Melissa in Stephenville

What do you mean, you don't have metadata experience?

2011-03-09T17:26:00.000-06:00

(This has been in my drafts for a while. I finally decided to publish it. Maybe one of these days I'll publish all the other drafts I have sitting around.)

A few weeks ago, a cataloger who thought she might soon be unemployed emailed one of the listservs I subscribe to. One of the things she wrote really caught my attention: “The few cataloging jobs that I saw required metadata experience, which I don’t have…”

I could say who wrote this and when it was written, and the post can be found in this particular listserv’s archives, but since I don’t know if this person would be ok with her name also being in a blog post, I’m not including it here. The important thing is simply that she wrote this, and that this is not the first time this has come up.

Offlist, I emailed her about this statement, saying that, actually, she does have metadata experience. MARC is a metadata standard. In fact, it’s a very complicated and unintuitive metadata standard – lots of fields and subfields. The average person, looking at a list of MARC fields, would probably not be able to immediately equate, say, “245” with “Title statement,” and yet for many catalogers who regularly use MARC it actually becomes more comfortable to see fields and subfields rather than plain English labels.

If you know MARC, you have metadata experience. You may not have experience with Dublin Core or EAD or ONIX or XML or whatever else, but you do have metadata experience, and you can apply what you have learned from MARC to learning another metadata standard. (This, of course, takes an employer who is willing to train you or give you the time to get trained - which is a valid worry, what with all the employers who seem to want new employees who can be put to work with little or no training.)

Not everyone writes or talks about MARC and metadata as if they are two completely separate things, but it has still somehow been embedded in some people’s brains that they are separate things. On listservs and in blogs, I have read complaints from people that catalogers aren’t very good at recognizing transferable skills. The mental separation of “metadata” and “MARC” is, I feel, one of the main reasons why this is so, and it cripples catalogers and makes them afraid. Skilled catalogers don’t think they are qualified to be metadata librarians (or whatever else they are called). They think that what they do is becoming obsolete.

I do believe that, one day, catalogers will probably be using something other than MARC. However, I don’t live in fear of my future and my career(*)…because I believe there will always be a place for someone who can create and edit metadata. I can learn a new metadata scheme if I need to. After all, I learned MARC.
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If you'd like to know more about MARC's place in the metadata world, check out "A Visualization of the Metadata Universe." Actually, this shows you the place of 105 metadata standards - it's awesome and kind of pretty.

* - I do worry that, one day, there won't be any jobs for people like me in libraries. I could work for a corporation if necessary, and almost ended up at one during the course of my post-grad school job search, but I'd prefer to work for a library. With all the outsourcing that's going on, however, that may not always be possible.

The blog hasn't died, really it hasn't

2011-02-23T22:55:00.000-06:00

I know, I haven't updated this blog in ages. I figured I'd make my first update in such a long while an update about some of the projects I've been working on, either on my own or with Tracy:

Fixing up the diacritics problem in the Classical Music Library and Contemporary World Music MARC records. There are still no diacritics (I'm not sure if would be possible for our OPAC to display those diacritics, anyway), but at least the stuff that looked like gibberish and was unsearchable and unreadable by human beings has been dealt with. Tracy and I worked for an hour and a half on this problem ("Diacritics Hell"). Neither one of us had any idea it would take quite so long.
I'm still working on adding 505 fields (contents notes) to records. Right now, I'm concentrating on PS647-PS648 (in our General Stacks area). We've got records for anthologies in this area that don't say what titles or authors they include, meaning that the only way someone would know that, say, History Revisited has a story by Harry Turtledove is through some source that is not our catalog (the record for this book now has a contents note, by the way).
The records to which I'm adding 505s get other special treatments, which is why I only do a few per day, or there wouldn't be any time to do anything else. To list a few things I do: add our holdings to OCLC if they're not already there, fix up the title control numbers, and add genre/form headings (which are actually just LC subject headings used in 655 fields - for now, until there are more genre authority records and I'm actually able to load those authority records, this seems to be the best way to go).
I'm cleaning up 505 notes that already exist in our catalog. Some of them are enhanced when they shouldn't be, which creates false hits in our title searches. Some of them are unenhanced even though they should be enhanced, which means things that should come up in a title or author search don't. I can fix it globally, but the fix is imperfect, so I have to at least glance at the records before I reload them, slowing the process down a bit.
I'm fixing 245 fields (Title) that have subfields in an incorrect order. The incorrect order creates display weirdness that sometimes makes it incredibly difficult to figure out what the actual title is, or see that it's the audiobook version instead of the print version. So far, I've done our vinyl records and VHS tapes, which probably took care of the worst offenders.
I'm still loading authority records in order to authorize our headings and make it easier to keep them up-to-date. It's a slow process that I will never finish.

I think that's it, not including all the projects that have ended up on the back burner.

Something cool - Amazon to MARC and IMDb to MARC

2011-01-21T12:44:00.003-06:00

The Amazon to MARC converter takes information from Amazon.com book records and turns it into MARC. I don't see myself using the MARC records this produces, because the records would take so much cleanup that it might actually be easier to start from scratch, but I still think it's pretty cool. Plus, some aspects could be useful for my work: I could copy and paste summary information from here and avoid (I'm pretty sure) having to hunt down quotation marks and apostrophes that Connexion doesn't like, and I could potentially use this as a starting place for call numbers and subject headings.

The IMDb to MARC converter (prototype) takes information from IMDb and turns it into MARC records. I think this converter's output is actually even more helpful than the Amazon to MARC converter's - video recording MARC records take a lot of work, because of all the name access points and various notes. This would take care of some of that work, although there'd still be a lot of fixing and fiddling to do. I love the "verify names" feature (also present in the Amazon to MARC converter). I could see this tool being especially popular with libraries that, in order to save time, have a policy of basing video recording cataloging on container information - this would probably help them save even more time. Again, as with the Amazon to MARC converter, I probably wouldn't use the MARC records produced by the IMDb to MARC converter, but there are still certain things I could copy and paste into the records I end up using in Connexion.

UPDATE: The Amazon to MARC converter doesn't just do book records - I just had it generate a record for a DVD, VHS, and CD. The "classify" information seems to be drawn from OCLC - too bad, I was hoping it could help Tracy and Trudy in those cases where they have trouble finding OCLC records that match the Contemporary World Music records they're assigning call numbers to.

Electronic theses and dissertations

2011-01-05T16:31:00.000-06:00

I added 115 URLs and their corresponding e-resource item records to bibliographic records for theses and dissertations today. In theory, every thesis and dissertation for which we have a bibliographic record and that is available via Proquest should now be searchable as Type: Thesis/Dissertation, Location: Online Access. Yay!

While I was at it, I also cleaned up some stray issues in the records, and added abstracts to records I was editing that did not already have them.

Newest project, with an observation

2010-12-10T13:16:00.000-06:00

Now that I've finished the project that flipped subfield d's and q's into their correct order and got rid of all or most of our obsolete subfield w's, I've got yet another project on the table. I realized that, even though I can't export records based on publication year, I can export them based on record creation date, which should usually be within a year or two of the publication date. With this is mind, I'm hoping to add and (where necessary) enhance contents notes in bibliographic records added to our catalog in the past five years. All of the below is being done using MARCEdit, by the way.

So far, the first step is going well. I exported the records, extracted all the ones that have 505 fields (contents notes) with " / " in them, extracted all the ones in that file that don't have 520 fields (summary, etc. notes), and globally enhanced all the 505s. However, not all of these 505s really need enhancing, and there's some potential for error in how enhancing occurred, so I'm going through the records one-by-one before reloading. This is still going a lot faster than enhancing them all individually would have gone.

I haven't had much of a chance to work on this project, because of all the end-of-semester stuff that's been happening, and because cataloging new things needs more attention right now. Still, I've looked through enough records to discover something I hadn't realized: our NetLibrary records, which I had always assumed were the highest quality ones, sometimes have contents notes that end prematurely. The contents notes might only cover half the actual contents of the book, with no indication (via the first indicator) that these fields are in any way incomplete. I'm fixing them up as I come across them, but it makes me wonder what other kinds of problems there might be that I don't know about.

"You say you want a revolution"

2010-12-06T12:32:00.003-06:00

This is a bit of a rambling post, but the general topic is RDA. That seems to be all anyone ever talks about in the cataloging world anymore. Not surprising, really.

There are a lot of complaints about RDA being voiced on the OCLC-CAT listserv, of all places. Why OCLC-CAT? I'm pretty sure it started because of the way OCLC has been allowing RDA data (authority and bibliographic) to be added to the WorldCat database.

When I originally heard that RDA would be tested before the Library of Congress made any decisions about it, I assumed that that test would take place outside of the live cataloging environment. This has not been the case. The word "test" in OCLC Land sounds an awful lot like "the rules have officially changed, deal with it." OCLC has instructed catalogers to treat RDA bibliographic records vs. AACR2 bibliographic records the same as they treat AACR2 vs. AACR bibliographic records: if an RDA record already exists, an AACR2 record would be considered a duplicate and is therefore not supposed to be entered. Catalogers not using RDA may edit the record back to AACR2 locally.

How exactly does this make sense? I would understand if RDA were the official new rules, but they're not, at least not in the U.S. I know that there are countries that have decided to implement RDA already, and WorldCat is an international database. However, couldn't OCLC just instruct catalogers to treat RDA vs. AACR2 records as parallel records? For instance, if an RDA record already exists, catalogers still using AACR2 (which is most of the U.S.) could enter an AACR2 record, thereby giving other AACR2 users the ability to share the work rather than having every AACR2 user edit the RDA record locally. When/If RDA is implemented by the Library of Congress, OCLC could set their deduplication software to consider RDA and AACR2 records for the same title as duplicates, but it makes no sense to do so before the end of the supposed test.

The bigger uproar on OCLC-CAT right now seems to be focused on authority records. I will admit to not understanding everything everyone is saying - the complaints seem mainly focused on the way RDA information is being added to authority records (RDA name headings live in 700 fields right now, with the AACR2 name headings still in 100 fields - no information has been given on what will be done to these records if RDA is implemented). Having RDA name headings in 700 fields doesn't hurt DSL, but, from what I've heard, there are libraries whose authority control systems choke on this. What does worry me about all of this is that, like the bibliographic records, these changes are all happening to live records: this is not a separate authority file just for the use of those testing RDA, but rather the authority file used by everyone, regardless of whether or not they are test libraries. In effect, non-test libraries are being forced to take part in the test. How can this still be considered a test if everything is happening in a live environment?

The uproar about the way OCLC has been handling the RDA test resulted in Memorandum Against RDA Test, a petition that has so far been signed by 312 people. Although I agree with the petition, I don't always agree with the strong wording that Wojciech Siemaszkiewicz, the person who I believe started the petition, has been using on the OCLC-CAT listserv when talking about RDA. Siemaszkiewicz has an unfortunate tendency (unfortunate because it immediately gets RDA supporters backs up and occasionally even alienates those who oppose RDA) to phrase complaints about RDA in ways that bring war protests and the rhetoric of revolution to mind.

Siemaszkiewicz isn't the only one stirring things up - Deborah Tomaras, on the OCLC-CAT listserv and others, has encouraged those who are against RDA to send their concerns to the personal emails of the members of the RDA Coordinating Committee. She even provided all the email addresses in case the website with those email addresses is taken down. While I can understand the frustration that resulted in this particular call to action, since it feels as though complaints and concerns about RDA and the RDA test have fallen on deaf ears, I'm also not comfortable with what Tomaras is asking catalogers to do. I don't really know what catalogers who are against RDA should be doing, since going through the proper channels has so far seemed ineffective, but spamming/harassing the individuals on the RDA Coordinating Committee isn't, to my mind, the way to go. Can we all just please remember that we're supposed to be professionals?

I may not be sure how I should be communicating my concerns about RDA, but I do have concerns, and one of them is whether or not a drastic reorganization of cataloging rules is even necessary. I recognize that there are problems with AACR2 - I rarely catalog any of the formats (such as databases and websites) that are difficult to catalog with AACR2, but, when I do, it's painfully clear that something needs to be done. At least, something needs to be done to the rules for electronic resources and other things with similar cataloging problems. As far as I'm concerned, the cataloging rules are fine for most physical materials.

Let's be clear about this: the cataloging rules are different from the encoding standards, which are different from ILSs. One of the things that consistently frustrates me about the RDA arguments is that there seems to be an assumption on the part of those who are most in favor of RDA that most of our cataloging problems reside in our cataloging rules. I would argue that this is not the case.

Maybe I need to keep a list of every catalog wish list item I am asked to implement that I can't, in addition to the reason why I can't. I'm pretty sure that, most of the time, when I can't implement something it's because of the way MARC is set up or the way our ILS works, not because of AACR2. If AACR2 is the reason why something can't be done with MARC or something in our ILS is not doing what our users (whether they're students, faculty, or librarians) want, and if that were plainly stated to the cataloging community, I would happily accept a change to the rules. However, I don't agree with change for change's sake, and that's what RDA feels like. On the one hand, RDA is supposed to make everything better. On the other hand, it's supposed to not change things so much that AACR2 records can't live side by side with RDA records. I don't see how both of those statements can be true.

So, that's it from me for now. I don't know if those who are most against RDA will ever be able to reconcile with those who are most for it - neither side really seems to understand the other, or maybe they're just not willing to listen to each other. Or even talk to each other (it seems like pro-RDA talk may be happening on Twitter a lot - I wouldn't know, since I don't use Twitter, but I may have to start just to see what's going on - while anti-RDA talk is concentrated on listservs). Another problem seems to be that not all ILSs are created equal and that not everyone understands this. But then, I may just think that because I'm in the camp that believes our largest problems lie in our ILSs and MARC 21.

Radio Ballet

2010-12-01T18:00:00.001-06:00

← This book led me to these:

Cross-references: what good are they?

2010-11-29T18:05:00.000-06:00

Authority work has been one of my long-time pet projects. Authority records, properly linked to headings in bibliographic records, make it much, much easier to globally update headings as changes occur. Authority records can help keep headings in bibliographic records consistent, and consistent headings allow users to search those headings in the catalog and get what they're looking for. Even if users don't know a thing about name and subject headings and just use keyword searches, hyperlinked consistent headings allow users to click on the headings and retrieve everything else that has that same heading (depending on system settings - and, actually, I'm not quite sure what our setting are like). It's very important that the headings are consistent, because, if they aren't, clicking on the link isn't necessarily going to bring everything up. The OPAC doesn't know that the hyperlink "Tiger" and the previous authorized form "Tigers" should be considered the same thing.

There's one thing about authorities that bothers me, though. When I was in library school, one of the touted benefits of using authority records was their cross-references. If a user doesn't know that the authorized form used by their library happens to be "Airships" and not "Blimps," the cross-references are supposed to help them find the records they're looking for anyway. The problem is that this assumes that users are doing browse searches. Anecdotal evidence (and quite possibly actual studies, which I haven't tried looking up) says that this isn't true. Instead, users, including a lot of librarians, are probably using keyword searches. True, they may be subject keyword or author keyword searches, but they're still keyword searches and, as far as I know, there is no ILS out there that searches cross-references in authority records in addition to text within bibliographic records. I had heard that SirsiDynix Symphony does somewhat, but, from what I can tell, "somewhat" means that, if the keyword search retrieves nothing, users are redirected to a browse search for that word. That can work well enough in some cases. If users don't automatically assume that the redirection is a completely failed search and actually click on the cross-reference hyperlink. And only if the keyword search retrieves absolutely nothing.

It would be nice if the cross-references of any authority record to which headings in a bibliographic record are linked were searched in subject/author/genre keyword searches (maybe even general keyword searches). If an ILS exists that can do this, I'd love to hear about it. And I'd like to know why more don't.

Current big global editing project

2010-11-12T12:18:00.015-06:00

I'm halfway through my current large global editing project that is cleaning up the name headings (flipping subfield q and d so that they're in the correct order), deleting obsolete subfield w's in access points, and fixing obsolete indicators in several fields (100, 700, 110, 710, 260) in our oldest records. I looked at the numbers, and I think it'll take 10 more days of work to finish the whole project up. Not bad.

After this project is done, I think I'll go back to concentrating more on straightening up our authority records and name and subject headings - a never-ending job.

While I was doing some subfield q and d flipping, it occurred to me that the technique I was using could be used to fix other problems we have. Since the technique took a bit of work and a lot of testing for me to figure out in the first place, and since every step must be done in a particular order, I decided to save myself future pain by posting instructions, complete with screenshots, in our staff wiki. That'll keep me from having the reinvent the wheel when I finally get around to doing those other fixes.

