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ALA MidWinter 2013 Movement Monday

29 Jan

Today was about moving forward and ensuring that the future is better and more useful and effective than anything now or in the past. A refinement, if you will.

That said, my day began early with the 8:30 session PVLR (Publisher/Vendor/Library Relations) Interest Group Forum that focused on the topic of enhance ebooks. This is of great interest to me since I catalog ebooks, and have seen a few “enhanced” with links out to other material but that’s it as far as enhanced. Jake Zarnegar from Silverchair Information Systems gave the most comprehensive explanation of the myriad of different types and levels of ebooks, along with the some challenges and benefits. Susie Stroud from Credo Reference demoed their enhanced ebooks, which are more like interactive websites with immediately playable embedded videos and interlinking to other relevant articles and research materials. It’s a great way to think about content and the learners, meeting them where they are and chunking the information up (you’ll see the next tie-in shortly!). Nancy Gibbs from Duke University Library focused on the challenges of faculty by-in and how hard it is to get the library involved. On her campus, different professors created one-off ebooks solely for a class. One professor had the grad students create the content to be bundled at the end as an ebook but then the professor merely deleted it at the end of the semester, finding no future value in it and wanting the next year to do their own, possibly on a different topic. Even for just preservation reasons if nothing else, how can they convince a faculty member to involve the library to save a copy if the professor himself doesn’t value the end result of the students creating an enhanced ebook? It’s tragic but if they create the project on their own and don’t include the library, it’s a huge hurdle to get involved later on in the process, or at the end; this is something to work on. Andrea Twiss-Brooks from the University of Chicago science libraries discussed more of the hurdles with enhanced ebooks, concerning use, pricing, and support. Ebook apps, while a great idea and cool, aren’t sustainable for libraries and check-out or reserve shelf, etc. Questions around ILL, upkeep, cataloging, and acquisitions were also discussed. While it brought up more thinking points than it resolved, this session truly stimulated the room and myself into considering what is out there, what’s to come, and what do we do about it?

My final session of ALA was Taking a New Look at Training and Learning that centered around small group discussion that filtered back into the larger group. People from Web Junction facilitated the event and kept an agenda and plan going to keep us in the time limits. But with all the great ideas and comments, the time literally flew by, with most of us wanting to continue on talking. What do learners need? What motivates people? How do we apply these lessons to training to better serve the learners? Despite not teaching or supervising in my cataloging role, I have taken webinars for software and helped teach my grandparents and parents about the iPad, and my uncle about his Windows laptop. From these experiences, I could relate and project these take aways into future situations to ensure the best learning environment for me or others. I dropped into this session last minute and loved it, learning a lot too. That’s what ALA is great for an can be really fun–stepping outside your usual bounds and seeing what you can learn and apply later. Ideas abound!

Lastly, I walked the exhibit hall one last time. Besides following Steve around on his booth business, I peeled away to explore on my own. One of the best stops was at the LC booth. At the RDA update, Beecher Wiggins discussed the training that they are wrapping up for all of their staff, including overseas. At the Learning session, one lady asked me about assessment tools for those RDA modules online–yes, she was a cataloger too! I didn’t know but thought it a great questions so I headed over to LC to get an answer. No one there could give me one at that point so they put me in touch with a couple of people in their training office, so hopefully in the next week or so I’ll hear back from them. Being able to talk in person can really get the ball rolling, if not work things out.

And since I avoided all of the swag, I just couldn’t resist those darn cute mini read tote bags and a call number tea mug!

ALA tote and mug

And, of course, our shot glass for each new city that we visit.

Seattle shot glass

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Posted by on January 29, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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ALA MW 2013 Successful Sunday

28 Jan

What a day! So much for taking it easy and not having so much on my list to do today. I ended conferencing for 12 hours, staying busy and engaged nearing the whole time. My plan was to be finished at 4 but things fall into place that you have to roll with sometimes!

