Tag Archives: Library of Congress

Comparing the Library of Congress to Wal-Mart

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Surely the news from last week about some Congressmen unfavorably comparing the Library of Congress to the likes of Wal-Mart and UPS was one of the stupidest things I have ever read. I was genuinely shocked by the level of ignorance and, well, stupidity…shown by Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.), when they made statements like the following:

“You might be well advised to consult with Wal-Mart or Target who track inventory every day.”

and

“If UPS can track millions of items a day and not have a 10 percent loss, why can’t you?”

I mean, are these people for real???? Here is a link to an excellent post by Matt Raymond at the Library of Congress that thoroughly and completely exposes the whole tempest-in-a-teapot for the farce that it was: http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=207.

In that same blog post there is discussion about the current ALA president, James Rettig, and his comments to Congress about what he sees as major deficiencies with recent changes in cataloging and so forth. Here is part of what he stated that the Library of Congress needed to do:

“…require the Library of Congress to consult broadly and meaningfully with the library community, including organizations central to bibliographic control, regarding all future decisions to substantively modify the character and quantity of bibliographic records”

Good grief. What on earth does he think LC has been doing? And has always done?! I can (barely) grasp that Congressmen might be ignorant but for someone at the highest levels of librarianship in this country to make such dumb statements is, in my opinion, inexcusable. Even worse to my mind was that many of my librarian colleagues cheered him on. It’s yet another reason I am so thankful that I no longer belong to the American Library Association (as if I needed any more reasons).

Some crystal ball reflections

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Recently my mentee at UIUC GSLIS asked me to look into my crystal ball and articulate some thoughts about what lies in store for technical services librarianship. What follows is my response. I publish this here because although my points aren’t polished and well-defined, what I wrote to my mentee expresses some of what I personally think about library-related topics that are popular right now.

Where do I start?! Those who work in tech. svcs. are in need, more than ever, of a management mindset. Not necessarily management responsibilities, but a management mindset. By this I mean that we need to understand the broader pressures and trends that managers, especially upper-level managers, have to cope with and prepare for. We can no longer be (if we ever were) narrowly focused on, say, cataloging of print books and only print books. This luxury only exists in a handful of really large or special libraries. We need to be very aware of user-oriented trends such as the whole “social web” or Web 2.0 discussion, and how that might alter user expectations of what we provide to them in terms of access paths to information.

In terms of concerns and anxieties, well…I am reminded of a quote I always see in the signature of emails written by a friend of mine: “Delete: Bathwater. Undelete: Baby.” This causes a smile to come to me every time I see it. Put simply, I worry that in the rush toward new technologies, new ways of interacting with and meeting the needs of users, too many of my colleagues find it easy to forget or ignore what is in the past. In many ways I do believe the Bible verse that states something like this: “There is nothing new under the sun.” I believe this has application in libraries. We are not to be bound (pardon the small pun) by the past, necessarily, but we at least need to acknowledge a.) that there is a past and b.) understand at least some of that past to put the present and future into a right perspective. I’ve said this to people over and over again and I’ll repeat it here as an example of this point. About 10 years ago, when I was new to the profession, one of the really hot topics was outsourcing of technical services work. People were either up in arms against this trend or actively applauding it as revolutionary and innovative. Truth is, it was neither. Outsourcing has existed for a very long time in libraries and one big example of this is in the realm of shared cataloging. The Library of Congress distributed its cataloging records on 3×5 cards to other libraries throughout the U.S. and (maybe) the world, as long ago as the early 1900s. That is outsourcing!

Particularly in this era of the “social web” I am worried by so many librarians who are leading “the revolution” and proclaiming how wonderful and how great everything is that relates to blogs, wikis, instant messaging, etc. Those things ARE great but please, folks, get some perspective on them! Understand that libraries have ALWAYS striven to be social and interactive and patron-oriented. The way some of the library technorati talk these days, you’d think that libraries have been forbidding prisons until the social web came about. That’s ridiculous. Most of what is new is actually evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Don’t get me wrong: I am heartily in favor of trying new things, of experimenting, of innovating, etc. My wife calls me a technogeek and I guess that’s an accurate made-up word. My problem is just that new developments need to be understood and perceived through the lens of historical perspective.