Fun with GIMP

2010-11-08T10:48:00.002-06:00

I figured it was time for a non-cataloging related post.

On the left is an image I recently edited nearly to death in GIMP.

And here's the image as it was before I GIMPified it.

The edited image is made up of 5 layers (actually 6, but only 5 of them make up the visible parts of the image - I kept the original image as a background layer that I could copy in order to create additional layers).

Originally, I tried using the "cartoon" filter to create the black lines I wanted, but I didn't entirely like the results and the filter, however nice, didn't give me enough control. Since I'm still limited almost entirely to using a touchpad, I don't have much fine editing ability, either.

I created an effect similar to the cartoon filter by copying the original image and applying the photocopy filter. Then I selected according to color and selected all the true black areas of the layer with the photocopy filter applied. I inverted the selection, cut everything that was selected, and then made the selected area transparent. I repeated those steps with another layer with the photocopy filter applied, only this time I selected gray areas. I repeated the steps again for another gray. For all those layers, I made the remaining ares of color (the lines leftover from the photocopy filter) completely black, either with levels or with the colorify tool.

Then I decided to mess with color. I may not wear them, but I love bright colors, so I created a new layer and used the Color Balance tool until I got something I liked. However, I only really liked it on my shirt, so I deleted and made transparent every part of that layer but the shirt.

I still wanted to punch up the rest of the colors in the picture, though, so I created another layer and used, I think, the Hue-Saturation tool until I got something I liked. I thought I'd end up doing the walls separately from my face, but I ended up liking that particular color effect on both areas. However, my face had gotten a bit patchy-looking, and I wanted to smooth that out. I tried out a few tools but ended up liking the Oilify filter the best.

I didn't entirely like the hard lines (the result of the stuff I did with the photocopy layers) along my jawline, some areas near my mouth, and on my neck, so I used the eraser tool to get rid of those. I can do that much, even with a touchpad.

And that's basically how I did that image. It's nice to know that I can still use GIMP a little, even with a touchpad - there are just a few limits to what I can do. Drawing in GIMP, no, but editing a photograph? That I can do.

Also: yes, my NaNoWriMo novel is not going well. As has happened every time I've taken part, my writing speed has tanked. I'm hoping I can get it back up again - there are still several weeks left in the month.

More deduping, plus an explanation of why it is necessary

2010-10-26T20:30:00.000-05:00

I did 6 or 7 more deduplication tests using MARCEdit, with no true success, but a little minor success. On the plus side, I can produce an overzealous list of duplicate records that includes true duplicates and a few that only look like duplicates (for example, same title, but one is a newer edition than the other). That at least gives us a list to work from, I suppose, although matching on ISBN would give a more accurate and probably more complete list.

In case you're wondering (I know this and my last post are somewhat technical), duplicate records are records that are basically for the exact same title - it was published by the same publisher, published on the same year, etc. When we get e-book record files from vendors, we sometimes get records for the same title from multiple vendors. Some of the vendors have records with OCLC numbers in them, some don't, and sometimes they might have OCLC numbers in them but not the same ones that another vendor used (yes, OCLC has duplicate records, lots and lots of them). When we load them, we end up with multiple records for basically the same thing. Ideally, we'd like to have an e-book that is available from multiple vendors accessible on one record.

That's where record deduplication comes in. Right now, we could do our deduping by searching each and every e-book title in the catalog and clearing up duplicates as we come across them. This is not a good idea - we have tens of thousands of e-books, and the number will only grow. The tests I've been doing are part of an attempt to automate deduplication, or at least come up with a list of potential duplicates so that we could avoid having to search every single title in our e-book collection.

I think I'm going to start reading articles on record deduplication. I probably should have done this earlier - if I find something right away that could help us, I'm going to kick myself.

Trying to dedupe records...and failing

2010-10-26T11:11:00.000-05:00

While provider neutral e-book records are a nice idea, it's a little hard to do in practice when you're dealing with vendor e-book record packages. Today will be Round 3 of me trying to figure out how to dedupe our records without having to go through each title one by one.

In theory, deduplication could be done at the record loading stage, using, for instance, ISBNs as a second match point. In practice, this probably wouldn't go well, unless we decided to have print and electronic formats on one record - by matching on ISBN, we would end up matching our e-book records with our print records. There are probably other issues with this method that I haven't even thought of. I could do some testing, but I haven't really focused much on this method of record deduplication yet.

Instead, I've mostly been looking at methods of deduplication using MARCEdit. The obvious method, using MARCEdit's deduplication tool and trying to dedupe on ISBNs, has so far failed. I'm either using the tool wrong, or it's not working the way it should. The first day I started experimenting, I remember having some success by matching on main title information. I think I might try that again today. Unfortunately, that would result in multiple editions of one title being considered dupes. If it also lists actual dupes, it would still be better than nothing. Instead of having to search hundreds of titles, maybe we'd only have to search a few dozen. Or so I hope...

Vacation, catalog maintenance

2010-10-08T18:16:00.000-05:00

Wow, it's been almost a month and a half since my last post. My vacation had a little to do with that, but the rest was just...pre-vacation near burn-out, maybe?

My vacation went great. It took me a while to get comfortable with my niece, since I've never really been around babies before, but now I find I feel sad that I won't get to see her very often. At the very least, everyone in her family but her mom and dad is going to miss out on her first birthday - so sad!

Being back at work feels a little weird, but that'll wear off. With SCUUG only a week away, I've been reminding myself how to use MARCEdit for catalog maintenance by working on a project I started looking into right before my vacation. An unknown number of name headings in our catalog are messed up, with subfield d coming before subfield q, rather than after. I had been ignoring this problem, but now it's starting to interfere pretty significantly with my batch authority searching and loading process.

An example of the problem:
Babcock, C. J. $d 1894- $q (Clarence Joseph),

Should be:
Bacock, C. J. $q (Clarence Joseph), $d 1894-

In the past, I occasionally fixed these by hand as I came across them. However, this is annoying, and also bad for my wrist. Global editing is a good thing, and this looked like something that should be fixable globally. I just wasn't sure how.

It turns out it's possible with MARCEdit, and I figured out how to do it all on my own. Woohoo! I'm planning on running the fix for all the oldest records in our catalog (nearly 200,000 I think) over the course of a few weeks. That should take care of most, if not all, of the problem, and then I can get back to batch searching and loading authority records.

While playing with all of that, I also learned the first few steps for a new tool in MARCEdit that allows you to extract certain records from a larger file, edit the smaller file of records, and (in theory) re-insert the edited records back into the larger file. This will be great for all kinds of projects, once I figure out how to get the reinsertion part to work.

Cataloger humor on Twitter

2010-08-31T22:19:00.000-05:00

Turns out I even like Fake AACR2 better than Fake RDA.

RDA and the RDA Toolkit

2010-08-31T09:22:00.000-05:00

It's the final day of the RDA Toolkit free trial (I will not call it the "open access period," as this implies things that aren't true), so I decided to write a post about it.

When I originally began hearing about the RDA Toolkit, there were some things about it that I thought sounded kind of exciting. I liked the idea of being able to keyword search RDA. I liked the idea of a mapping between AACR2 and RDA and between MARC and RDA. I also thought the workflows feature sounded like it would be really useful.

Then I got to experience the reality of the RDA Toolkit, and not just what all the webinars had been telling me. My original plan was to try to catalog a few things using the Toolkit, to get a feel for what it would be like to actually use it. I also planned to try out any available Library of Congress RDA Toolkit workflows. It turns out my original plan was a bit ambitious.

I haven't been able to catalog a single thing with the RDA Toolkit. Granted, I haven't been able to use it as much as I would have liked, but the bigger problem is that it is so hard to figure out where to begin. If I take a look at the RDA table of contents, do I see something that helps me easily navigate cataloging a book, versus a DVD, versus a website? No. I see "Recording Attributes of..." (there is no way to get the full chapter title to show, not even by expanding the pane, so it's not until you click into a section of the chapter that you can guess it's actually "Recording Attributes of Manifestations and Items"), "Recording Primary Relationships..." (same problem as the previous chapter), "Recording Relationships to..." (again, same problem), and "Recording Relationships between..." (and again, same problem). Where am I supposed to begin? Even when I can find a logical starting place, if I don't consult other chapters, I won't be able to completely catalog the item.

"But wait!" you with knowledge of cataloging with AACR2 say. "Isn't it the same with AACR2?" Well, in some ways, yes. Chapter 1 is the primary chapter one works with, but that information needs to be combined with other appropriate chapters, as well as chapters for choosing and building access points. However, with my nice print copy of AACR2, it's fairly easy to see the overall structure and pick out the chapters I need to use. I read many of these chapters from beginning to end when I was first learning to catalog, and now I rarely have to consult any of it. However, when I do need to consult it, it's fairly easy for me to figure out where to go. Each bibliographic description chapter has the same overall structure. There's even an index, for easier access when I can't remember exactly which chapter I need to consult to, say, deal with honorifics.

The RDA Toolkit is supposed to be the best way to use RDA: "...most users agree the preferred way to interact with RDA is online via the RDA..." (Troy Linker, AUTOCAT listserv post, "RDA Toolkit Solo-User Pricing, Double-User Offer, and RDA Print," 4/28/10). I'm not sure I agree with this, and I wonder if those users that supposedly said this qualified their statements with "but even the Toolkit is hard to use." At least with AACR2, navigating the multiple chapters needed to catalog something is made easier with an index and an overall organization that accepts the physical reality of the items being cataloged (which, yes, has drawbacks when you're dealing with items that are electronic, rather than physical, but wouldn't it have been easier to just overhaul the e-resources portions of AACR2?). With the Toolkit, there is no index. When I asked whether there would be an index for RDA, I believe the answer was something along the lines of "probably not" or maybe "we'll consider it." While I love the idea of being able to keyword search my cataloging rules, that's only a good option once I know those rules. I could probably do successful keyword searches in AACR2. Unfortunately, one of the big things about RDA is that it overhauls cataloging vocabulary with FRBR terminology. An index with decent cross references could help clear things up, but, instead, I'm left with keyword searching. I know there are those who figure out which AACR2 rule corresponds to which RDA rule (connections which, as far as I can tell, have not yet been implemented as easy-to-use links in the Toolkit), but isn't RDA supposed to replace AACR2? It's not a good replacement if you find yourself having to consult the "replaced" rules just to use the new ones.

So, part of me wonders if it wouldn't be easier to use a print version of RDA, which would also have the advantage of not requiring a yearly subscription fee. I'd save myself a bit of eyestrain by not having to read through it on a screen (yes, you can print RDA from the RDA Toolkit, but then why not buy it in print in the first place?). However, then I remember the monstrous bulk of the RDA draft. Without an index, I'm not sure even a print version of RDA would be easier to use.

When I was first learning to use AACR2, I wrote in it, and I marked pages with post-it notes. In the RDA Toolkit, you can create bookmarks, which is nice, but wouldn't it be even better if it were easier to add bookmarked information into a workflow? Maybe I've missed something, but the Workflows portion of the Toolkit, the part that I was most excited about, seems awfully clunky. The Workflows editor has many of the features of something like MS Word, and, as far as I can tell, no features that integrate it really well with RDA. When I bookmark parts of RDA, where is the feature in the RDA workflow creator that allows me to easily add bookmarked information to a workflow? Yes, I can copy and paste, but I can do that in MS Word. There should be more benefits to using the Workflow creator/editor than just the ability to easily share workflows with others.

"The RDA Toolkit is designed to reach several audiences. The largest audience is of course catalogers, but some of the functions while marginally useful for catalogers were designed with educators, system developers, researchers, and the wider metadata community in mind." -- Troy Linker again, RDA Listserv, "Re: [RDA-L] RDA Toolkit - Schemas," 8/26/10

This is a point that has been made several times, that RDA and the RDA Toolkit are intended to be used by a wider audience than just catalogers. I'm wondering, does ALA Publishing really expect RDA to be adopted outside the library community? If even we have difficulty understanding it and how to apply it, I seriously doubt other communities would want to make the effort to wade through it. By trying to be all things to everyone, RDA has, in my opinion, managed to not really serve anyone. If anyone does use it (which library catalogers may have to, if the Library of Congress adopts it), they will probably not be using the RDA Toolkit. Instead, I imagine most people would rely heavily on a "Concise RDA" of some sort, or RDA cheatsheets. Another possibility is that those who do use the Toolkit will rely primarily on borrowed workflows, either used as is or with local edits. The Library of Congress' RDA workflows, while still a bit daunting, are much easier to use for the actual act of cataloging than the full RDA.

Last I heard, our library will not be subscribing to the RDA Toolkit yet. There's really no point. It's too cumbersome for me to begin using right now, and, anyway, there's not point in using it if it hasn't been officially adopted by the Library of Congress yet. Plus, if I were to switch to using it, I would first need to spend a few hours with Tracy, changing our ILS display settings and adding new MARC fields. For now, I guess I'll wait and see. It's just too bad that ALA Publishing set up such a limited trial period - why not extend the trial until the Library of Congress has actually made its decision? I doubt ours is the only library that will not be subscribing because it's not yet clear whether it would be a waste of money.

A week or so of Second Life

2010-08-28T21:59:00.003-05:00

For a large chunk of time, I sort of forgot about Second Life. To get back in the swing of things in preparation for a meeting, I spent the past week or so exploring. Which is pretty much all I do in Second Life, because I haven't really felt inclined to try to build things. Well, except for that one time I accidentally created a cone, which, to my horror, stayed in the world after I brought it into being. As far as I know, the cone is still there, because I wasn't really sure how to get rid of it. Thankfully, it's tiny and underwater, so maybe no one will ever notice.

Anyway, I took pictures. Here they are.

This place is Chouchou_V. I think it's some band's island. It was empty when I went there, but the notecard I was given when I went to the island indicated that the band sometimes does Second Life concerts here. In this picture, you can see me at the top of some very high stairs, perilously close to falling. It's a pretty, creepy place. It makes me think of a cathedral of bone in a dream world.

This is my avatar in a place called Alirium. It has giant bunnies. It's a little hard to tell, but there's also another avatar with wings a little to my left. She never moved or spoke. Then again, I was a little too intimidated to try to strike up a conversation. I didn't stay here long, because the bunnies kind of freaked me out.

The next time I logged on to Second Life, I was a particle cloud. At work, with a less wonderful video card, I became an egg (I'll see about posting that one sometime - it really is pretty funny). Particle Cloud Me could move around, and apparently other people saw my avatar, and not the particle cloud. Even though I could still do things, I wanted my avatar back. I opened a case with Second Life tech support, waited a few days, heard nothing from them, and eventually figured out how to fix things myself. By the way, I was in a place called Nemo when I took this picture. It's a gorgeous steampunk-style island. Like so many other islands I've been to, it was completely devoid of other avatars.

These three pictures were taken on a strange island called Cheese. Cheese is like an onion of crazy - as you move around, you think you've seen it all until new stuff rezzes into being. I found it fascinating, creepy, and a little horrific. From what I could tell, what powers all this craziness is lots of capitalism. Any building you could go inside was filled to the brim with products you could buy. For example, in the third picture, I am within view of a building called "Ultra Mega Mass Homicide," which sells, if I remember correctly, scary clown skins, and a building called "That Handsome Devil," which also sold stuff (can't remember what). I'm standing on a platform in front of another store, which, among other things, sold dancing Michael Jacksons and dancing Christopher Walkens. It's too bad I only know how to take snapshots and not video - this picture just does not communicate the creepiness of turning around to see a frantically slithering Christopher Walken.

Also, you may have noticed, but my avatar is now black-and-white with wings. After finally figuring out how to not be an egg or a particle cloud, I decided to give my avatar a drastic makeover. This was the result.

I'm pretty sure this place was called Little Kasiopaya. These are not really representative pictures. Basically, from what I could tell, everything worth seeing on this island was enclosed in a giant glowing sphere - I'm standing right outside that sphere in the first picture. In the second picture, I turned around to see what was outside the sphere. As you can see, there was lots of space. Literally. Inside the sphere are various scenes which I think are supposed to depict areas of the galaxy. Or maybe giant jewels. In addition to providing some interesting views, I think this island was also intended as a good make-out spot. I came across one couple doing just that, as well as some "hug" and "cuddle"...things (jewels, spheres, whatever). I know, this probably makes no sense. I just don't have the Second Life vocabulary to describe this kind of stuff, and I didn't take the right pictures.

