

Community Content On LibraryThing

“Next Generation” Cataloging and Metadata Creation Pilot

Getting Ready for RDA: What You Need to Know

Genre Blocks: The Short Story

“Us” vs. “They”

Heidi Hoerman’s back at her blog for a week and she’s already stumbled right into some controversy.  Well done.  Yesterday she wrote a post on the openness of bibliographic data, which followed up on a great piece of RDA criticism from Diane Hillmann.  Well in the comments someone went out and accused Hillmann of wishing “to destroy cataloging”.  I haven’t seen that level of vitriol in the field since the OCLC discussions on Autocat caused all the participants with worthwhile things to say to boycot the mailing list entirely.

So of course Hoerman had to issue a rebuttal, a wonderful read.

The Aftermath

Wow!  This was a good day.  My workshop went amazingly well and the responses I received for it were more than I possibly could have hoped for.  Huge thanks must go out to Janet Eckert and WMRLS who organized everything and served as the most gracious hosts imaginable.  And the attendees were just as wonderful, everyone seemed engaged, there was a good amount of participation (that I hope will continue online), and they let me rant a bit on copyright, RDA, and the new OCLC records policy.  

And I even got to show off my favorite website of the week, which had nothing to do with anything, goingtorain.com (Thanks Jason).  Sadly the answer we got from it was yes, and that prediction proved accurate.  But even the rain (ok snow while driving back over the mountain), couldn’t bum me out today.  Because I have a handfull of feedback forms that almost uniformly say the one improvement that could be made to the workshop, was to add more time to it.  And in the positive column I got some of the best praise possible, that it was actually practical and useful.

And to top it all off, lunch at the Black Sheep, home of the greatest cookie I know, the Repulican National Convention cookie (full of fruit and nuts).  They started making these back in ’04, they’re basically giant macaroons filled with whatever nuts, fruit, and bits of chocolate they had left over in the kitchen from all their other baked goods.  If you’re ever in Amherst you must stop in, the baguettes are amazing too.

A Few More Links

A complete transcript has gone up for Pamela Samuelson’s keynot address at Berkeley’s Free Culture Conference (via BoingBoing).  This is an amazing piece on the faults in current copyright law, why it will eventually be forced to change, and how to go about making those changes.  Read it! (yes I give homework snow).

Oh and after a series of delays the full draft of RDA has finally been released.  But I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (which would be my homework).  Expect more on this later.

RDA MIA

There’s been a lot of talk on Autocat this week regarding the absence of RDA’s first full draft.  It was originally supposed to be released last week.  Now the rumor mill is saying it’ll be out on Halloween, the irony of which has not passed anyone by, especially not after Heidi Hoerman’s presentation.  Something has gone horribly wrong.

Reaching our Limits

There are some days when I truly despair for how far behind library catalogs are from the rest of the world.  At work yesterday one of my colleagues was attempting to compile a list of our new DVDs for our patrons and was unable to pull out a single piece of useful from the system besides the titles.  She wanted to list the directors of each film, which couldn’t be done.  She also wanted the year each film was released in cases where there were multiple adaptations, couldn’t be done.

The sad thing is that some of that information was indeed in the records, just not in a useful way.  Anyone who has any role in the production of a film can be listed in a record if the cataloger felt so inclined at the time, but their roles are never assigned and it’s not considered essential information so it only appears sporadically.  

Which officially makes our catalogs less powerful than the IMDB, Google, and the spreadsheet I cobbled together in excel for my own collection.  And don’t think that dvd’s are a unique example, this is par for the course.  Using a catalog try to find comics written but not drawn by Frank Miller, novels written by the actual V.C. Andrews, or a collection containing the Raven by Edgar Allen Poe.

These are all useful, fairly everyday searches that are impossible to conduct using the catalog alone.  And we these are pieces of software we’re paying small ransoms for, which are all the while becoming more and more obsolete.  And to make maters worse, we can accept a large amount of the blame for this ourselves.  While we’re debating the practicalities of FRBR and RDA and generally aren’t getting anywhere with a great deal of speed LibraryThing is merrily marching on with less than a dozen people on staff and have been implementing exactly these sorts of things monthly.

Why can’t we do the same with the resources that come from the rest of the profession?