This morning began with a change of pace. My mother-in-law @Lorna_Librarian works ILL at the College of Wooster so Steve (@sxflynn) and I went to meet Rapid ILL to find out information for her. They were at a hotel as their home base rather than being on the exhibit floor since they are so specialized, serving only academic librarians. The service and support that they is amazing. Their goal is to provide ILL within 24 hours, and their current average was 13 hours! Most of that is due to electronic resources that some are nearly instantly filled but even print versions usually have a quick turn around. Though they are a small organization that is inside of the Colorado State University library, this is their benefit because they work with their users everyday and are bettering the software and know it inside and out because it what they use. Originally, they created the program after a flood when they lost all of their bound widths and half of their monographs and since then it continues to grow and expand. Very cool!

Luckily, I made it back to the conference center in time for the LC New Bibliographic Framework Update. Roberta Schaffer introduced the session and speakers and said that the session was being recorded. It will be on up YouTube shortly and on the LC website after 6-8 weeks once they have closed captioned it. Beecher Wiggins gave an overview on what has happened since ALA Annual in Anaheim as far as committee work and moving forward. Reinhold Heuvelmann from the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek discussed their trial of Bibframe, touching on the difficulties, what they recommend for improvements, where they see this potentially going and its benefit, and how they are proceeding now to prepare for a linked data Bibframe future. Ted Fons, a Tech Evangelist at OCLC, then also gave his examples of what OCLC has done with linked data and Bibframe, and how a shift is taking place to a more agile, iterative system to get software out sooner and with continual revisions and releases. Part of the push to ensure that this is a long term standard is to use schema.org to utalize the web and linked data, gaining more clout in libraries and use of the resources that we already have by making them more findable in the internet. The purpose is the expose library data. At this point, I left for my lunch plans, knowing that the rest I can catch recorded. The three remaining speakers were Eric Miller, Sally McCallum, and Kevin Ford. However, with leaving early, I missed the official unveiling of http://www.bibframe.org but I caught it on Twitter. This is when Twitter and hashtags truly rock!

After lunch, I hit the exhibit floor and ran into friends and people who know my co-workers. That is part of the beauty of attending a conference, you never know who you will see and catch up with. Or who you will meet! And now, I am recognizing people from past conferences and they are becoming conference friends. Plus, it’s always fun to meet those librarians who work with Safari MARC records that I create. They love meeting me and putting a face to the who is behind the product and making it run. One guy came up and said hi at another session later, already making a point to build our connection–awesome!

Next was the all important RDA Update Forum that had huge attendance, over 200. This one wasn’t recorded and if I had planned ahead I would have brought my laptop to record audio since it was very detailed. That is one issue with sessions, you never know if it will be practical or theoretical, and even then if it’s actionable information or just informative; this was practical and actionable, and I wish I’d had my laptop. Sure I could have used the iPad but it would have been as good from the back of the room–this is my assumption since I’ve not tested iPad Mini recording against a laptop’s. Again, Beecher Wiggins gave the RDA update since last Annual. The final RDA update rewording/rewrite is wrapping up after a few chapters were reviewed and okayed. He also mentioned the http://www.bibframe.org launch. LC have 150 training resource available online for use, just give credit to them. All their staff training will wrap up around March. Next, Troy Linker from ALA Publishing talked specifically about RDA revisions and publishing a new version. RDA Toolkit’s latest improvements was a main portion, pointing out in particular RDA MARC mappings, auto sync table of contents, global and local workflows, videos and tutorials (part of the free section on the toolkit), their blog with first Tue of the month announcing change and second Tue implementing it, and a new print edition out around mid 2013, among other things. Also, there is an Essential RDA in the works, similar to Concise AACR2, that’s meant to be a practical guide and live outside of the toolkit. John Attig from the JSC gave his updates. He walked through the revision process that they did in November at their meeting. CC:DA and JSC websites discuss the changes for RDA and Fast Track keeps a history of all of those changes. Phillip Schruer, a PCC chair, covered PCC and RDA, talking about RDA BIBCO Standard Record, different task groups that have progressed to reviewing recommendations and comments on their reports to create a final version and guidelines. Three in particular focused on hybrid records, access points for expressions, and relationship designators and will be out in a few months. Undifferentiated names are a new focus now but they are still working on it. He also mentioned RDA PCC decision tables. Finally, Cynthia Whitacre from OCLC gave a brief summary of the new RDA policy and how records will be treated in OCLC. They plan to be very open and informative about when they make global changes, doing it piece by piece rather than whole records. In the Q&A, new to me, she mentioned OCLC working on a new bib notification that is very customizable and based on your holdings–no name at this time. I need to find the slides because of all the information convey, especially the very detailed field and subfields changes that are difficult to type everything out. There was a lot of great, useful information provided; a lot to take in!