I am 100% broke in Second Life. I can't even do the dirt cheap fishing that one island offered as its fun activity. Luckily, sight-seeing is free. Petting the dogs at the VKC Dog island was also free. Here's my avatar, petting a doberman. All or most of the dogs here cost at least a few thousand Linden dollars to adopt. I think I'll wait and see if I can find my avatar a free pet.

Semantics vs. the Library Catalog

2010-08-24T11:45:00.002-05:00

"Not" is a very important word - leave the "not" out of any sentence, and you end up with a very different meaning. However, library catalogs don't necessarily care about that kind of thing, which can create a bit of a disconnect between them and their users.

Take this book I just cataloged: I can't believe it's not fattening! : 0ver 150 ridiculously easy recipes for the super busy by Devin Alexander. You won't ever find this book by searching for I can't believe it's not fattening. You'll either have to search for it with everything in quotes, or (the more amusing option) you'll have to search for I can't believe it's fattening, leaving out the "not."

I've heard that there's maybe one ILS out there that doesn't ask its users to rely on special tricks for getting around the "special Boolean words" issue. Ours is not that ILS.

Unauthorized subject headings

2010-07-20T07:54:00.004-05:00

I've managed to reduce our unauthorized 650 fields (subject headings that don't have matching authority records in our system - this doesn't necessarily mean they aren't valid subject headings) to below 16,000. Or maybe that's the number of bibliographic records that contain unauthorized subject headings, I'm not sure. The number does not include Killeen-only records (which will one day be disappearing) or Cross Timbers stuff (which use subject headings in ways I don't quite understand and am not sure I should be messing with).

It's a small victory, and it's a long way from 0, but I'm still happy about it.

Manga Guides, the complete package

2010-07-09T20:10:00.004-05:00

What you see on the left is a whole lot of awesome, all 6 of the Manga Guides currently available from No Starch Press. If you can't read the titles, they are The Manga Guide to
- Molecular Biology
- Calculus
- Physics
- Electricity
- Databases
- Statistics

I've read the one on molecular biology. I thought it was ok, but not great. Still, I love the idea of learning a bit more about a subject via a format that I enjoy, manga. From what I understand, all six guides wrap their educational content in a simple story. In the molecular biology one, a professor has two students in his introductory molecular biology class who are failing, so he tells them they have to do special make-up work. On his private island. Yes, he has a private island, complete with virtual reality teaching tools and holographic image projection capability, which he uses to give his students minor heart attacks and hands on experience with the concepts he teaches. By the end of the book, the girls have learned a lot about molecular biology, and they also learn a secret the professor has been keeping from them. I knew that the story was going to be pretty simple and likely silly, so I didn't have a lot of expectations in that area. My biggest problem with the book had to do with its information, which didn't always seem very balanced and which I'm pretty sure left out a few important bits (if I remember my high school biology classes correctly). Also, chunks of the book were just text, with heads in the margins to show who was speaking - pretty boring.

But just because I didn't think the molecular biology book was all that great doesn't mean I don't want to try out the other books. The ones on statistics and databases are next on my list - I'll have to see about requesting them via ILL sometime.

Cookery, again

2010-07-02T16:58:00.000-05:00

I think I managed to change all our "cookery" authority records to their new "cooking" form. That means that, tonight, all subject headings linked to those records should change to "cooking" instead of "cookery."

This does not necessarily mean that all instances of "cookery" in our subject headings will be gone. Our Children's subject headings will probably continue to use "cookery" - since I only do authority work on Library of Congress subject headings and not Children's, MeSH, or anything else, the only subject headings that ever get updated are Library of Congress subject headings. Also, we have some Library of Congress subject headings in our catalog that don't have their corresponding subject authority records loaded yet - these won't change to "cooking" until I change them by hand and/or load their authority records and force the headings to flip.

Subjects headings and DVDs continued

2010-07-01T18:12:00.001-05:00

The "Gay parents" vs. "Same-sex parents" argument on AUTOCAT is still ongoing.

In "cataloged DVDs" news, today I cataloged an interesting consumer education one called Shopping behind the seams : judging quality in clothes. It shows how to judge the quality of clothes before you buy them, so that you don't end up spending more for clothes than what they're worth. I didn't see enough to know if it's all just commonsense advice or if it includes tips you might not normally think of, but it at least has the potential to be really good, so I might check it out sometime.

Subject heading arguments: "Gay parents" vs. "Same-sex parents"

2010-06-30T17:18:00.000-05:00

The big argument on AUTOCAT today was over the subject heading "Gay parents" vs. "Same-sex parents." There was some confusion over whether or not one authority record should have been cancelled in favor of the other (basically, "don't these mean the same thing?") or whether "Same-sex parents" should at least have a "broader topic" reference in the authority record for "Gay parents." I think it all came down to, "they are not necessarily redundant," with lots of references to films and sitcoms in which children have parent figures who are not gay but who are the same sex as one of their "actual" parents (a biological parent, or a guardian).

It kind of began to feel like a Friday thing (odd tangents, jokes, and other things that aren't really work-related are generally restricted to Fridays on AUTOCAT, although sometimes Friday starts a few days early), but similar discussions have happened in the past over other subject headings. Most often the subject headings causing confusion are religious or legal ones, where it is sometimes difficult for those without a lot of knowledge about the topics to understand how they should be applied.

Hulu on the new monitor

2010-06-30T06:53:00.004-05:00

I started using Hulu again for the first time in a long time. I like watching stuff full screen if I can, and I was worried that any subtitled stuff I might want to watch would be too blurry full screen on my new monitor, but it turns out that it's not much worse than when I viewed stuff full screen on my laptop. Yay!

So, my current show is Naruto Shippuden. My dad keeps calling me up to give me unasked for spoilers, so I figure it's finally time to start watching the show - hopefully I can eventually get to the point where I'm watching it too quickly for him to spoil things for me. That may be a while, though - right now on Hulu, the show has reached 165 episodes.

It's DVD time

2010-06-29T17:02:00.003-05:00

I changed my procedures for cataloging DVDs a little today. Although I now catalog almost everything in OCLC Connexion and then import it into WorkFlows, AV materials are some of the few things I still catalog directly in WorkFlows. Since my wrist still hurts a bit when I use a mouse, though, (it's getting better, but slowly) I wasn't looking forward to cataloging anything in WorkFlows - there are a lot of things that I need to do while cataloging (like adding a new field) that, as far as I know, have no shortcut keys in WorkFlows. With OCLC Connexion, I can use the keyboard or mouse as much as I want, just by mapping some things to certain keystrokes or setting up macros.

So, to save my wrist, I cataloged DVDs in Connexion today instead of in WorkFlows. The only thing I had to remember to do was change the title control numbers of the brief records in our system before I imported the records. It worked out very nicely, and I think I'll continue to do it this way in the future - not only did it reduce the amount of time I had to spend using a mouse, it also reduced the number of times I had go back and forth between different programs, because I could do both cataloging and authority work in one place.

Basically, good news for me, and maybe I'll get through all of these DVDs a little more quickly. Or not. I would've thought the Gone with the Wind record would have been wonderful, but that one ended up needing the most work out of all the ones I did today. After all, how can something be a "2-disc edition" and yet supposedly have 3-discs? Sloppy editing on someone's part, and everyone who's used the record (including me) is afraid to edit the master record. Or it really is a 3-disc "2-disc edition"...

Going through stuff, or at least thinking about it

2010-06-22T17:24:00.000-05:00

I have almost 1600 unread emails. Part of the problem is that I don't subscribe to the digest form of anything, so nearly all of them come from the various listservs I subscribe to. Almost half of them come from PERSNAME-L. It's a great listserv for finding about about possible incorrect name heading forms in bibliographic records and, I think, the occasional name authority record correction/change. However, I almost never have the time to go through the emails, and, even when I do, it's stuff I tend not to be able to do in great big chunks (as in "physically can't do in great big chunks"). PERSNAME-L is followed by MARCEDIT-L (the listserv for MARCEdit, great MARC editing software), another great resource. Mostly, I read MARCEDIT-L for catalog maintenance ideas, although I've gotten an amazing amount of help just by emailing the listserv any questions I have.

While working on cleaning out my emails, I finally decided to delete some emails that mentioned taking care of Bear after his surgery. It's weird, boring little emails can make me sad - before those, it was photos of Bear and Yuki I found on my cell phone (which have no plans to ever delete). My cell phone is like a graveyard of pets - I found photos of Cinnamon (my family's dog, who died days after I came to Stephenville) and Felix (one of my family's cats, who also died after I came to Stephenville).

Webinar - "Making the Most of RDA Toolkit's Open-Access Period"

2010-06-17T10:33:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching the newest RDA Toolkit webinar, "Making the Most of RDA Toolkit's Open-Access Period." I missed out on some of it, because Donna and I were talking about RDA and what we might be doing about it (and lamenting that you can only get the best deal on RDA Toolkit before it's clear whether the Library of Congress and large universities will even be adopting it). However, I don't think I missed too much - honestly, a lot of it was the same as the previous RDA webinar I went to (except for updated pricing info, areas of the RDA Toolkit that used to not work now do) and, for the most part, it felt like a marketing presentation (because it was). Troy Linker, the guy who did the presentation, isn't a cataloger, and this presentation wasn't about using the RDA Toolkit to catalog something, it was about using the RDA Toolkit, period.

I'm still not pleased that there's no index, by the way. The RDA Toolkit uses some terminology that's going to be new to me, and it would be nice to be able to turn to an index and find cross-references from the terms I know to the terms RDA is now using, i.e. FRBR terms. I don't have AACR2 rule numbers memorized, unlike some catalogers. I just know that, if I have a question about something, I need to flip to the appropriate chapter. RDA Toolkit lets you find rules via keyword searching, via looking through the table of contents (which uses an organization system that is alien to those who actually catalog), and via looking up AACR2 rule numbers (if there is a correlation between the rule and RDA). I like being able to flip through a physical book, though. Yes, RDA will be released in paper form, but it is so not meant to be used in paper form. And. There. Is. No. Index. Those who saw the draft will remember that the table of contents alone was 70 pages. The print version would be unwieldy enough with an index. Without one, it will be an exercise in self-torture.

During the first few minutes of the presentation, Mr. Linker made sure to say that RDA will better help library users "find, identify, select, and obtain" the information they want. You know, right, that saying something doesn't automatically make it true? First, from what I've heard, RDA isn't really all that different from AACR2 - it's just that the way it's being presented (complete reorganization of the rules, best used online, etc.) is completely different. Second, nothing RDA says will change anything unless a library's ILS can actually make things happen. Our ILS may have its...issues, but it's still better than some I've heard about, and even our ILS can't seem to manage to effectively link different editions, translations, etc., even when fields that should link them are provided. If there's a problem, that problem lies either in how a library's ILS is interpreting MARC, or that problem lies in MARC itself. Or both. I don't know enough about programming to really know the answer to that one.

Well, that's it for now. More on RDA the next time I go to another webinar. Or after I actually get to try it out. Maybe there will eventually be a webinar just about using RDA to actually catalog something - I'd rather have one of those than another marketing webinar.

Playing with GIMP again

2010-06-14T23:30:00.000-05:00

GIMP is way too much fun. I've been experimenting with paths (transforming them, painting along them, etc.). I came up with a little project for myself - make a Dick Smith Library wallpaper. Well, I'm not sure how recognizable the logo is, because the selection I turned into a path was really bad, but here it is. I did the jungle-y text to try to make it look like the logo was done strangely on purpose. This wallpaper was for work - my next project will be to make a good one for my ginormous new monitor at home. Somewhere along the line, I hope to learn how to create better paths.

There are actually 3 versions of this wallpaper. I originally created one with a light yellow background and green Tarleton text, but I like the darker version better when used as wallpaper, because icons show up better. I thought the filter I used on the logo and text was kind of cool - I think it looks a bit like a woodcut this way.

Pages and pages of names

2010-06-04T17:13:00.006-05:00

For a while there, I had been working on batch loads of authority files for names in our 100 fields that WorkFlows said were unauthorized (which still leaves the 600s and 700s, and maybe 800s). I sort of stopped working on that project for a while - I think that I was working on the C's when I stopped. I thought I'd done a pretty thorough job, and then I started working on the project again. From A to C, I was able to batch load more than 2500 authority records. I think a lot of them came from e-resource records, which means every time we get batches of e-book records added to the system, the number of unauthorized headings I have to deal with just balloons. Really, I already knew that, I had just never had it demonstrated to me quite so clearly before. Oh, free MARC records. Even the best of them bloat my catalog maintenance reports.

I'll keep plugging along. Going through all the names to find the ones that shouldn't be batch loaded is annoying, though, like a word search puzzle that never ends. Luckily, I may be getting a little help with that. We'll see.

I've got my procedures for name headings pretty much figured out, but I need to take another look at the way I've been doing subject headings. Hmm.... On the plus side, I'm getting really good at doing nifty things with Find and Replace in Word.

Something to look forward to

2010-05-28T21:16:00.003-05:00

In a couple weeks or so, I will have a new computer, my first desktop PC in 8 years. I've been saving up for it for two years and can't wait to get it - I hope everything goes ok. It took quite a bit of time on the phone to get the whole "being shipped to a different address than the billing address" part to work out, but I'd rather deal with that than having to take a couple days off, one day for the monitor and one for the computer itself, just to wait around for the FedEx guy.

The nifty thing about having to order this over the phone (because of the address complications) is that I discovered that I get an additional discount for working for Tarleton, so the whole thing was $100 cheaper than I originally thought it would be. Yay! It's not just Dell that gives us discounts, it's HP, too.

The reference desk, aka the research vending machine

2010-05-26T06:14:00.000-05:00

I'm sure people who work at the reference desk more regularly than I do have had this happen to them plenty of times before, but the Unshelved comic for today reminds me of one particular experience at the reference desk I had. I don't know how much of it people retain, but I usually try to make sure that I talk about what I'm doing as I do searches for people - maybe they're actually paying attention, maybe they're not, but usually they at least stick around and look like they're paying attention.

This one particular time I'm thinking of, the person didn't even do that. I started to do the search based on what they first told me when they walked up to the desk, looked up to ask for some clarification on a few things, and saw them walking away to go sit at one of the computers. Which automatically made me think, "so, what am I, the research vending machine?" I managed to get the guy to actually come back to the reference desk (I also offered to help him do stuff at his computer, on the off chance he was worried he might lose his computer to someone), and then I found out that he was actually part of a two-person group. The second person stuck around with me to watch me search and clarify things as I searched, and the first person walked off again.

I wonder how common this sort of thing is? I had never had someone come up to me before, tell me what they were researching, and just go to a computer while I was in the middle of searching databases for them.

I can't remember at what time of year this happened. Maybe it's more common during finals time?

Wiki updates on series searching

2010-05-20T17:22:00.002-05:00

Today I updated our Staff Wiki with all kinds of new information about series title searching, although a lot of it won't really be true until the database gets reindexed (after the reindexing, I'll be adding another illustrative image to the stuff I wrote in the wiki). However, I'm really excited about the recent changes Tracy and I did - I hope they'll make our series title browse more useful. At the very least, the changes cleared up a lot of inconsistencies we had in our settings - always a big "yay" in my book. It's no wonder I had so much trouble wrapping my brain around the way our series browse searching works.

Unrelated to the actual content of the wiki page ("Catalog Records", which should probably be renamed, but I can't figure out what would be better), I'm also happy I managed to add a table of contents to the page. I have a feeling the page will get pretty unwieldy in the future, and a table of contents should help deal with that a bit.

RDA Update webinar

2010-05-06T19:06:00.000-05:00

Today's Amigos "RDA Update" webinar was quite good, although a bit (more than a bit?) biased against RDA. It's the first RDA presentation I've attended that included a list of some of the primary changes RDA is making to bibliographic records (although, since RDA has not officially come out yet, even this is still technically preliminary).

Whether the general cataloging community will implement RDA is still up in the air. If it doesn't, I doubt we'll adopt it either. I'm still waiting to see how things will go with the Library of Congress, how SirsiDynix plans to adapt to it, and whether we can afford it (although recent changes to the pricing may help with that, as long as everyone at DSL is ok with only one RDA Toolkit user at a time - the paper version is a last resort, because it's monstrous and doesn't have an index).