A discussion with Karen Calhoun

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Tomorrow during class, Karen Calhoun, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services at Cornell, will be a guest to discuss the report she authored for the Library of Congress, entitled “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools.” I am really thankful that Karen so graciously agreed to meet online with my students and others from the UIUC GSLIS community and this final class session is one I have been anticipating with excitement for a long time. Karen’s report was part of required reading for class and the themes and issues it contains have cropped up time and again throughout this entire semester. I remember, for instance, with what passion the UIUC technical services librarians who met with the class on the first day discussed the report and its implications. This made a big impression on the class.

I have no idea how many people will tune in to join the online discussion but I suspect it will be quite a few, perhaps as many as 40 or 50 people. The report and Karen’s visit to the class tomorrow have generated a lot of interest among other faculty in the school as well as from other parts of the extended GSLIS community. Mark Lindner will do his sterling job as usual in terms of broadcasting the session and I know that he, too, is really looking forward to it.

Start of class

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Last week I met face-to-face with the students who signed up for LIS578LE: Technical Services Functions at UIUC GSLIS. Overall it was a great time, including an informative meeting with librarians and staff who work in technical services areas at the Main Library at UIUC, followed by a guided tour. This invariably serves to put some immediate context to the topics covered in the course and all of the students enjoyed it a lot. Many remarked on the energy and passion for their jobs that our hosts at UIUC demonstrated. One student described his impression of their work at UIUC as “drinking from the fire hose.” I thought that was a pretty apt description :-) A major focus for discussion during the visit and tour was Karen Calhoun’s recently released report on rethinking the role of the OPAC, commissioned by the Library of Congress. This is required reading for the course section on cataloging (a few weeks away yet) and we will discuss it more in depth at that time, but the basic themes contained in the report, and debated by the students and the UIUC librarians and staff, are ones about which it is hard to remain neutral.

There are 22 people in the class and as Mark Lindner remarked on his blog, this has the makings of an excellent group, with varied backgrounds and interests. (By the way, it was great to finally meet Mark in person! A great guy, and one whom I am pleased to work with.) Several students in the class work in public libraries; one works in a school library. As usual there are other students who have no library (let alone technical services) experience, and then there are those who have worked for several years in this area already. All of them bring valuable insights to class discussions.

This year I departed from the norm by having the class meet for part of a second day (usually one day is all we get; the rest of the semester is conducted entirely online). The main focus of this portion of the time together was on discussion about the tour and visit with UIUC technical services folks, followed by a crash course in setting up blogs and the class wiki. There may be some who found this new stuff a bit overwhelming, and that is to be expected. However I tried to point out the importance of getting involved, personally, in investigating these new forms of communication and collaboration. GSLIS has a technology platform for conducting online courses that has stood the test of time — 10 years, to be exact — very well, but there are many aspects that need to be updated. The tech support folks are wonderful, incredible people. They already have begun investigating and testing a new platform for conducting classes, called Moodle (it’s open source to boot). Two of the LEEP courses this summer are using this new platform, which contains built-in support for wikis, blogging capabilities, RSS, etc. For the technical services course I teach, I have had to go outside of the bounds of the LEEP technology to integrate blogs. I chose WordPress.com as the best overall platform for a balance of ease of setup and use as well as a rich set of features (and of course, it is free). A general class blog is now operational and most students have successfully set up individual blogs as well. One of the main assignments of this course is what I’ve termed a reflective journal. It struck me that this assignment would make a perfect match with blogging technology, and it would have the secondary benefit of helping to generate and sustain conversations about themes in the course in ways that a generic bulletin board setup could not. This is all somewhat experimental of course, and we’ll see how people take to the new stuff. So far, I am really pleased.

Oh, one other new tool that I am excited about in terms of teaching this course is the new ability I have to do application sharing via another open source software called Web Huddle. This will make introducing students to ERMS, for instance, much more fruitful than, say, a PowerPoint presentation.

Now I’ve got to prepare more for tomorrow’s first online “live” session, on the topic of acquisitions and collection development. Unfortunately I have had serious problems with connecting to the GSLIS server from my workplace, such that I am forced to conduct tomorrow’s session from home, where there isn’t aren’t such tight restrictions on network traffic!