Surprisingly, RDA ended early. I guess they expected a hour of questions but not many people asked. So with time to spare, I headed over to the Collection Management and Electronic Resources IG. Since it is newish and their leadership fell through, it ended up being an open discussion about ERMs. Very fascinating, not having dealt with them. Apparently there isn’t one perfect software to do everything so based on your institutions needs, and funding, there are multiple things necessary to management the data and other documents for electronic resources. Part of the initial challenge is gather the info but a major hurdle can be all of the data entry. There was a lot of interest in the group and they are look for a chair and vice chair so let me know if you are interested because I have their contact info!

Not having had enough fun for the day, I hit up on last session to satiate my curiosity–the Digital Humanities Discussion Group. This had huge turn out for what the organizers originally planned. This began only at Annual Anaheim last summer and now they are trying to make it an IG due to the interest and growing area and need for it. The session was, similar to my previous, an open discussion about several topics: data and alt-metrics, retraining, digital humanities space. Many people talked about their work and projects, or the challenges faced with beginning, as well as how to proceed as professional librarians. Do we need to change the perception of us as specialists, experts, and end points to being experimenters and explorers along side faculty members? Does buy-in need to come from tenured faculty, newly hired, newly tenured, grad students, or those already using tech, OA, and DH who might be more receptive and interested? Though provoking stuff! Can’t wait to see what these librarians put together for Annual in Chicago! They have a blog and a Twitter @DHandLib–they live tweeted so you can follow the gist of the meeting.

By now, at 5:30, my day was definitely going to end. Plans were to eat chowder, walk to the Space Needle and take in the Chihuly Garden and Glass. However, as things present themselves…

While eating said chowder, we noticed a Thompson Reuters Customer Reception going on next door. And librarians were still going in! So we headed over, Steve being a customer himself, and met some great people, had drinks, food, and collected our first tile. Apparently this is a big thing, and some have attended for 20 years so they have quite a collection! Who knew!?

By 9 p.m., we were back to our place. So much for my plan to not do as much. The thing is, once I get to conferences, I always want to do and see what I can. Being curious also keeps me seeking out topics of interest, or speakers that I want to hear. And ALA sure provides a great selection for no matter what type of library you work for or what your role is. If you are willing to do it, there is always something new or more to learn, and people to meet who are just excited (sometimes if not more)! Making connections is always fun. Especially when you run into again at later ALAs. That’s one of the benefits of returning.

Tomorrow I promise myself not to do as much. Maybe.

Seattle 2013 TR tile:

Seattle 2013 Thompson Reuters tile

 
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Posted by on January 28, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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ALA MidWinter 2013: Solidarity Saturday

27 Jan

Sitting in Seattle right now, it is still hard to believe that ALA MidWinter is upon us–even having spent the day conferencing all around the city. Though enjoying seafood and 50 degrees, despite some drizzle, is enjoyable!

This is my first MidWinter but it is just as crazy and bustling as Annual, it seems. As co-vice chair for the Cataloging Norms Interest Group, I helped with our panel this morning and it had 60-some people attend. And that’s for MidWinter. It amazes me that thousands of librarians turn out for this mid-year event, though it shouldn’t because it seems to be gaining in size and clout each year.

Today, I attended four sessions, though two were closely related. That is a lot in one day for a conference. Cataloging Norms IG started off my day with two distinct presentations that dovetailed each other nicely. The first speaker, Harold Thiele, gave an in-depth look into the history and beginnings of cataloging, starting with Mesopotamia and Sumer up through RDA. He discussed how title main entry slow progressed and evolved to the form that we know in AACR2 and how with RDA the approach is more with its lack of main entry as we know it. Maura Valentino discussed the 21st century, focusing on metadata beyond that of description and how it affects workflows and process. Though very different, the two talks paired well together and truly gave a complete picture of how far cataloging and metadata have come.