Although RDA obviously directly affects me, because cataloging is a big part of my job, it will affect others at DSL as well if we implement it. Those who do some cataloging will need to know about it and how it differs from AACR2 - part of the reason why it's a little frustrating that I'm always the only one at RDA information sessions. I suppose I'll need to put together training sessions or something.

It's not just people who catalog who will be affected, however. RDA will very much affect how our records look and, if SirsiDynix gets its act together, it will very much affect how searching works. Yes, that means reference librarians will have to know what's going on, too, and even users (for whom most cataloging changes probably usually go unnoticed) will likely realize something has changed, even if all they consciously notice is the superficial changes.

Here's what we can look forward to so far (warning, cataloger jargon-heavy - I'll need to do a less jargon-y list for the staff blog at some point). I don't mention FRBR at all, although it's very important. I'd like to look at a FRBRized demo catalog that was mentioned in the webinar before I bring it up in relation to RDA and the future of catalog searching. So, record changes:

GMD (General Material Designations) in the 245 fields are going away. That means that something that was previously "Clinical microbiology [videorecording]." will become "Clinical microbiology." RDA assumes that you have an OPAC that graphically displays what an item is. If we implement RDA, unless we also implement item type graphics, I will have to edit every record that would previously have had a GMD so that it once again has a GMD, unless we can figure out some kind of workaround that can draw from the three new MARC field that will be taking the place of 245 subfield h.
The "rule of three" is gone. Now, either every author/contributor will be recorded, or, at the very least, the bit that formerly said "et al." will say something like "and 5 others." Each library will have to decide for itself how many names they wish to record and how many they will wish to trace, potentially resulting in the need for even more local editing than is currently necessary. There are both benefits and drawbacks to this change.
"Editor as author" is now ok. I'm assuming this means that an editor can be used as a main entry. Compiler can be used as main entry, too.
All abbreviations that are not actually used on the item itself are abolished. Everything will be spelled out. "Ed." will be "edition", "Dept." will be "Department". You get the idea.
Cryptic/Latin terms like s.l. and s.n. will no longer be used. Instead, "place not given" and "name not given" will be used (unless you're at a non-English speaking library, in which case you'll be cataloging in whatever language is spoken by your user base).
Authority records will be changing, although I'm not quite sure how. They'll have more information in them, at any rate, although I don't know that anyone but catalogers will notice.
There will no longer be any need to justify headings in records. That means that, if you think it's appropriate to add a name heading to a record, you can, even if that name is mentioned nowhere else in the record. It's a freeing idea for a cataloger, but it could also potentially cause problems in terms of record sharing and future record maintenance, since it would not be immediately apparent why the headings were used and what their usefulness, or not, is.

That's all I can think of for now. As far as the immediate use/understandability issues go, I'm most concerned about the lack of GMD, because of the way our OPAC is set up to display our records - true, I can choose to enter "hybrid RDA" records into our system, but I'd like to have to do less record editing, not more. As far as the rest of it goes, the thought of all that typing exhausts me. I can understand why some users might like some of the changes, but I, as the one responsible for doing all that cataloging, am not happy about the amount of time things will probably take. I'm not sure how many headings (for instance, authors) I'll prefer to have us trace - it wouldn't take too much time, if I did a sloppy job of it and didn't check each heading I added against available authority records, but it would take quite a bit of time if I did a good job of it.

I'm really interested to see what SirsiDynix will do after RDA is released. Of course, it may take a few years before anything happens. It's at least comforting to learn that SirsiDynix is one of the ILS vendors involved in the testing of RDA.

Waiting and watching

2010-04-30T06:54:00.004-05:00

The vet wasn't able to say for sure what's causing Bear's lower body weakness (his hind legs don't have as much range of movement and control, and his tail is mostly limp). Apparently, he might have hurt his back. He might also have degenerative osteoarthritis. That second one scares me, since it means he's only going to get worse. (I love Rat Health Guide, by the way - it's been very helpful over the years.)

The vet has put him on steroids, and today was his third day getting them. So far, I'm not sure if he's improved, but the vet said it might take as long as a week to see results. I'm also a bit worried about his tumor, which seems to have gotten a bit larger. I had originally planned to take him in for surgery if it looked like the tumor was going to start growing, but with his other problems now I'm not so sure. I'm hoping the universe will be nice to Bear and just leave him alone for a while.

I'm working on creating a single-story cage for him. It's basically just a plastic storage container with some aluminum screen material on top - I doubt he's athletic enough anymore to make it out of the container, even if I chose not to give it a cover, but I figure it's better safe than sorry. I'll probably put him in the new cage tonight, so I can see how he deals with it before work on Sunday.

Item IDs transformed into barcodes

2010-04-21T17:06:00.002-05:00

I dug up Merry Bortz's "Report Makeovers" PowerPoint presentation, in which, among other things, she explains how to turn item IDs in reports into scanable barcodes using MS Word's Find and Replace - and I actually got it to work! The current cleanup project I applied this to is fairly small - only 60 or 70 item types need to be globally changed - but it's nice to know that I've figured out how to do this, in case I've ever got something a bit larger and/or more complex to deal with.

That was probably one of the most awesome SIRSI presentations I've been to so far, and I'm applying what I learned on an almost weekly basis - maybe not the "item IDs into barcodes" part, but definitely the parts where she talked about cleaning up reports. That's how I set things up for batch searching in OCLC.

Some presentations are just so worth the entire cost of a conference - and I'm saying this 6 months after the conference. :o)

Second Life snapshot

2010-04-21T08:38:00.004-05:00

I figured out how to take a picture of my screen in Second Life (not a screenshot, which would also show my avatar's name floating above her head, but a "clean" picture). So, here's a picture of me on some island - I can't remember the name of it. It's the one where I fell into the ocean. In the background, you can see a dunk tank, which I've never seen in action, and a merry-go-round. I think there's some kind of water park or something in this picture, too. My computer doesn't really like this island much, because there's so much stuff on it - it takes forever for everything to rez (rez = to appear/finish loading). I don't currently have access to a computer that meets Second Life's minimum requirements - I wonder what Second Life would be like if I did?

Second Life - TLA presentations and solidity problems

2010-04-16T18:34:00.003-05:00

After weeks (maybe even more than a month?) of not getting on Second Life, I logged on today so that I could attend some presentations on libraries and Second Life. The presentations were pretty interesting, and they gave me some ideas for places to visit in Second Life that might point to ways DSL could set up its Second Life presence.

One place I was particularly interested in was Know How Island, so I visited that. I'll have to spend a bit more time there, but for the most part I found it interesting, creative, and frustrating. Know How Island sets up little learning activities so that they're a bit like games. There's a swimming pool that's supposed to teach you how Boolean searches work, a boardwalk that you can explore to learn a bit more about how to judge sources, and lots of other stuff (I even found a fish that gave me a notecard that included its subject headings and a few related narrow research topics). As far as exploration goes, it's pretty cool, a bit bizarre, and it must have taken lots of work. I'm not sure it's quite as fun as the presentations today made it seem, though. For example, I couldn't get the darn Boolean pool to advance to the next stage, no matter what I did (were those fuchsia things supposed to be red?) - this frustration factor was repeated in other areas of the island, and I don't think it's necessarily a failing of the island, but rather a failing of Second Life in general. Still, the island is interesting and I plan to explore it more later.

After Know How Island, I went to Info Island, which is another place I'm going to have to spend more time in. From there I went to Info Island International (or something like that) - lots of good stuff there, almost too much. Feeling a bit of information overload just by being there, I decided to teleport somewhere else and decided to see what Second Life thinks is my Avatar's home. I don't know where it took me, but I don't think I've ever been there. I certainly don't remember ever having been somewhere with a road before. A road I promptly fell through and couldn't get out of.

So, to get out of being trapped under the road, I teleported to yet another island, where I immediately almost fell to the bottom of a deep, dark ocean and was saved only by remembering how to not just fly, but fly up. Then I decided I'd hit my Second Life max and logged out. It's a good thing avatars can't die.

Bear go rawr

2010-04-16T06:50:00.004-05:00

One of the drawbacks of having a pet rat is that they don't have very good eyesight. I got Bear all excited over a piece of apple, opened his cage to give it to him, and forgot to be careful about where I stick my fingers - so now I'm a little bit wounded. Thankfully, it's in a easy place to bandage and he wasn't trying to do damage, so the bite wasn't very deep and I only bled a little. But ouch.

World War II is over - next up, the Vitenam War

2010-04-09T06:50:00.002-05:00

Technically, we're dealing with the Vietnamese Conflict, not the Vietnam War. Hopefully, all our Vietnamese Conflict headings are now updated - I was going to check, but I seem to be having problems accessing the library's website. More than likely I'll have some manual cleanup to do, though. World War II took more manual cleanup than I expected. Just a few examples - headings in which the war started in 1930 or 1936 (typos, don't you love them?), and an instance where the war was a geographic subject heading (which would mean World War II was a place, not an event - an interesting idea for, say, a writer to play around with, but not something that has any place in our catalog).

World War II ends...TONIGHT!

2010-04-07T06:54:00.003-05:00

Or so I hope. Last night I discovered to my embarrassment (as I was helping a student, actually) that we still have books with subject headings in which World War II hasn't ended - the subject heading used is "World war, 1939-" instead of "World war, 1939-1945." I'm hoping they'll all "flip" to the correct heading tonight.

This is why ongoing catalog maintenance is a good idea. I've also noticed that, if a person has died sometime after 1950, there's a good chance they're still alive in our name and subject headings. "Aged" (which should be "Older people") is a known problem and being worked on - I could flip them overnight, but there tend to be more problems with these records than just a single out-of-date heading, so I'm doing them by hand. Headings containing "Afro-American" (which should be "African American") are also still in the process of being flipped - the remaining ones basically need to be done by hand.

::sigh:: I could really use a second me for full-time maintenance work. However, our "browse" searches are working much better than they used to.

Cataloging April Fool's

2010-04-02T07:32:00.003-05:00

A cataloging-related April Fool's joke that got me: Librarians Give Permanence to Twitter

DSL audiobook cataloging changes

2010-03-29T12:40:00.001-05:00

I'm just about done cataloging all our new audiobooks. In order to speed up the cataloging of audiobooks and, I hope, improve the way they're displayed in our catalog, here's some things I've started doing. Note to any catalogers who may stumble upon this: these are local edits only, so don't freak out. I rarely edit audiobook master records.

Statements such as "abridged" and "unabridged" are moved from the 500 field (a miscellaneous "note" field) to the 250 field (used for edition statements). Although these statements aren't technically edition statements, according to the way they're defined in OCLC Bibliographic Formats and Standards (I wasn't able to find anything this specific in AACR2, so AACR2 may be more flexible in its definition of "edition"), even if 500 notes for audiobooks displayed in our OPAC, and I don't believe they do, it would take a little work for our users to see what many audiobook listeners consider important information.
What this means for catalog users: Whether an audiobook is abridged or unabridged will display right next to the title in our results lists.
I'm no longer listening to even a portion of each audiobook. According to AACR2, the chief source of information for sound recordings is, for CDs, the disc and label and, for cassettes, the cassette and label. Listening to the discs wasn't really accomplishing anything other than making the cataloging process take quite a bit longer.
What this means for catalog users: Probably not much, unless the discs are defective in some way. In theory, listening to the discs also allowed me to spot-check them for problems. I still visually examine the discs for scratches, but I could potentially miss problems that might only make themselves known by listening to the discs. However, by the time I catalog things, it's usually well past the period when we'd be able to send something back. If we were truly concerned about defective discs, we'd need to have our Acquisitions students check them as they received them.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I now add the 306 field, which contains standardized playing time information, to each record that doesn't have it. Although this may add a little to the time it takes to edit an audiobook record, it doesn't add much - this takes less time to do than adding a 590.
What this means for catalog users: Probably not much, unless they want to try my advanced search, with all its annoying limitations. However, without this field, any kind of limiting by playing time is next to impossible.
I don't record producers, directors, etc. in audiobook records. In most cases, I'd have to at least listen to the first and last discs (or cassettes, although I've only had to deal with CDs so far) to get this information, skipping to the last track of the last disc and carefully fast forwarding until I got to the credits. I've done this before - this added significantly to the time it took to catalog an audiobook, and I kept asking myself, "What's the point?" I doubt our users are interested in the producer and director of, say, the audiobook version of Blink. Rest assured, I always record and add access points for audiobook readers.
What this means for catalog users: In the event that they actually are interested in audiobook producers, directors, etc., they're out of luck.

Ok, I think that's all the main changes I've recently made to the way I catalog our audiobooks. While certain information is left out that wouldn't have been before, I don't think the information is important to our users - if I'm wrong and someone has come to the reference desk asking about something that I'm now leaving out of records, let me know. The primary benefit of several of these changes is that audiobooks are getting cataloged much faster. This not only benefits me - it benefits our users, who get to see audiobooks on the shelves sooner and who don't have to wait ages for me to get back to cataloging print books because the audiobooks are taking up all of my time.

Audiobooks - limiting by playing time

2010-03-26T12:21:00.003-05:00

I'm working on cataloging a big stack of audiobooks, and looking over my "Audiobook Cheat Sheet" reminded me of something. A while back, I wrote a post about limiting searches to books of certain lengths. I mentioned that the method I was writing about for books could be used for audiobooks, but that it had certain severe limitations, because of the way audiobook lengths can be recorded in the 300 field.

Well, it turns out that there is a perfectly easy method of limiting audiobooks searches by length (although even this method has its limitations - see below). The problem is that the records have to have the proper field, and I know not all of ours do (we have more than 500 audiobooks, and I think only slightly more than one fifth of them have records than include the necessary field).

Basically, field 306 is for recording "playing time" in a standard manner. For all the details, see the MARC 21 Standards page for this field. Playing time is always recorded as hhmmss, where h is hours, m is minutes, and s is seconds. So, a sound recording that is 2 hours and 30 minutes long would be recorded as 023000.

Although the search one needs to perform to limit by information recorded in this field is what I would consider "advanced," it's a relatively easy advanced search. Simply use ? in place of any number you're not particularly concerned with. For instance, if I know I'd like an audiobook that's no more than 3 hours long, I could limit my search (an Advanced Search with Type: Audiobook selected) by adding, as a General Keyword search, 03????{306}

Now for the limitations. As far as I know, there's no way to use wildcards so that you can search for all audiobooks that are, say, less than three hours, including audiobooks that are 2 hours and 15 minutes, or only 30 minutes long. If you wanted something like that, I think you'd be limited to constructing the General Keyword part of the search so that it looks something like this: (03???? OR 02???? OR 01???? OR 00????){306} Finding things that are, say, more than 3 hours long could be pretty complicated. I had thought NOT would be a useful Boolean operator, but I'm not sure how I'd start the whole thing - (NOT 02???? NOT 01???? NOT 00????){306} isn't a permissible search.

Annoying, yes? If anyone can think of an easier way to construct searches for ranges of playing times, I'd love to hear it. Still, I suppose it could be worse. The lack of 306 fields in our records is probably the biggest limitation right now, but, since this information would already be recorded in the 300 fields, it wouldn't be too difficult to add 306 to the records that don't have it. At the very least, I'm going to make sure to add 306 to any new records I add to our system. It's too bad the information isn't easier to use, but maybe it will be one day in the future.

Authority control, without the shoulder pain

2010-03-23T09:06:00.003-05:00

For most people at DSL, the biggest benefit of all those unsmooshed fields we now have in our catalog is that subject and name headings can now be used properly. For me, the biggest benefit is that I can now run reports that will allow me to do some of our authority work in batches. The process still takes time, and there are so very many headings that will need to be dealt with individually, but being able to do any of this in batch makes me happy. Yesterday, I started writing up procedures for how the reports need to be run and massaged so that batch searching with them is possible, but I've already loaded 10,000 or so authority records with the help of this method, so I know it works.

By the way, prior to our unsmooshing project, those 10,000 authority records would have probably taken me more than 4 months to go through and load, assuming that the resulting shoulder pain from moving my hand back and forth between my mouse and keyboard for each record didn't completely cripple me. I ♥ batch searching.

Done, until next year

2010-03-14T21:57:00.002-05:00

I've finally done my taxes - after remembering them, forgetting them, remembering them, forgetting them, guilt-tripping myself about them, stressing about them, etc. Now I just have to get past that portion of my brain that wonders if I did something wrong or didn't do something I should have - I think it's related to the same portion of my brain that thinks I might've left a burner on, every time I leave the house. I have this vision of IRS employees being like the guys with blue latex gloves in Firefly.

