Tag Archives: cataloguing

Understanding FRAD and authority control

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My cataloguing course came to an end this week, which means that after 12 weeks of thorough study I’m apparently now familiar with, if not competent to work with a host of acronyms such as AACR2, MARC21, LCSH, DDC, and of course, DC.

Something we haven’t addressed, however,  is RDA or FRBR, which in some respects is acceptable since the former hasn’t been formally released and the latter, as I’ve now tattooed on my arm (not really), is a framework, a guideline, a conceptual model. But what little I do know of the organization of information (something I think all librarians should know something about) suggests that RDA and FRBR is the way to go and the things to study if I want to (1) make a real difference in the field, and (2), find a half-way decent income.  So in between my final assignments I’ve been reading a lot on the FRBR game. I may turn it into a reading course for next term.  we’ll see how it goes.

In the mean time, here’s another set of rough notes, this time on Glenn Patton’s “Introduction to FRAD”, from Taylor (2004).  There isn’t anything real exciting to report from this chapter, I don’t think, except for Patton’s summary of what a good authority file should do:

  1. Document decisions made by the cataloger when choosing appropriate records for a BibRecord as well as when creating new access points.
  2. Serve as a reference for these two functions listed above (i.e. choosing and creating).  This provides information to distinguish one authority file from another and can reveal when a brand new access point is needed in the authority file.
  3. Control forms of access points.  Patton adds that “in an automated environment, [it will] change those access points when the authority record itself is changed.”  I understand Patton’s context more than his original statement, but for now that’s good enough for me.
  4. Support access to the BibRecord by leading the user from the name that has been sought to the name listed in the BibRecord.
  5. Link bibliographic and authority files in different ways, e.g., to allow data elements to be converted into different languages and scripts that are appropriate to the user’s needs.  This is fairly general, I think, but I’m happy to let it be.

[ipaper id=23699538]

I don’t know if the concept of authority control is something we give much thought to – I know my fellow students and I didn’t in our class.  Authority records were just things we double-checked to ensure that our BibRecords would be correct.  And in this day of automation and electronic data transfer, I suppose authority control is more and more rudimentary.  But there can be so many value judgments in this particular area that things can get heated or philosophical.  On the one hand, we’ve given ourselves (if you will) the power and authority to grant a person or body a name. On the other hand, we’ve given ourselves the power and authority to signify an individual by a certain term.  We can be as absolute (and arbitrary) or as relative as we choose to be on this one – it plays tricks with my background in the humanities.

Anyway.

UWO Labour Situation – taking stock of what librarians do

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Reading the recent news that the University of Western Ontario‘s professional librarians are very, very close to being in a legal strike position with the school has got me thinking about what would happen to an academic library on the first day of such a strike.  How would the user community’s experience be different on Strike Day-One as opposed to the previous day?

This is an interesting way to take stock of the things an academic librarian does – visible and invisible – that affect the community on a near-daily basis.  Just thinking about how my workplace, a small-to-mid-size university library, would be affected by labour situation brings to mind:

  • The Reference Desk. Although we allow library technicians with undergraduate degrees and research experience to sit at the desk, well more than half of the reference desk shifts would not be attended.  Admin might ask the lib.tech who are trained for the desk to help cover these shifts, but then their own important work in Cataloguing and Tech Services (which are vital to the library’s day-to-day operations) would fall behind.
  • Reference-by-appointment. There would not be anyone in the library who could offer its individualized research sessions.  Our library extends one-on-one help to pretty much any student who asks, and we get a lot of takers, especially at honours-level Commerce, the MBA, and the M.Finance.
  • In-Class Sessions.  Every single instructional session offered by the library, be it on plagiarism, study skills, or how to use SPSS would be lost.
  • Info.Lit grading would be lost as well.  Many faculty members at the University demand that their first-year classes take part in library workbook exercises that are typically worth 5-10% of the students’ final grade.  The workbooks would sit on our desks, untouched, waiting for our return.
  • Promotional Services. Gone. This is not the largest of our departments, to be sure, but it does maintain a blog, provide outreach to the community, and most importantly, is responsible for web-site maintenance.  The library’s web presence – which should be “always on,” is tied to the work of the professional librarians who would be on strike or be locked out.
  • Database management.  While everyday cataloguing is in the hands of the library technicians, policy decisions and methods lie elsewhere.
  • Systems.  You show me an ILS without a Systems Librarian close at hand and I’ll show you a crippled ILS.  I’m being facetious to a certain degree, especially since my workplace is part of a consortia for book lending, but serious problems could ensue on the electronic-serials side.

So if a strike were to happen tomorrow, I think it’s safe to say that for the vast majority of students the first thing they’d lose – the first thing they’d see disappear – is ready help at the reference desk.  And within a day or two, between missed IL classes and grading, DBMS, research interviews and the like, many people would see how tightly woven library operations are to this group that helps administer it.

Anyway.  Read the article about the potential strike.  Join the facebook group, if you like.  And think about what might happen at your own library if you neither you nor your colleagues could walk in tomorrow – help get the word out that MLIS-holders play a valuable role in libraries if not provide an essential service to the entire academic community.

n.b. just to clarify to the irregular readers – i am neither employed by nor affiliated with UWO.

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e-Books and MARC

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Happy Fall!

I haven’t posted here much lately.  School is in session and I’m still holding down an information literacy internship that amounts to 15-20 hours a week of work, so I’m a busy little bee. My apologies for that.

I’ve got a MARC story to tell.  Yes, I can hear the pitched groans out there.   Anyway, at one point at work today I had to figure out roughly how many e-books our library subscribes to. All I needed was a general figure to paste into a flyer to promote the growing e-book collection, but this question posed a dilemma that required four other staff members to wrap their heads around.  After speaking to our database management librarian, our systems librarian, as well as the two tech services staff who really are the experts and daily managers of the e-books as they exist in the collection, we still didn’t have a solid answer.  Although we could all go into our own records and tally up the numbers, it would have been nice if the catalogue could spit out a number for us.

The problem is that, like so many other organizations, our catalogue was not designed to properly account for e-books. We can list the e-book’s format as a book and as an Internet resource in two different (but not mutually exclusive fields), and we can flag the item as an electronic resource in the 245 field under the GMD. And like so many other libraries, we also choose to list an e-book in the 655 genre/form field.

So, there are several ways for us to mark the e-book in MARC.  However, without a chance to mark the simple format field as an e-book in our catalogue, it has become difficult to query the database to see exactly how many items we subscribe to at the moment.  We can limit our queries to “electronic resource” in the title field to access the GMD, but this also calls up items with those words anywhere in the 245; limiting the query in a similar manner under the 655 field isn’t so great either because it then calls up many digital gov.doc serials that are also entered in the catalogue with this field

At any rate, an answer has been found.  When I left work this afternoon, some of the staff were performing a common command line search to figure out the answer to the question I was wondering at 830 in the morning. I did feel bad for asking the question, since it created a little bit of work, but it was nice to see that people with the know-how on this one where up to the challenge and were determined to come to a answer by hook or crook.

It’s this sort of work that has really made me come to respect cataloguing and database management.  It’s one thing to know MARC codes and indicators like the back of your hand, but it’s another to understand the reasons why certain items are flagged the way they are and what the ramifications are in the present-day and into the future.  I don’t think my question, as it was posed, is going to force a major re-think of how e-books are catalogued at the library, but it was interesting to see the organization of information truly come into play on this one.

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