The Catalog Management Interest Group focused on managing catalog workflows, content, metadata, and prepping for RDA field displays. This ended being a more practical session that I first anticipated. Sherab Chen spoke about his new role as an e-resource manager, focusing on personnel tips and his lessons learned so far. He balanced his talk well between a no-nonsence, realistic approach and having an optimistic, can-do attitude despite all of the work and problems that such a job entails. Next, Jessica Hayden covered demand driven acquisitions within an consortial environment. Not having worked in such a setting, I am fascinated by all of the collaboration and discussions that must go on in order for a consortium to function well, and yet there are myriads of benefits to such a arrangement. Also, the distinction of what is done at the consortial level versus local can create either more roadblocks or paved ways, depending on the situation. Sarah Beth Weeks, however, gave my favorite presentation due to her topic of using Google Refine to clean up data in the catalog. For a cataloger, the chance to provide more access and an easier search for the patron to find what they are looking for is the main goal that we all strive to achieve. At their college, rather than amend specific MARC fields to make them all uniform, they added the most common form of a term as a 9xx field for better access. Finally, Roman Panchyshyn closed off the session with his testing of RDA catalog display and how to best make it work for the patron. The 3xx, no surprise, were the oddest and trickiest to work with of the new fields. Since the 264 has a 2nd indicator to help define it, those were easier to display, as were the 502 field labels after a wording tweak. Next month, he will send of his recommendations, basically what he presented at the session, to Innovative in order to get their ILS to display RDA records and fields how they want them, and ensure that they are included in indexing for search results.

After a great lunch break–ALA plans out 1.5 hours over the lunch hour, thank goodness, for no sessions–a back-to-back linked data two part session began. The first hour was informative. Some of it I had heard in Anaheim at Annual but it was a good refresher and parts of it were new information, or said a different way. Eric Miller, president of Zepheria, discussed linked data, tying git in a little bit to Bibframe. Mainly he covered the underlying structure of linked data and why it is an important task to take on as a library community. If all of our libraries were linked data, search engines would include our books and items in the top results pages, allowing users more access especially if they begin their research in the web. Next, Richard Wallis from OCLC talked about all the different projects that they are a part of concerning linked data–mainly VIAF, FAST, Dewey Classification, and now WorldCat linked data. They hope to create a large, more prominent presence on the internet with library data, and are setting an example for member libraries. It is true that if all of the libraries work together, we could make a huge splash in online metadata and set president for all who are part of the web; we have the specialized knowledge and wonderful data, so we just need to make it accessible openly on the web through links that bring users back to the library websites and catalogs.

During the second part of the linked data session, two librarians showed the small-scale projects that they completed using linked data. Both approached the idea differently and created two unrelated yet amazing projects. Violeta Ilik linked her universities math department in Viewshare, allowing for new connections and analysis to be done on the faculty itself, including gender ratios and research areas. One of the coolest part of her data ended being the PhD. location of all the faculty, which displayed on a map. Jeremy Myntti used Viewshare for an entirely different purpose with a whole other type of data. His institution has an online collection of animal sounds recorded in several states. To get even more out of the data, he loaded certain information into Viewshare and was able to display not only a map of locations for the sound recordings but to show pie charts that broke down the kingdoms and genus. The link to the recordings for each animal was included so that a person could click and follow the link to the website with the player on it. Both Violeta and Jeremy said the from start to finish, their projects took no more than 1 hour to create the linked data. Though these were fairly small scale, the implications and ease of linked data are amazing to consider.

What a day! I love attending sessions that sound interesting and I always yearn to learn more while at a conference. That’s why I am here! However, there gets to be an overload point if you pack too much in, especially if you aren’t used to it. Thankfully MidWinter is slightly shorter in the sense that there aren’t as many sessions, so I can conference a bit harder today and tomorrow knowing that Monday will be fairly sparse and Tuesday I fly out before the crack of dawn.

So far it’s been a great conference. Let’s hope tomorrow can live up to today’s standards! We will see that that huge RDA afternoon session brings…

 
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Posted by on January 27, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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Famous!: At least among librarians and educators…who listen to the LiTTech podcast

09 May

My awesome friend, Emily Thompson the Learning Technologies Librarian at SUNY Oswego, invited me to speak as a guest on her podcast, LitTech. I enjoyed explaining cataloging, touching on RDA and FRBR and the  future of cataloging. She includes great podcast notes with links.