GIMP, 1st attempt

2010-03-12T20:20:00.004-06:00

I think I'm addicted to GIMP. This was my 1st attempt at using it in years. For the most part, it was easier than I remembered. This was inspired by Library Lovers Day.

Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front edited by K.R. Roberto

2010-03-09T08:58:00.003-06:00

I just realized that I finished this a while back, and I haven't really written about it much. Like any book of essays, some of the essays are better than others. I'm probably not "radical" enough for some of the writers who contributed to this book, but I appreciate that some of them care enough about certain issues (like queer subject access, or the classification of Native American materials) to force the cataloging world to change, however slowly.

I think, for me, the most enjoyable and potentially useful section of the book was part 3, which included essays on innovative cataloging practices. One essay (Michelle Emanuel and Susannah Benedetti's "Browsing Berman, finding Fellini, cataloging Kurosawa: alternative approaches to cataloging foreign language films in academic libraries") would be good for me to consult, if only to get myself in the proper mindset, if we ever decide we need to do a cleanup of our DVD/VHS call numbers and subject headings (or genre headings). I've started trying to formulate and follow a plan for how I construct call numbers for DVDs such as those based on plays or books, but that doesn't take care of previous inconsistencies in practice.

Another good essay I'm going to have to go over again sometime is Wendy Baia's "User-centered serials cataloging," which includes tips for serials cataloging damage control. I don't know that we'd necessarily want to follow all those tips, but I can understand why she thinks they're necessary, and it wouldn't hurt to look through them and at least consider them and figure out what their implications would be for both our users and future serials record maintenance. Or maybe I'll just recommend this essay to Janie - I'm sure she'd like some of the tips.

Although it was short, I enjoyed Robin Fay's "'Why isn't my book on the shelf?' and other mysteries of the library," which was about error reporting. The author's library's catalog has links to an error reporting form at the bottom right of the screen - sometimes users report actual errors in records, and sometimes the "errors" they report are actually indications that the library needs to be clearer about certain things (for instance, the meaning of the word "discharged," letting students know what they need to do if they can't find a book the catalog says is there, etc.).

Jennifer Erica Sweda ("Dr. Strangecataloger: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the tag") and Dana M. Caudle and Cecilia M. Schmitz ("Drawing reference librarians into the fold") also wrote essays I enjoyed, although, with me anyway, they were preaching to the choir. Personally, I love the idea of user applied tags (in conjuction with the continued application of LCSH by catalogers, which I'm a little worried about the future of, after reading Thomas Mann's "What is going on at the Library of Congress?"), and getting input from reference librarians on how to improve the catalog seems like a no-brainer to me.

I'm going to have to take a closer look at Dana M. Caudle and Cecilia M. Schmitz's "MARC: it's not just for cataloging anymore," although I think some of what they describe in their essay is stuff we accomplish with ItemCat1 and ItemCat2 in our item records. However, I love their description how their library maintains its lists of electronic databases - using information drawn from the MARC records in their catalog, Perl scripts generate updating A-Z and subject-specific lists. Database cataloging might seem a bit less like slogging through thigh-high mud if I knew that the information I was inputting might end up being used as more than just a bandaid for confused students. I keep putting my database cataloging off in favor of other things.

An essay I was particularly looking forward to reading was Carrie Preston's "High-speed cataloging without sacrificing subject access or authority control: a case study." I already do some of the things Preston mentions, like making use of macros (although I really need to figure out how to create a macro that strings together several macros, so I don't have to run each one separately). Some of what Preston writes is a little more painful, like choosing not to enter certain information that is considered optional. One thing I've incorporated into my current regular cataloging is the elimination of bibliography pagination - I still check it if it's already in the record, but I don't add it if it isn't, and probably no one will ever miss it. I consider table of contents notes or summary notes to be more worth my time than bibliography pagination, and, using a combination of copy and paste and several nifty macros, I can create summary and contents notes more quickly than I used to be able to. One thing I incorporated into my cataloging of our databases was sitting down and figuring out which fields absolutely need to be there, which fields need to be checked if present but don't need to be added if they aren't, and which fields don't even need to be checked. Having a set list of things I need to pay attention to has helped speed things up a bit (when I actually choose to work on the project, which I've been really bad about).

The thing about all "radical" cataloging decisions is that they need to be applied consistently. If a cataloger decides, for the good of his or her library's users, to do something differently from what the rules say and what other catalogers do, that's fine, but those decisions need to be documented for future catalogers.

One thing I think also needs to be taken into consideration is whether or not the benefits of any local changes to the rules outweigh the drawbacks. For instance, Brian R. Thompson's "Monographic collections structure and layout revisions: or, how to tweak LC call numbers for the good of your users" details how his library came up with an implemented a huge reclassification project that tweaked LC call numbers so that books were grouped together in a more user-friendly way. This sounds great (and exhausting to do), but it also means that this library may never again be able to use call numbers in records they import as they are - in order to keep their clean, user-friendly arrangement, they might need to tweak the call number of each book they have to catalog. That works fine if you've got enough catalogers, or at least enough people trained in assigning call numbers that follow local practices, or if catalogers don't need to catalog much, but otherwise it's potentially a nightmare. Currently, however problematic LC's assignment of call numbers sometimes happens to be, I accept almost all LC-assigned call numbers without question. I can't imagine having to at least look at, if not tweak, each call number I encounter. Cataloging takes long enough as it is.

Overall, this book was pretty interesting, and some of the essays would probably even be readable by noncatalogers (it should be noted that not all of the essay authors are catalogers). However, catalogers in particular should be able to get something useful out of this, even if only a different way of thinking.

Pet store!

2010-03-08T18:03:00.003-06:00

After getting my teeth scraped and polished by the dentist, I went to Granbury to get some car stuff done - probably unnecessary, but it also works as an excuse for getting out of Stephenville. My vet told me that she got her family's rat at a pet store in Granbury, so I decided to try finding it. It's got tons of supplies and accessories, even the cardboard tubes that are the perfect size for Bear to curl up in. The place does, indeed, have rats, but they're intended to be feeder rats - they're sorted into cages marked "small," "medium," and "large." They're probably never handled, and they're not necessarily very healthy. Still, the "small" rats might be young enough to become sweet pets. I loved looking at them - their feet were almost as big as their heads!

No, I'm not considering getting more rats anytime in the near future, I'm just looking into my options. I figure that, when Bear's gone, I'll be petless for a while. Short rat lifespans are so tough to deal with. After my last pair of rats, I swore I'd never get any more, and a few years later I ended up with Bear and Yuki when the pet store my mom shops at had an accidental rat litter. I'd prefer to get my next rats the same way, or from a breeder, but that might not be possible. Well, you never know.

Status of the "unsmooshing project" - Finished!

2010-03-07T12:57:00.001-06:00

As of 12:36 PM today, I loaded what I think are the last of the records with "smooshed" headings and fields. I say "I think" because 1) it turns out there were a few stragglers I almost missed because mine and Tracy's method of extracting them by call number didn't catch them (invalid call numbers? strange Sudoc numbers? I saved the records and plan on checking or sending a student to check) and 2) it's possible that there are records with smooshed fields that don't fit the criteria we set up when we extracted them.

Even if we missed some, we still managed to touch and fix an amazing number of records in slightly less than two weeks, and almost 24,000 access points that were previously unusable for anything other than keyword searching are now usable as actual headings (i.e., they will now display correctly in browse searches, you have a reasonable chance of finding more items with the same heading when you click on them, etc.). Nice.

My next step will be to start running all kinds of maintenance reports, now that they won't be cluttered up with all of that smooshed junk.

One step closer to fixing the "smooshed" fields!

2010-02-22T17:16:00.003-06:00

I emailed the MarcEdit listserv for advice and now have a regular expression that I can modify that will hopefully be able to take care of a large chunk of the "smooshed" fields in our older records. Very, very nice, plus I plan on taking this regular expression apart as part of a project to learn more about MarcEdit's regular expressions. I've used regular expressions in Microsoft Word (they're called wildcards there) and have done some nifty things, so I'm excited about the prospect of learning how to do similar things in MarcEdit.

Now I just have to carve out the time for all of that "playing." All the webinars last week and the time I spent figuring out how to globally change the type on our thesis and dissertation records lost me most of the small lead I managed to gain over the Processing students, so it may be a while before I'll have the time to do a lot.

The 590 field

2010-02-16T22:19:00.004-06:00

(Warning, very long post ahead. However, it might contain useful information for those of you who've wondered about the apparent gobbledygook you may have spotted in a "Local note" in our records. By the way, I thought we'd set things up so that those no longer displayed in our book records, but apparently I'm wrong. Argh. Anyway, I've thought about writing a post like this in the past, because I've had people at the library - librarians and staff, not students or faculty - ask me what "that stuff" was in our records. Writing this post feels kind of like giving away library secrets or something. I'm not sure why.)

This is the field I love to hate (as it's used at DSL, since what 590 is used for can vary from library to library), even as I am occasionally able to admit its usefulness. I hate it (dislike it?) for four main reasons:

It contains item-specific information. Admittedly, I'm coming at this from the standpoint of a cataloger, but, to my mind, bibliographic records shouldn't contain this sort of information - if you want to record item-specific information, you should do so in a note in the item record. That way, if you withdraw the item, you delete the item record, and the note is gone. In a 590, the note is there forever, even if the item is long since gone, replaced by something that would now be copy 10, if copies 1 through 9 still existed. You wouldn't even necessarily see 10 590s in the record - there will probably only be one, the one created when the very first copy was cataloged.
The information recorded in the 590 is not necessarily recorded in a controlled manner, even though it may appear that it is. A simple example is "Biology," which is usually recorded as "Bio" in 590s, but I have also seen it as "Biol".
Certain aspects of the 590 may not always consistently mean the same thing from one 590 to the next.
From a "streamlining of the cataloging workflow" perspective, it kind of gets in the way. I won't go into detail on that, because this post would probably double in length, and no one really wants to read all of that anyway.

If you haven't stumbled upon a 590 in our records yet, here's what one looks like in our OPAC (in general - 590s for gifts tend to be missing certain bits of information, 590s for memorials have additional information, and certain things in 590s for gifts and memorials are defined differently than they are for everything else):

The first part, the 8-digit number, is the item's barcode. I'll admit that this can be useful to have in the bibliographic record, because it means that anyone can quickly and easily find the record for something, even if they don't have access to WorkFlows. Unless of course the record doesn't have a 590 for that particular item (see "reason I hate 590s" #1, plus all the other reasons there might not be a 590 for each item).

The second part, in this case "BT", is the vendor. I try to enter this in a consistent way, so Baker & Taylor is always BT, Amazon is always AMZ, Blackwell's is always BBS, etc. However, I don't think I was always this consistent when I first started, and I have no idea what people before me did.

The next part is tricky. You might think that this is the code for the particular fund that paid for the item, but this isn't always the case - that's why this particular 590 is such a good example. See, when I, the Cataloger, get a book from Acquisitions, sometimes the only clue I have as to where something is intended to be shelved is what's written in the book (or on the printout slipped in the book/DVD/CD/whatever). Sometimes it's obvious where something should be shelved - picture books are easy. Sometimes it's not so obvious - books for Limited (with the added complication of "where in Limited?") can be especially hard for me to identify. Sometimes something says "CurrJuv" in the 590 because that's the fund that paid for it, but sometimes it says CurrJuv because it's supposed to be shelved in the Curriculum Collection, even though the money for the book came out of another fund. I've been trying to encourage the use of color-coded flags to indicate what a book's location is supposed to be, but it hasn't been working out very well. So, in the meantime, my main source of location information is either what's written in the book (which ends up in the 590), instinct, and telepathy. My instinct is getting slightly sharper, my telepathy not so much. By the way, this is another portion of the 590 that may not be typed consistently from one record to the next. See "reason I hate 590s" #2.

I have no idea what the next part means. Seriously, I don't. For a while there, I thought it meant "Selector", since that's what the ancient notes left behind by previous catalogers that I unearthed in my office said. I think that sometimes it does mean "Selector." In the case of my sample 590, that's probably true. In other instances... Anyway, almost all of the 590s I've entered since I've started working here say either "Tennyson" or "Pape." Maybe it means, "this is who approved the use of money for this item?" But I don't think even that's true... I should probably have yet another talk with Jodee about this bit. I've talked with her about it before, but never in much depth.

The next bit is the date we received the item. It's pretty straightforward, I think. I don't know if previous catalogers entered the date in MM/DD/YY format, but I don't - February 2, 2010 is 2/2/10 for me, not 02/02/10. If you're trying to formulate a search of the dates in our 590s, how this date has been entered makes a difference. I only know how I've been entering it.

Last is the cost of the item. Also pretty straightforward. I never use a dollar sign, and I don't think any cataloger before me has, either.

I have so far thought up one useful search involving the 590, but it has serious limitations. However, if I don't forget, I'll post it soon. I have to hunt through my email to see if I can find that one where I put together the search with Biology in mind.

And now, to bed - I must get up at 3 AM to coddle my rat. He has me wrapped around his tiny pink fingers (yes, toes, I know, but they look like tiny lady fingers), but at least he repays me with cuteness. He curled up and fell asleep in my hand today for a full hour, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Info for the staff blog?

2010-02-16T17:55:00.004-06:00

I don't post much on the staff blog (actually, I don't think I've posted anything at all in months there). It feels kind of weird posting there, I guess because, prior to coming here (to DSL), I'd had no experience posting on blogs with multiple authors. Plus, I'm never sure if some of the things I think about are things people would actually want to see posted on the staff blog - which brings me to the reason I'm writing this post.

I was talking to Cathy W. about a search I had formulated for a Biology professor (mainly because I wanted an excuse to contact him, just to remind him that I exist). That got us to talking about some of the other searches I've formulated and posted on this blog (click "searching" in the labels list for a few examples). Some of the searches are relatively simple, like the one for limiting a search to musical scores. Some of them are a bit nastier, with long explanations that are kind of necessary if you want to be able to customize them for your needs and understand their limitations (like the post I wrote on searching for books, or limiting a search, by number of pages) - plus, the explanations help me vent my nerdiness. It's hard for me to tell what kinds of things others might actually want to know about, and what kinds of things would just make people's eyes glaze over. I post them on this blog because I figure people can either choose to read what I write or not, and there will be a general expectation that occasionally I'll be boring and wordy.

But, should I post some of this stuff on the staff blog? Stuff like the scores post, yes, stuff like the number of pages post, no? All searches I think up, no matter how complicated-looking, yes? Any thoughts?

It's Colorado in Texas!

2010-02-11T17:50:00.005-06:00

I'm absolutely amazed at all the snow outside right now - and I'm pathetically glad I don't have to be outside in it anymore today. Anyone who likes snow has obviously not had to be out in it much. Unfortunately, taking my comp time today didn't exempt me from going out on the road. I drove as much today as I usually do in a month.

I took Bear to the vet today, sort of hoping that all he had was an abscess. The vet took some fluid, looked at it, and decided it was probably a tumor. With a tumor, the only options are surgery to remove it, or letting it continue to grow. Even a benign tumor can eventually interfere with internal organs and movement. Since they'd had good success with doing surgery on older rats in the past (my fear was that Bear would be considered too old for surgery to be safe), I decided to go for it.

It's going to be a rough next 10 days. Bear had not one, but two lumps removed - a tiny one on his thigh and a larger one on his shoulder. He can't reach the sutures on his shoulder, but he already managed to completely chew out the ones on his thigh. Now he has staples there, as well as an E-collar to keep him from messing with them. I'm hoping that overfilling his food bowl will allow him to eat with the collar on, because I don't relish the idea of having to take the collar off and put it back on several times a day. He'll probably have to live in his small carrying cage for the next 10 days, until the stitches can be removed, because I don't like the idea of him going up and down the ramps in his cage while he's got the collar on. I'm crossing my fingers that everything heals up ok, without any infection.

I'm exhausted and hoping that it snows and snows until the library is declared closed tomorrow. All that driving in this weather, while simultaneously worrying about Bear, wasn't very restful. Also, when I went to WalMart to pick up some stuff for Bear, I locked myself out of my car and had to walk home and back again to get my spare car key (I've already thanked my dad for advising me to keep a spare house key in my wallet). I was not, unfortunately, very well dressed for the weather, so I think I'm going to drink some Throat Tea and hope I stay healthy.

I hope everybody stays safe!

(Oops, just remembered that I have to finish up an LOL blog post for tomorrow. I've got one almost finished, but I hate it. Maybe I'll finish it up and schedule it to be published anyway. --Update: I wrote an entirely different, holiday-themed blog post, but I haven't yet trashed my original post.)