ONIX for Serials and MARC21 for Holdings

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2006-05: Changes to Holdings data fields to accommodate ONIX for Serials in the MARC 21 Holdings Format (Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress)

Just came across an announcement of proposals for changes to MARC that will be discussed by MARBI (Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee) at ALA Midwinter. One proposal, referenced above, is of particular interest to serialists because it suggests a means to add ONIX for Serials information, specifically for two message types, Serials Release Notice and Serials Online Holdings, into the MARC Holdings record. This should be interesting…

Library of Congress goes Unicode

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Within the last month or so, the Library of Congress‘s online catalog received an upgrade that allows users to view and search for records using non-Roman (Unicode) characters in Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Persian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. See more information about it on their What’s New for the online catalog help pages. I think this is a big step forward for users and libraries who rely upon LC. For one thing, as far as I know, LC’s is the largest library catalog (for a single library) in the world; and it may also be correct to say that LC produces more cataloging records each year than just about any other library. People all over the world use this resource every day. (Full disclaimer: I happen to work for the vendor that provides LC’s online catalog software, Endeavor Information Systems, Inc.)

E-Archiving tools the next big thing? [Updated]

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Some recent developments and announcements make me think that e-archiving solutions may be the next big thing in the world of information technology and libraries. Certainly, things are heating up in this area. Several weeks ago the National Archives of the U.S. announced a contract with Lockheed Martin to develop a tool known as the Electronic Records Archive (ERA). More recently, the Library of Congress gave $3 million to support development of an e-archive solution named Portico, being developed by a non-profit organization called Ithaka Harbors, Inc., which appears to be a spinoff of JSTOR and the Mellon Foundation. Just today, Endeavor Information Systems, Inc. and Sun Microsystems announced a partnership to develop their own e-archiving solution(s). (Full disclosure: Endeavor Information Systems, Inc. is my employer.)

LibraryThing is cool

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Just wanted to point out a new site that I learned about last week, called LibraryThing (www.librarything.com) that allows users to register to post their book collections online. That in and of itself doesn’t sound radical but what is interesting is that users can then readily see the contents of others’ libraries, how they have categorized (or tagged) their entries, what the most popular books or authors are, etc. It includes a simple to use interface to search the Library of Congress’s web-based catalog via Z39.50, as well as Amazon, so that the the user can then import the bibliographic description from these sources without rekeying the information.

Readerware

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A couple of years ago, I happened to read about a software program called Readerware that was created to enable users to catalog their home collections of books, CDs, videos, and DVDs. Being the library geek that I am, and with my background in cataloging, my interest was immediately piqued. I downloaded a 30-day trial version back then and was quite impressed with Readerware’s auto-catalog feature, by which it goes out to predefined sites such as Amazon, Powell’s, the British Library, the Library of Congress, and other sites, and automatically harvests metadata about the item you wish to catalog, using a list of UPC and/or ISBN numbers that you’ve scanned into the system in a batch. Metadata can include (but is not limited to) author, title, publication information, value, and even, when available, cover images. You can pick and choose which sites you wish for Readerware to search, and in what order. You can also specify that it merge data from disparate sites into one record. Furthermore, instead of or in addition to doing batch searching, you can even drag and drop from a webpage containing information about an item into Readerware and it will auto-catalog that item on the fly. E.g. you can use Alibris or IMDB to find a record for something you own, drag the URL over to Readerware, and it’ll automatically parse the descriptive data and create a catalog record. One of the better aspects of the system’s capabilities is that in addition to the auto-catalog feature, it also allows you to periodically auto-update everything, e.g. to keep up with changing values for items you own. The cost for the Readerware bundle (there are three separate versions, one each for books, CDs, and videos/DVDs) is $75. I think that’s a real bargain.

Last week I was finally able to purchase a copy of the software and use it “for real.” Along with the software, I also received a free USB version of the :Cue:Cat barcode reader to enable me to quickly scan in the ISBN and/or UPC information needed to do the auto-cataloging. My wife and my eldest son, Keegan, rolled their eyes as I excitedly worked my way through our collections. I could tell they were thinking, “Oh great, there goes Mr. Library Geek again, wasting time on something technology related!” When I stopped scanning things in for a bit and had only one more bookshelf to do, I decided out of curiosity to review some of the prices of some of our books, just for fun, to see how much they might be worth. I was astonished to find one or two were valued at over $100 or more. When I showed this to Michele, suddenly her tune changed and she said, “What are you waiting for?! Get the rest of those books scanned!!!!” Keegan got very excited when I told him that one of the books that was valued the most was one of his game books! So we’re now singin’ a different tune ’round here. <grin>

Anyway, I think this is great software and highly recommend it to anyone! I’m inspired now to see if I can dabble in buying and selling books on the side. My plan is not to make much money, but instead, to make just enough of a profit selling other books to enable me to collect the books I really want. I see a whole new hobby opening up for me (like I really have time for that)…