Really, there’s not much more that I can say about it…please go listen, especially if you aren’t a cataloger or librarian.

So, want to hear the inside scoop about subject headings, get an explanation of cataloging, hear some library science history, or why paraprofessional jobs in cataloging are become more prevalent, listen to LiTTech show 29 and let me know what you think!

Enjoy!

image

Note: The above screen shot is only an image, so the listen now/play buttons won’t work; click the link above that says LiTTech 29! 🙂  (This will be obvious for most of my blog readers but my mom and family does read it, too!)

 
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Posted by on May 9, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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Post-RDA: the next generation of cataloging

30 Jan

Since RDA has yet to be implemented, this might sound presumptuous but I’ll throw caution into the wind and just say it: we should move past RDA to a post-RDA cataloging world.

This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for several months, having cataloged professionally at ProQuest now for soon-to-be 7 months! Jan. 5th came and went quicker than the 6 month acknowledgment allowed–kinda like those linger holiday thank-yous that I swear Steve and I will write this weekend. Being a professional, rather than a student, cataloging is fully on my mind all the time now.

What we catalogers need is a grass-roots cataloging initiative and guidelines.

There, I’ve said it. Does it seem radical? I hope the answer is both yes and no.

Yes, because cataloging is coordinated and administered, on the whole, by the Library of Congress. Don’t get me wrong, I love them (and would love a job there!!!–as many of us would) yet their purpose is not to be the central conduit and decider of all things cataloging. It just ended up that way because it was nicer and easier for all libraries who happened to have many of the same items and could rely on LC for good records and shelf list cards, subject headings and call numbers. It made cataloging consistent and got items out to patrons sooner since it shared information amongst the cataloging network. So proposing a grass-roots coordinated effort sounds crazy.

No, because catalogers truly care about the information and records they provide to the public and their users. Most of the time, a para or a professional cataloger will proof the copy cataloging that is brought in, to ensure quality and make personal adjustments for the library and its collection as needed. LC was never meant, and still isn’t supposed, to be the cataloging aggregate so it makes sense that since the Internet connects us all now, that we catalogers can take back this charge that LC has wonderfully kept in check all these years and reclaim what should be our prerogative, especially now that we have the tools and capabilities to catalog together as a profession.

What exactly is the idea that I am proposing? Rather than trying to rush RDA which still seems to be not ready, and with no successor to MARC in sight, as a cataloging community of paraprofessionals and professionals, we should create and maintain our own cataloging wiki that contains all the rules and guidelines, authority files and subject headings, classification and call numbers, that can be edited by any cataloger.

We all care about the work we produce. The listservs make this clear. So what if we funneled all that energy and knowledge and experience into a self-created and maintained wiki for all catalogers? So many people complain about lacking and unsatisfactory subject headings, for example, that wouldn’t it be great to have a wiki in which we all give our input and create not only what we need but what the users want? It would remain a standardized list but we as catalogers would control it.

AACR2 and MARC are still viable but what we need to do as professionals is start hacking them more–see my previous post. There is room for expansion in the available fields and subfields, as well as indicators. We could repurpose what we need for now and growth for the future, rather than trashing it all for RDA or some other systems that isn’t yet fully realized. If we took over cataloging guidelines and standards, cataloging could become what we want it to be for the current and future needs of libraries and their patrons. We shouldn’t let the past blind us to the capabilities of what we already have and use today. Computers hold far greater quantities of information, so we should put in all the information, fully written out and complete, that we need to explain the item and that the user needs to find it. Sure, AACR2 and ISBD were especially useful for shelf list cards but we can and should expand beyond those restrictions since they don’t apply anymore. Same goes for MARC, it is still perfectly good; it just needs some tweaking to expand it.

Sure, this time next year RDA might be officially rolling out and we will all likely be learning it, but what if? What if an idea like mine took off and revolutionized the cataloging world, not in a way we expect by undertaking a new set of guidelines but in a vastly different way of conceiving and maintaining the cataloging world all together, in a collaborative wiki run by us catalogers?

What if?

 
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Posted by on January 30, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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