RDA Toolkit

2010-02-08T15:58:00.003-06:00

I just finished the webinar, so, while I can still remember:

I got to see the beta version of the RDA Toolkit in action (The release date is sometime in June of this year. Or, considering how things have gone with RDA, maybe sometime in July. Or later.). The reason it's called the "toolkit" is because it contains not only RDA (the rules which catalogers have been poring over, in their PDF form, since they were first made available maybe a year ago - sorry, can't remember the exact date), but also AACR2, RDA: Element set view, and "more to come." The "collection of stuff" aspect makes me think of Cataloger's Desktop. The RDA Toolkit is not, at this time, planned to be included as part of any products like Cataloger's Desktop - you'd have to buy both separately. Apparently there are plans in the works for allowing connections between the RDA Toolkit and various ILSs, OCLC Connexion, and more.

Although libraries will pay for a limited number of concurrent users, this number is unrelated to the number of profiles - an unlimited number of profiles will be allowed. I'm guessing that, with different profiles, different people can create their own personal workflows, bookmarks, etc.

The browsing and searching features of RDA were shown. I didn't see any kind of index and asked about it - the question wasn't answered during the presentation, but I think I'm probably going to get an email response sometime. I hope there will be an index, because I'm not sure I can remember RDA's wordings for things, and I know it'd take me ages to find what I want via browsing. Another option would be to use AACR2's index, then use the AACR2 rule number search available in the Toolkit, and then hope that there's a link between the rule in AACR2 to the corresponding rule in RDA. Or I could write my own index (::shudder::). Or some industrious cataloger somewhere could write an index and share it, and then probably be shot down by ALA Publishing for copyright violation or something. Sorry, sorry, moving on...

There are currently no plans for a print version of RDA because it would "do a disservice to what was originally intended to be an electronic product." This, and/or the pricing for the Toolkit, still annoys me, and I'm not sure I did a good job of explaining why in my last post. It boils down to this: I catalog pretty much the same stuff over and over. I know the basic rules well enough that I don't need to consult them all the time. I only consult them when I come across some unusual situation or when I catalog something I haven't cataloged in a while or ever. What that all means is that I only actually look through my copy of AACR2 maybe once every few weeks or months. And ALA Publishing will expect us to pay $325 each year for this. I'm not sure if they've thought about how real, flesh-and-blood catalogers use the current rules - what they've laid out here seems to indicate that they haven't. Anyway, the other option would be to print out each chapter and keep them in what will probably need to be multiple binders. I'm not sure if updates to RDA will be announced, so it may not be possible to pinpoint sections that need to be reprinted.

Consortia will get special pricing, but it's not yet clear what that will be.

Short-term additional users will be granted for training purposes.

The "free trial for all" period will be from June 2010 to August 31, 2010. It will end August 31, 2010, regardless of when the actual release date is. By the way, the software is "in pretty good shape, but not perfect yet" - it seems likely that there will be a flurry of updating the first few months. October 1st to December 31st will be the period during which the test sites will create records using RDA. January to March 2011 will be the period of record evaluation.

The RDA Toolkit looks a bit daunting to use, particularly for those who have never cataloged before (Intro to Cataloging classes are about to get scarier). One nice thing for practitioners, though - libraries can create Workflows, which they can then choose to share with others in their library, or even make public. Hopefully the Library of Congress (and perhaps OCLC?) will make Workflows available to the public. Even if all they make public is a Basic Book Workflow, that's at least something that someone like me could look through and try to learn about RDA from. Because, quite frankly, the browse view of RDA looks no less daunting than the PDFs did. If I remember correctly, the printed-out table of contents was more than 70 pages.

So very lazy

2010-02-04T09:43:00.004-06:00

I used to try to get stuff done during my mornings off. Now I sleep and do useless stuff on the Internet. YouTube, Facebook, and webcomics. At the very least, I should slog through some more Second Life (and I might actually do that in a bit) or write some book blog posts. There's also plenty of time to make muffins, do a little housework, get a haircut, and finish up an ILL book.

I don't see any of that happening this morning. In fact, it's chilly enough that I'm considering just going back to bed for a while. Brrr. At least I managed to make a batch of muffins last night (Chocolate Cream, in which the "cream" part is sour cream - very good, uses one bowl, and easy to make). I'm still considering what I'll make for the bake sale next week. Chocolate Cream? Blackberry? Pear? Or maybe even one of the savory muffins, like Parmesan Herb or Rye? Decisions, decisions...

Limiting by language...still looking

2010-02-04T09:15:00.002-06:00

As a former German minor, and as someone who is half German and occasionally forces herself to crack open a book written in German, our catalog's language limiter bothers me a lot. I'm still looking for a way to limit by the language of an item in our OPAC. In an attempt to just retrieve things that are in German, I've tried:

ger{008}

and

ger{lang}

The first search fails. The second search acts they way the language limiter in our advanced search does, limiting the search to everything that's in German, was originally in German but has been translated into something else, has subtitles in German, has some text (but not all) in German, has librettos in German, etc. I'm going to have to dig through some help files sometime and see if there's another value I can put in the curly brackets that will do what I want.

A quick way to find scores at DSL

2010-02-03T17:08:00.002-06:00

(Inspired by the questions I've gotten at the reference desk, asking for our scores.)

Provided that the physical descriptions are done correctly, this search should retrieve all our scores. You can use the same search as part of an advanced search, too.

Here it is:

score*{300}

I ♥ curly brackets.

I'm currently considering writing up a future LOL blog post featuring nifty (well, nifty to me, at least) searches like this. On the one hand, advanced searches like this might be too freaky-looking. On the other hand, you can do some great things with them that you can't necessarily do any other way with publicly available tools (as opposed to WorkFlows and OCLC Connexion).

Bending time in the library

2010-02-01T12:05:00.000-06:00

February 2010 has only just started, and yet I am magically transported into the next year - Media and criminal justice : the CSI effect by Dennis J. Stevens is the library's very first book with a copyright date of 2011.

It's (going to be) a girl!

2010-01-22T00:51:00.002-06:00

My sister found out that her baby will be a girl, so I'm going to have a niece. Yay! Well, I'd be saying "yay" to a nephew, too, but it'll be fun looking at little girl things. I'm also happy that she actually called to let me know - I haven't even heard from her via email in a while.

Large print books

2010-01-21T18:40:00.002-06:00

Cathy W. had a question for me yesterday (or maybe today, my memory is like Swiss cheese) that brought something to my attention - there's no way to find large print books using our OPAC, or even, as far as I know, a report in WorkFlows. You can limit a search in WorldCat just to large print books that we own, but it can't generate a list of every large print book we own. The best option right now: I can come up with what is probably an almost complete list of them using OCLC Connexion. Since this list is based on the master records available via Connexion, rather than our own local records, it doesn't include our call numbers. It relies heavily on the assumption that the previous catalogers who added our holdings to those records were paying attention to the little code in the fixed fields that can indicate whether something is large print - it's quite possible that these items we have that are supposedly large print really aren't, and I've already seen that we have a few books that are probably large print but that aren't coded as such in the master records. The biggest drawback, as far as DSL's users and people working at the reference desk are concerned, is that the only one who can generate this list is someone with access to Connexion.

There's a way to fix this, however. There's a subject heading, "Large type books," which I could add to every large print book record we've got (it'd probably be more correct to add it as a local genre heading, but, without a genre index, that would defeat the purpose of creating something that people can actually make use of). The "tidy" way to do this would be to take a look at everything in our holdings that Connexion told me was large print (34 items, as of this morning) and confirm that it really is large print. The faster way to do this would be to just add the subject heading to all 34 records, plus the few stragglers that seem to have miscoded master records - some of them might not actually be large print books, but the project would take up less of my time.

It's not really a "rush" project, so I'm thinking about it for now.

I want to be a cheetah!

2010-01-20T22:29:00.004-06:00

Things I learned to do in Second Life yesterday:

Dress myself without accidentally becoming publicly naked.
Unpack free clothing so that, instead of wearing the boxes the clothing comes in, I wear the clothing itself.

My avatar no longer looks like Corporate Barbie - now her appearance better matches her last name, Wikifoo (heehee, Wikifoo). At least, that's what I think. If I can figure out how, I'll try to take a picture of her sometime and post it.

That doesn't mean she's going to continue to look the way she currently does. Once I get brave enough, I'm going to mess with her skin and try to turn her into...a cheetah! Yes, that's right, I think I've managed to pick up a free cheetah skin and I'd like to try it out. My only fear is that I won't be able to figure out how to change it back if I don't like it. It might be kind of embarrassing to show up to a meeting in Second Life looking like a cheetah. Or a fox. Or a wolf. Or a horse. My avatar could be a bipedal horse. With dragons...

As far as my original "I'd like to change my hair color" issue goes, I've now decided that that's not actually possible, at least not the way I had thought it should be. I think I'd have to either figure out how to modify the object (in this case, my hair) or somehow acquire hair in that exact style in whatever color I'd like. Whatever, I know how to unpack boxes now. Ha.

While I know there's still a lot of things I haven't learned how to do, I think I'm ready to try teleporting to another island now. With any luck, I can figure out how to get back to Orientation or Help Island if I'd like to do more relatively "safe" experimenting (and pick up more free stuff).

Designed to fail?

2010-01-20T17:19:00.003-06:00

RDA, the new cataloging rules, has been keeping all of us catalogers in suspense for a while. It's now finally about to be officially released, although, in the U.S. at least, it will be in a testing phase, as the Library of Congress and a few other libraries try it decide whether to continue with it. If the Library of Congress decides to continue using it, lots of libraries (such as DSL, for instance) will probably need to adopt it as well.

Even if you put aside all the complaints some catalogers have had about RDA, one thing that has concerned everyone was RDA's pricing. It was made clear that RDA would be primarily an electronic product, and it was assumed that the pricing would probably be subscription-based. However, there haven't been any clear answers whenever catalogers have asked how much it would cost.

Until now. "RDA Toolkit," as the product will officially be called, will cost $325 per year, for a single user at a time (there can be unlimited total users, but only one person can use it at any one time). The pricing for additional concurrent users: 2-9, an additional $55, 10-19, an additional $50, and 20+, an additional $45.

I'm not exactly happy with this, and a lot of other catalogers aren't either. With AACR2, if you buy a print copy, you pay for it (with a binder and no other discounts, probably a little of $100 with shipping), and it belongs to you (or your library) for however long you'd like. When updates came out, you could buy the updates and add them to the binder of rules you already own. If you or your library couldn't afford to buy the updates, you didn't. Your copy of AACR2 would then be out of date, but, get this, you'd still have something you could work with. With the "RDA Toolkit," if your library can't afford to fork up another $325+ next year, you'll have nothing.

Brilliant.

No more "Cookery"!

2010-01-14T13:17:00.002-06:00

What I posted previously about changes to "Cookery" in subject headings was only a proposal - now it, or at least aspects of it, is really going to happen. Here's where you can find the details: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/cooking3.pdf

The "target date" for the Library of Congress's implementation of these decisions is late May/early June 2010. It'll take a bit for those changes to be reflected in the authority records I get via OCLC Connexion. Happily, I've figured out how to make updating groups of authority records in our system a little faster and less harmful to my elbow, so I can make these changes without too much trouble (I hope).

"I can't find my hair" - my first two sessions in Second Life

2010-01-13T19:42:00.005-06:00

I'm one of the people on the informal committee (so informal I'm not sure it can even be called a committee) charged with making sure that the library doesn't get left in the university's dust as it launches its own Second Life presence. I haven't tried to install Second Life on my personal laptop yet - I'm pretty sure it can't handle the graphics and, even if it can, I'm not sure I'm ready for something I'm basically doing for work to take over my evenings. I did install it on my work computer, however, and I tried it out a couple times, once during lunch and once after work. All total, I've spent maybe an hour and a half in Second Life.

I've been involved in relatively simple virtual worlds before - one that ate up a lot of my time was Puzzle Pirates (I was determined to one day own my own ship without ever spending a single dime of real money). My requirements tended to be fairly simple - I needed to like the game, and it needed to be something I could enjoy without having to spend real money. I don't know of any virtual world that doesn't have the option of converting real money into game money, but each world tends to vary in the amount of enjoyment that can be freely had. Plus, some of them require subscription fees. Puzzle Pirates fit my requirements pretty well (and may still fit them, but I haven't played it in over a year - must...resist...the pillaging...).

So, I'm not a complete newbie with this kind of stuff. I've played more complex 3-D games, too, although usually not online. I heard about Second Life a couple years ago and have read a few books on it. It sounded interesting, but I never got around to trying it out. Now that I've tried it, I have to say...if it weren't for the "informal committee," I'm not sure how likely I'd be to continue with it. The learning curve for things that are usually much easier in most other virtual worlds is very steep.

The first thing you do in most virtual worlds is create your avatar. Some things can never be changed again - in Puzzle Pirates, for instance, your name and physical appearance stay the same after you set those up (your physical appearance amounts to your skin color and your hair, because Puzzle Pirates avatars look a lot like Lego people). The thing you can change is your clothing - and there is lots and lots of clothing to choose from, in many different colors. Of course, you have to buy most of it (it's not possible for players to create their own clothing, as it is in Second Life), but earning money in Puzzle Pirates is pretty easy. Setting up your initial appearance and changing your clothing is simple. Even in games I've played that allow more customization, things are still pretty easy to figure out. What causes things to take so long isn't usually the process of figuring out how to do the customization, but rather looking through all the customization options.

Not so with Second Life. A sizable chunk of the hour and a half I spent trying it out today was devoted to trying to figure out how to change my appearance - and reading all kinds of tutorial notes, flying, walking, running, figuring out shortcut keys, trying out gestures, picking up freebies, and learning how to interact with objects. There's tons to learn, and although the info I've been looking at on Help Island is nice, it's not always as helpful as I might like.

Back to the whole appearance thing. I'm probably going to go explore other places and just leave my appearance alone soon, but I'd really like my avatar not to be so generic. I figured out how to change certain aspects of my avatar's body, and I changed the color of her blouse, but the same principle that worked on the blouse does not work on her jacket, pants, and hair. I picked up some free stuff, so I could use that on my avatar instead, but that doesn't solve the problem - all I get is a new hairstyle and new clothes, when what I really want to do is take what I already have and change the color. It's frustrating, but I'm keeping at it, for a little while anyway, because every new thing I try teaches me something about Second Life.

So, in the process of trying stuff out, I made myself bald and then couldn't find my hair again. Rather than go bald, I went around with an enormous pony tail for a while, until I located my original hair and put it back on my skull. Tomorrow I'll try the hair thing again, but I have a feeling I'll give up soon and just teleport someplace else, probably Info Island - I want to see what other libraries have done and how they're doing it. Then, if I can figure out how, I'll go to a university island with a library and see if the library is just there to make the island look more like the real life campus, or if there are actually any interesting things being done.

I knew from past experiences with virtual worlds that they suck up a lot of time, but I think Second Life might be on a whole new level.

Drinking coffee, marveling at the adorableness

2010-01-10T07:56:00.003-06:00

Aww. Bear has gotten to the point in his life where he's calm enough and trusting enough that, when he sees me stick my hand into his cage, instead of getting nervous and/or excited, he stretches out and closes his eyes (!), hoping for a good neck rub. So adorable. And I am so wrapped around his little pink fingers.

Anyway, if I can bring myself to write something coherent about it, I plan on writing a post about the newest book on cataloging that I've finished, or at least a post about a few of my favorite articles. I'm up much earlier than I'd like today, so I can hopefully manage to get laundry done - maybe that'll translate into more time later today for blogging? Unless I go to the movies - I haven't decided on that one yet, since the only movie I'd at all want to go see that I haven't seen yet seems more than a little iffy. When even a movie's premise seems awful, the movie itself probably isn't much better, but I might enjoy it anyway because I like the actress who plays the main character. Hmm... (The movie in question, by the way, is Leap Year. Read the premise and try to tell me it doesn't sound bad. Your nose may grow.)

The Year of Cataloging Research

2010-01-06T21:49:00.004-06:00

In case you didn't already know it, 2010 is the "Year of Cataloging Research." Kind of nifty. I wish I could think of something to do research on, or had the time to do the research. The only thing I can think of right now that I'd want to find out is whether some of the more time-consuming things I do actually improve access and use of our materials enough to justify me spending the time to do them. My library research conducting skills are rusty.

Darn - a half-day of doubt

2010-01-06T19:27:00.002-06:00

Warning: somewhat long and whiny post.

The retreat today was fun and informative, probably the best part about my day today (not counting my dinner, which will be delicious :D). Unfortunately, aside from that I feel like one of those cartoons where there's a character being followed around by a dark, rainy cloud. Just one of those days, you know?

Aside from being generally confused about the status of the small cart of things I decided could be weeded yesterday (if only I had procrastinated just a bit longer!), my cataloging today was filled with doubt. It wasn't any particular thing that inspired my doubt - just general doubt. Things like:

It's the Library of Congress's practice to only record "ill." and/or "map(s)" (for the most part), choosing not to specifically say when those illustrations are actually photographs or portraits or music or charts, etc. On AUTOCAT, not too long ago, a lot of catalogers complained about this lack of specificity and talked about how it could actually be helpful to users to be more specific. Those catalogers are more specific. I follow LC's practice, because I decided I have better things to do with my time than figure out what the various abbreviations and terms are for the different kinds of illustrations. Plus, when I flip through, all I need to pay attention to is whether there any pictures or maps at all, not what any of them actually look like. Sometimes I wonder if this is a mistake, and if it would actually matter to people whether an illustration is a drawing or a photograph, or whether a book has portraits. I have no idea what the catalogers before me did, or if they even thought about it at all.
Why do I record/check information in records that people aren't going to see and/or that isn't searchable? The answer to this is that, if it's not recorded/checked now, then if, in the future, it does become searchable (even if only by librarians via reports) and/or visible to the public, the library, our users, our collection, and the Cataloger (me or whoever) will suffer the consequences. Every time I work on catalog maintenance, I see the results of information not being recorded or checked (for whatever reason) - that's part of why I'm such a perfectionist (some might say "anal") about various record details. I understand all of that, and yet there are days when it's a wee bit depressing to enter or check information when I know it has no immediate use.
Also, leapfrogging on the whole perfectionism thing, should I care less? If "quantity cataloged" matters more than "quality of the records" (because "quantity," by its nature, is easier to quantify for statistics than "quality") are there things I should be considering no longer doing? The things that take the most time (for book cataloging, anyway) are things like adding new authority records (the things that make sure we have cross-references in our "browse" searches) and adding table of contents information or summaries. DVDs, videotapes, and any original cataloging are also automatically time-consuming. I don't want to "skimp" on things - I wouldn't be doing them if I didn't think they were important - but I think about this kind of thing when I hear about catalogers who've been laid off, or administrators who criticize catalogers for caring too much about the details (isn't that what we're supposed to be doing?). I also think about this kind of stuff when a new project gets added to my "to do" list. Thankfully, as far as the former stuff goes, our library has a pretty "cataloger-friendly" work environment. As far as the latter...ugh.
I don't know if you read this blog, Janie, but you might be interested to know that I flip flop between thinking that multiple formats should be on one record and thinking they should each have their own, separate record. I hate that I can't be ok with one decision or the other.

And that's only a sampling of the things that sometimes make me doubt my cataloging. Even as I think these kinds of thoughts, I keep doing things the way I "should" be doing them, or the way I decided I should be doing them, and I think about possible workarounds for anything where the capabilities of the catalog seem to be failing the library (of course, it's always possible that they're not failings, but rather just things where our settings need to be modified...). Still, I prefer the days when these thoughts aren't so much downers as energizers.

Thoughts while pulling stuff for weeding consideration

2010-01-06T17:46:00.003-06:00

I spent most of yesterday pulling stuff to potentially weed and then looking over the stuff I pulled. Aside from the depressing reminder that a lot of the stuff we have in some subjects is very old, the task gave me several thoughts (actually, what really got me thinking about some of this was a great ALCTS e-forum, but weeding reminded me).

Say something hasn't circulated much, and we've had it in our collection for a while - I'm wondering, is the real reason some of this stuff hasn't circulated our catalog records? When I catalog stuff, I now add table of contents notes and/or summary notes to almost everything that doesn't already have that information. You'd be amazed at the number of books that don't have this information - I'd say that books on education, computing, and sports seem to be the worst offenders. It can sometimes take a bit of time, but I think it's worth it to input this information for the added keyword access. However, we have tons of records that don't have this information. We even have lots of records that are basically brief records (I have no idea what the exact numbers are, or even if there's a way to find out) - they have title and author information, but not much else. Those materials are basically invisible, unless someone knows the exact title or author or happens to find them while browsing.

It's wishful thinking, I know, but I'd love to one day upgrade some of those crappy records. One way to start would be to identify sections that should be getting more use than they are, or maybe titles that are really hard to find unless you already know how to find them. When I chose to add to the title access points for the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, it was because I knew that it tended to be difficult to find unless you knew how to look for it. I don't know general areas that need that kind of attention, though.

I wonder if there's a good way to find all the brief records in our catalog? The only thing I know about those that separates them from the other records in our catalog is that they tend to be all in caps, but not all records that are all in caps are brief records. Plus, I can't tell our ILS to give me a list of all records like that - it's just not possible to search that way.

Hmm, something for me to think about... Of course, that doesn't mean I'd ever have time to work on all those records. But, if I ever get a student worker, one I could trust to work directly on our records, I could have that person add table of contents information as part of a project.

Picture books finished, I think

2010-01-04T12:52:00.003-06:00

I'm pretty sure I've finished cataloging all the new children's literature, unless there are some stragglers I missed. Woohoo, happy dance! (And I bet I know someone else who'll like this news.) The batch I just finished had an awful lot of titles that fit the whole "LC doesn't do series tracing anymore" issue, so I had to do more record editing than usual. Even that didn't slow me down as much as it could have, though - I love my new procedures!

Becoming familiar with important names and works in biology

2009-12-23T16:58:00.001-06:00

Sometime soon, I need to start weeding my area, biology. I'm better off than some, in that I know a bit about biology, but I could still use a refresher on the important names and works in the field. I figured I could take a look at a book on the history of biology and make a list that can help me avoid weeding important older works. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place, but I think all our books on the history of biology have been written before 1982. Granted, "history" means it's already happened and the events and people aren't going anywhere, but interpretations of those events and people can change over time. Also, I'm sure that things worthy of being in a history of biology have happened in the past twenty or thirty years.

Anyway, I grabbed something that looked particularly full of names and titles - it was written in 1964...

ISBN LOL

2009-12-17T17:22:00.000-06:00

This may be a re-use, or maybe just a mistake, but here's an amusing example:

ISBN: 9780823418657

Used on the records for

The picture book Pizza for the queen by Nancy Castaldo, illustrated by Melisande Potter
The government document Aviation security : next steps : field hearing before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, One Hundred Seventh Congress, first session, December 10, 2001

We have the first in our collection, but not the second.

Off and on kitchen luck

2009-12-14T21:38:00.003-06:00

For some reason, I keep thinking our holiday party is on Friday. No, bad brain, it's Thursday. My plan is to bring some Parmesan herb muffins. They're yummy, but, with my luck lately, I may well burn them. This past weekend, I made potato soup, carrot soup, oatmeal rolls, and garlic cheese rolls. The oatmeal rolls were burned so dark they looked like rye bread (they're just barely edible), and the potato soup was crunchy when I tried my first bowl. I managed to fix the potato soup, for the most part, but the rolls will just have to be soaked in soup. At least the garlic cheese rolls and carrot soup turned out fine. Here's hoping that the Parmesan herb muffins will too!

The most horrific children's book ever

2009-12-10T19:32:00.001-06:00

I just did a quick search to see if we have Don't make me go back, Mommy : a child's book about ritual abuse. We don't. The scanned pages are horrific (particularly in the "part 2" post). I wonder how many people have actually read that book to their children? Are there really parents who worry that someone may be trying to perform satanic rituals on their children and who therefore feel that their children must know what kinds of behaviors to report?

Known issues

2009-12-10T07:43:00.003-06:00

In my office, taped to the TV stand, is a list of what could probably be called known issues or, I should say, issues known to me. I have no way of knowing if anyone else knows they exist or, more importantly, knows their implications for searching our catalog. I've debated whether and how to get the word out. On the one hand, it would be helpful for reference librarians to know that, say, the first series title in our MARC records is probably not the one they should be clicking on, regardless of the fact that it is clickable. On the other hand, some of these problems, like the series title link problem, don't necessarily look like problems. Maybe people are happier not knowing, so they don't have to put up with my attempts to explain what's going on and why it's a problem in a non-jargony way (which I'm not always successful at doing...)?

Explaining in person, one on one, as someone talks to me about a time they had problems with a search that was caused by a problem I know about, seems to work ok. I'm not so sure about group explanations. So, what I'm thinking of doing is turning the "Catalog Records" page in our wiki into a sort of "known issues" page. If the issue comes up, I can point to the page, which I will try to make sure includes "what to do about it" sections for each problem. That doesn't necessarily help much with the problems that don't look like problems, but one step at a time, I guess. I'll just have to make sure that I update the page as the problems get fixed.

Something that works!

2009-12-09T17:12:00.003-06:00

I got to try out my "new" cataloging procedures on more than one or two books today. I started on a stack of picture books and decided that, since they were ordered after the cut-off point (I think Jodee changed things on her end sometime in August), I should be able to test things out on them. The test worked great, with the only issues being little things. Trust me, I'm thrilled. I can't wait until I get to the point where I can use these new procedures on nearly everything. The fewer windows I have to toggle between, and the fewer searches I have to duplicate, the better.

You say APA, I say Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

2009-12-03T17:26:00.004-06:00

A while back, it occurred to me that it might be nice if it were possible to find the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association in our catalog by searching for "APA." I remembered that thought today while taking care of our little booklet of corrections to the 6th edition. I made a few changes (none of which I would ever dare do to the master records in WorldCat), and now the search that I thought would be nice is possible. And, because I can do nothing without creating more work for myself, I have to figure out if we really do still have a 1983 edition of this work, or if that record should have been deleted ages ago...

Cute Overload

2009-11-24T22:20:00.004-06:00

I just rediscovered Cute Overload. It's great for those times when you need a quick pick-me-up. If a specific kind of animal really makes you go "aww," I recommend scrolling down until you get to the tags on the left side. I tend to like the "pocket pets" pics, but I'll certainly take cuteness of any sort. Today's cuteness is an itty bitty baby hedgehog. Personally, I'd be afraid to touch it - I figure I'd either stab myself or hurt it.

MARC --> OPAC = ?

2009-11-24T17:40:00.004-06:00

One thing that never came up during the cataloging courses I took, but should have, was that the fields in MARC records may mean certain things to the cataloger who's entering and editing them, but that doesn't mean they're understood and put to use in the same way by the OPAC. I got a reminder of that today.

I had assumed that the language dropdown menu in our advanced search limited searches to the actual language of the items (in my cataloger's brain, I thought it limited searches to whatever language was listed in field 008 positions 35-37). That would still make multi-lingual materials problematic, but it's better than nothing, right? However, I didn't realize that the dropdown was just drawing from all languages associated with the items. That means that, if you selected German as the language, you'd not only get materials in German, you'd get materials in other languages that are translations of things originally in German. Not exactly ideal if what you want to find is a book in whatever language you're interested in. Not everybody wants translations.

Ideally, there should be a way to limit a search by the language of the actual item and, separately, by the language of the original work. (Which is a simplification, because MARC records also include things like "language of subtitles," "language of librettos", etc.) Instead, I think we've just got an either/or situation with our ILS. Right now, "language" in our advanced search is defined in a very broad way, and, if we narrowed that definition (if that's even possible) by changing our settings, we'd lose the ability to find, say, a book that was originally in German by choosing German from the dropdown.

I figured out a way around "too broad" problem by using a report in WorkFlows ("List entries from catalog", searching for the correct language code in 008, and limiting by call number, library, etc. if desired), but this workaround is clunky. Also as far as I know, there is no way for the average user (or staff members or librarians without WorkFlows access and knowledge of MARC) to find only materials in specific languages. I'll have to think it over and see if I can come up with anything. It'd be interesting to see what others assume the language dropdown is supposed to do - it's possible that our settings could use some tweaking, even if that means losing the ability to find "translations of works originally in X language."

Super secret cataloger knowledge

2009-11-19T20:34:00.003-06:00

There are times at the ref desk when I feel like I'm not the best person to answer someone's question, although I still do the best I can (and send a cry of help to Cathy W., Yvonne, etc. if I really can't manage). Sometimes, however, I know I'm one of the best possible people to answer some questions. I just had a moment like that. A person wanted to know why she'd gotten an item she asked for just a couple days ago when she'd been told a week or two ago that we didn't have it. It turns out the item was something I'd cataloged only a couple days ago. Very nifty.

And now I'll get back to loading records and answering questions...

New anime, yay!

2009-11-17T23:51:00.002-06:00

I just got The Twelve Kingdoms in the mail - very exciting, even though I still have When They Cry waiting to be watched. At least I've already finished The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (great first few episodes, but nothing got resolved and the ending wasn't satisfying in the least). My NaNoWriMo writing seems to have ground to a complete halt, by the way. I think it would probably take a miracle for me to write enough to get to 50K, although I read a particularly inspirational email from another NaNoWriMo participant today that may at least get me to squeeze out another few thousand words.

OCLC article in Radical Cataloging

2009-11-17T00:23:00.001-06:00

I'm reading a book called Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front edited by K.R. Roberto. It's readable enough that I think even non-catalogers could get something out of it without necessarily having to consult dusty old notes from their Intro to Cataloging class.

I just finished reading Jeffrey Beall's contribution, "OCLC: A Review." It's a very critical look at OCLC, its products, its practices, etc. There are some things in the article that I agree with, and there are some criticisms of OCLC that have been made on AUTOCAT that I agree with that aren't mentioned in this article (OCLC's attempted and much-protested Record Use Policy came up, and died, after this book was published - it would have been perfect fodder for this article).

So, here's my brief critical paragraph. Criticisms of WorldCat's attempts at FRBRization are ignored or dismissed as being the complaints of too few for OCLC to take serious notice (see Lorcan Dempsey's blog post - I'm surprised there aren't more comments, particularly from people who have noticed serious problems in the way music materials are FRBRized). Like Beall, I, too, hate it when Connexion (OCLC cataloging software) goes down, although I'm not as crippled by that at DSL as I was at my previous library - at my previous library, pretty much all I could do during the downtime was clean my desk and twiddle my thumbs. I think OCLC pricing it outrageous, particularly when products like WorldCat depend upon catalogers at member libraries to edit and add records. True, OCLC has catalogers, too, (I interviewed for a job with them, and have even met some of those catalogers in person) but I doubt WorldCat would be worth anything if most of OCLC's customers decided they could no longer afford its services and left. I hate that OCLC has a monopoly as a bibliographic utility for cataloging (SkyRiver may change that, but I imagine it faces an uphill battle).

Beall's article bashes OCLC, and it's true that OCLC isn't all sunshine and flowers. However, it's not completely evil either.

They at least communicate with their customers more than some companies do (Janie would know which company I'm thinking of...).
Beall is extremely critical of Connexion, and one statement I found particularly interesting was "Libraries choose instead to download the records directly into their online catalog and fix up the records there, where the editing process is easier and generally quicker" (p. 88). This statement wasn't made in the Connexion section (it was in a section commenting about the horrible quality records with which WorldCat is riddled, aka the dreaded Level 3 records), but, lacking an explanation for what is meant by "easier and generally quicker," I can only assume that it's a criticism of Connexion. I'm unfamiliar with the bibliographic record editing capabilities of most ILSs, but the capabilities of our ILS are dismal. Say what you like about Connexion, I can edit a record far more quickly with it than with our ILS, and the results are generally less likely to have errors. Connexion gives me the ability to use macros (I don't have the skills to create a macro more complicated than the one that adds my 949 field at the end of my records, but several talented people have made their wonderful macros available to the OCLC cataloging community, for which I am very grateful), it has spell check, it has record validation, and I can use my keyboard to do most of my record editing. Our ILS has no macro capabilities, no spell check, no record validation (not entirely true, but what it does have is almost worthless for my purposes), and I'm forced to use my mouse to even add a new field to the record.
Connexion has batch processing options which save me lots of time. In the past few days, I've done work using Connexion's batch searching and processing that would have taken me years to do one at a time.

I could probably come up with more (and I'm only looking at this from a cataloger's perspective), but it's late and I'm tired. Basically, yes, there are lots of things one can criticize OCLC for, but I'd still be sad if we could no longer afford their services. If I had better alternative options for single-record editing (as opposed to batch record editing, which MarcEdit accomplishes nicely) and record-finding (the Library of Congress would probably be a great alternative source for most of our book records, but cataloging music, audiobooks, and DVDs would get a lot harder if I couldn't access OCLC's pool of records), I'd be a lot less sad.

NaNoWriMo update

2009-11-08T22:58:00.002-06:00

I'm still over 1000 words behind, but, when you consider that I was over 6000 words behind on Friday, that's not really so bad. It turns out that zombies are my cure for writer's block - without actually having a prior plan for them, I introduced zombies into my story on Saturday and managed to write almost 7000 words. Unfortunately, my characters have gone back to boring me. I think I may have to introduce yet another zombie attack soon, or I'll fall even farther behind.

Cataloger humor: Library of Congress Subject Headings

2009-11-02T18:49:00.003-06:00

It's only day two, and I'm already procrastinating on my NaNoWriMo writing. Bad, bad...

Anyway, here's a collection of LCSH-related humor.

Arguments and insults using LCSH - Tim Spalding writes about using LCSH to continue an argument about a librarian tour to Cuba and then comes up with a few ways one could insult someone with LCSH. Don't forget to look at the comments - some very creative insults can be found there.
LCSH, wild and wacky - Here you can see just a few odd subject headings. Unfortunately, the wiki mentioned at the bottom doesn't appear to exist anymore. I saw it a few months ago, and it looked like a lot of fun. Maybe someone will start it up again.
Strange things learned in cataloging class - This isn't entirely about subject headings, but I wanted to include it anyway.
Name That Book - Guess which classic/well-known works of literature these subject headings describe. This also shows why I don't really like LCSH in records for fiction. I'm more likely to enter a short plot summary or publisher description for a work of fiction than to agonize over its subject headings.

November is National Novel Writing Month

2009-10-28T21:13:00.002-05:00

Have you heard about National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo? I've done it for two or three years and plan to do it again this year.

So, for those who don't know, what is NaNoWriMo? During the month of November (until midnight, November 30th - participants may need every last hour they can squeeze out of the month), the goal for each participant is to write a 175-page (50,000 word) novel. Have you ever tried to write something and found yourself stalled, worried about whether it was any good or whether anyone would actually like it? Have no fear, because NaNoWriMo is all about quantity, not quality. If you don't want to share what you've written, you don't have to. No one has to know that what you've written is awful, mind-numbing garbage. I have to say, that's kind of liberating.

Of course, even with that kind of freedom, NaNoWriMo still isn't easy. It's hard to overcome the inner critic. It's hard to make yourself type that much when you're tired, can't figure out what you're going to write next, or just don't want to type after spending your day at a computer doing homework, work, or whatever else. It gets really, really easy to say, "Sure, I'm so-and-so many words behind on my NaNoWriMo writing, but I'll get caught up." Trust me, that turns into, "I'm so far behind, I'll never get caught up - I might as well watch this YouTube video of a cat walking on a piano."

I've participated in NaNoWriMo several times, but not once have I written 50,000 words by the end of the month. So far, the best I've managed to do is 12,000. However, I'll try again. My mantra will be, "it's ok for my writing to suck." Maybe I'll write that on a post-it note and stick it somewhere near my laptop.

Some NaNoWriMo participants make this month a really social thing. They'll form a regional group, meet for writing sessions if they can, encourage each other via email. There are general NaNoWriMo encouragement emails at least once a week. One year (maybe all years, but I only really paid attention to the emails one year), these emails were written by well-known authors - I think I may still have Neil Gaiman's encouragement email saved somewhere. Although I read the emails, I never really got into the whole "region" thing. Maybe that would help, though. I signed into my account (which needed updating - Colorado Springs was still listed as my region) - it looks like the best I can do as far as regions go is the Dallas/Forth Worth one. It has 2,012 members right now.

Sometimes getting a few more words written can take help. As I've mentioned, some people get involved with the regional groups. Here's what I'll be looking into for sure:

Tea - I guzzle herbal tea when I'm at home on the computer writing for hours at a time. This habit started when I was in grad school. Writing papers always gave me the munchies, and I didn't have the money to snack continuously (plus, walking is, and always has been, my only form of exercise). Lacking the funds for lots of chips, cookies, and whatever else, I bought tea samplers. A box of tea takes longer for me to get through than a box of cookies.
Music - I am an enormous nerd. My favorite online radio station is Keiichi.net Radio, which mostly plays J-Pop, J-Rock, and anime music. Even though I know only a handful of Japanese words, I have listened to this radio station so much that I can sing along with some of the songs. Scary, huh? This year, I think I may also give the offerings of Classical Music Library a try, once I'm able to access it off-campus (there seem to be some problems with that right now). I don't know much about classical music, so it's hard for me to think of composers or styles of music I might like, but that's where Classical Music Library's themed playlists come in handy. Today I tried "Music to Write To" (or "Music To Write With", can't remember right now) during work and really liked it.
Books about writing - DSL has lots of those. For starters, try the subject headings "Fiction--Technique", "Writer's block", and "Creative writing" (that one's good in a subject browse search, since there are lots of useful subdivisions, although subject keyword is good too and only a little daunting). I may have to lay off these, though - they tend to encourage me to procrastinate. Plus, these books get me to thinking about how awful my writing is, and then I start to freeze up. Not good. But I may at least try Writer's block busters [PN171 .W74 H68 2008 - still In Process, so it would need to be rushed] or something similar.
Fruits Basket as background noise - Fruits Basket, which started out as a manga series and was made into an anime, is a comfort series for me. I had it on in the background when I was a stressed-out undergrad working on my thesis. I always took a break to watch the episode where Shigure tried to avoid his long-suffering editor and made the poor woman think his manuscript wasn't finished yet.

Since I can't even keep up a once-a-week schedule with my book blog, I don't know how well NaNoWriMo will go this year, but I'll try.

The "teachable moment"

2009-10-28T20:35:00.004-05:00

"Every time we teach someone about a resource, an angel gets its wings."
-- Dewey, on reference librarians and the "teachable moment," Unshelved, 10/28/09

I don't often have to answer real reference questions at the reference desk, but, when I do, I usually try to remember to explain what I'm doing and why as I try to answer those questions (although that may not be an option on the really, really busy days...). For the most part, I figure that if I tried to cram all our services down our users' throats whenever they came near me, they'd probably try to run away like the poor patron in Unshelved. Still, I can't help but get excited when someone actually seems to be interested about learning something and hearing more about what we have to offer.

Another animal sighting

2009-10-25T21:10:00.000-05:00

This morning, as I was getting ready for work, a hawk landed on my porch. I saw it through my window - I was maybe 2 feet away from it, which was more awesome than scary, since there was a window between me and the hawk. I got to look it right in the eye, think "I wish I had my camera right this second", and see it fly off. Even if I had had my camera, I wouldn't have been able to take a picture fast enough. I'd need a camera installed in my eyeballs. By the way, raptor's eyes are creepy. I don't think I've ever been looked at that intently before.

A few minutes later, I looked out the window again and saw a squirrel sprawled on one of the steps up to the second floor of my building. I had previously thought that maybe the hawk had swooped down for something and missed, landing on my porch, but then I thought that maybe it had dropped the squirrel and tried to go after it again. I was a little bit freaked out by the idea of having to enter and leave my apartment with a dead squirrel staring at me, but it seems the squirrel was either an unrelated animal sighting or just stunned. When I left for work, it was already gone.

Big Kitty is gone

2009-10-25T20:30:00.000-05:00

I'm writing this post, wondering if Big Kitty will prove me wrong. "Big Kitty" was the not-quite-a-name I gave the cat I mentioned in this post. When I came back from the conference, Big Kitty wasn't there. I put some cat food outside, figuring he might have gone off somewhere to mooch off of someone else, and the food was still there in the morning. The food was still there when I finished grocery shopping and when I went to bed. It was gone by this morning, but I figure Narrow Kitty (my not-quite-a-name for the skittish stray cat that occasionally tried to steal food from Big Kitty) was responsible for that.

So, it's been two days, and I still haven't seen Big Kitty. I suppose I should be happy about that, since I'll no longer have to worry about him when it's cold and/or rainy outside, but it makes me feel kind of teary-eyed. He'd gotten in the habit of escorting me to and from the laundry room and mailbox area. Now it feels weird going without him. I miss him, and I hope that the reason he's gone is because someone took him in and finally gave him a home.

I really should move somewhere that will let me at least have a cat, but the idea of moving is too exhausting. Rats are nice, but there's something to be said for a pet that lives longer and can join you when you're doing something in another room. I also miss sleeping with a pet curled up at my side. If I fall asleep while my rats are out, I risk having one of them test me as a possible food source, chew holes into my clothing, and try to push me off of the bed (usually Bear does this - he hates it when I fall asleep and stop paying attention to him).

Not for those with arachnophobia

2009-10-08T21:32:00.001-05:00

Isn't this spider horrific-looking? Its abdomen is only 3 or 4 mm wide, so it's not big, but it still makes me shudder. It lives in my apartment, behind my front door. It usually hides right by the door frame.

Unless I shine a flashlight on it (or use my camera's flash), it looks dark brown or black, and its markings aren't very visible. Its shape made me think, at first, that it was a black widow spider, but I eventually realized the coloring was wrong.

Anyway, I posted pictures of the spider on BugGuide (an extremely awesome resource, although not something I'd recommend as an authoritative source - if you really want to scare yourself, do a search for Granbury). The general response was that it's probably Steatoda triangulosa. S. triangulosa is nifty, in that, from what I've read about it, it eats things like fire ants and brown recluses. However, I will probably either kill or remove it in a few days. I was told that it's a female, and I don't want to risk an egg sac in my apartment. Also, even though I haven't ever seen it move from its tiny space behind my front door, I'll be sleeping in my living room while my mom is visiting, and I'm not sure I can sleep peacefully knowing that a spider is only a few feet away from me.

If I'm going to have "natural pest control", I'd rather that the gecko living in my dining room window either invited a few friends over or had babies.

Searching with wildcards

2009-10-01T21:29:00.000-05:00

I wish it were easier to find out the wildcards that can be used in the library's catalog. For future reference (mine or someone else's), ? can substitute for a single character (the example in the OPAC help info, if you can manage to find it, is wom?n, which will find instances of "woman", "women" or, not mentioned on the help page, "womyn"), while $ is used for truncation (educat$ finds "education", "educate", "educates", "educating", etc.). I don't often use substitution, but I love truncation. According to the help page, you can also add a number after $ to limit the number of characters matched. I've never done this before, but it has great potential if you're searching for variations of a very short word.

A day or two ago, a student who had been conducting individual searches with every variation of words beginning with "educat" was very grateful when I showed him how to use $ in our catalog. Of course, then we moved on to Academic Search Complete, where truncation is accomplished with an asterisk. I tried to show him how I was able to find out which symbol is used for truncation, but I have to say, although I, personally, had an easier time with EBSCO's help pages than with our catalog's help pages, it can still be a little daunting.

Web of Knowledge includes, at the bottom of its search fields, examples that use asterisks, which is what it uses for truncation, but there's nothing near those examples that explains what the asterisks do. So, while I applaud them for trying not to bury their truncation information in their help pages, they're effectively still burying the information in their help pages. Just like everyone else.

Is there a database/catalog/etc. out there that communicates wildcard information in an easy-to-understand, easy-to-find, non-daunting way?

LCSH for "Cookery" being changed to "Cooking"

2009-09-30T17:14:00.001-05:00

The change hasn't happened yet, but apparently a lot of cooking and cookbook subject headings will be changed in the near future or are still being considered for change: see the PDF on this.

The problem, as far as our local catalog goes, is that I am still performing all authority work manually. I could potentially make cooking and cookbook subject headings a special project for myself, but it would only be one of many special projects I've currently got going. Even if I made it a special project and, by hand, exported former "cookery" subject headings from OCLC and imported them into WorkFlows, there's still no guarantee I'd get everything (I'm still finding headings using the older "Vietnam Conflict", and I'm sure we've got more with "European War" instead of "World War", etc.). Plus, we have an unknown number of records with headings that, for some reason, aren't properly linked to their corresponding authority records - these would need to be "flipped" by hand.

This isn't really just a cookery/cooking problem - it's a general, "doing authority work completely by hand" problem. At this point, the best I can do is load new authority records, overlay any that have changed when a new bibliographic record brings those changes to my attention, and load records for unauthorized headings when I have time. I'd love to be able to go through the Library of Congress Weekly Lists and update an of our authority records that have been changed (or split, or merged, or deleted), but, at this point, that's just a nice dream.

Oh, and since this post deals with authority records, I'll just mention that from the beginning of June to today, the end of September, I've loaded 4,102 new authority records. We have a total of 243,981 authority records, period. Of these, 27,811 are provisional (in our system, that means that they're machine-generated and therefore contain nothing beyond the "authorized" form of the name or subject heading and the title of the work that was used to generate the record). A couple hundred thousand authority records may sound like a lot, but we still need many more. I'm working on it. I'm also working on overlaying as many of those provisional authority records as I can.

Ah, authority work, my eternal project...

Classification of video recordings

2009-09-18T17:39:00.001-05:00

Every time I catalog DVDs/VHS tapes, I learn something new, since this isn't a format I normally work with. For instance, I've learned a lot about how other libraries handle classification of fiction DVDs and videos. One of these days, especially if there are signs that our DVD collection will be growing significantly, it'd be nice to go over our DVD collection and reclassify anything that needs it (I could include our VHS collection, but I'm betting our DVD collection will be around longer).

I'm currently trying to be good about recording any classification decisions I've made, in the hopes that future classification efforts can be more consistent that they have been. Some things have been classified very oddly over the years, or there have been misunderstandings about the correct way to apply LC's classification schedule (understandable, since LC classification works best for non-fiction).

Awful Library Books - a blog that encourages weeding

2009-09-17T21:48:00.002-05:00

I found out about this particular blog a while ago (but still after Yvonne) - Awful Library Books is hilarious and embarrassing at the same time.

It's hilarious because the books that they blog about are so bad (or so strange). It's embarrassing, and should be for any librarian, because these books are all signs that some library's collection is in desperate need of weeding.

The blog focuses mainly on public libraries, but academic library collections need weeding too. Yes, academic libraries should sometimes keep certain older books, perhaps for their historical value or because they are important in their field. It's not possible or advisable to keep everything, however. If the university has no courses that cover the historical aspects of certain topics (such as plant biotechnology, for instance), why keep books whose only current value is historical? There are lots of subjects that tend not to age well if you're not interested in their historical aspects - anything with technology, medicine, science, etc.

I'm not sure this gets mentioned a lot when the benefits of weeding are discussed, but, as a cataloger, I like the idea of large weeding projects, because that usually means lots of old, maintenance-needing records will be removed. I like catalog maintenance, but I like it even more when I know that the records I'm maintaining represent materials people would actually want to use.

Anime online, from FUNimation

2009-09-17T11:49:00.002-05:00

I absolutely love that FUNimation is showing free episodes of certain series - sometimes an entire series is available for viewing online. It's now possible to legally try out a series and see if it's worth buying. Yay!

Currently on my list to be watched, whenever I can scrape together the time and willpower:

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood - I've watched a little so far, and it's not bad, but the original series and manga are more coherent.
Baccano - Watched the first episode so far and it was good, but violent.
Basilisk - The website for this show has, if I remember right, a list of death scenes, so I imagine this one is violent, maybe more than I'd like. Yet another reason to try it out, so I know if it's really something to add to my "buy it" list.
Big Windup - Baseball and teamwork. Sounds like a feel good series.
Darker Than Black - I didn't realize FUNimation had made this one available online! Yes!
Desert Punk - My dad may like this one more than me - the jokes seem very guy-oriented.
Devil May Cry - I've seen artwork for this, and it looked good, but I don't know about the show itself.
Ergo Proxy - I've been on the fence about this show for ages.
Gunslinger Girl - Will this show depress me too badly? I guess I'll find out.
Hell Girl - Is this show "weirdness of the week" or is there more to it?
Jyu-Oh-Sei - I can't remember what I've heard about this one, but I remember thinking I should check it out...
Murder Princess - I almost got this one at Hastings because the series is really cheap, but is it actually worth it?
Nabari No Ou - The clips I've seen look awesome, and I have a soft spot for shows with ninjas.
Sgt. Frog - Sgt. Frog is now an anime?! When did that happen?
Soul Eater - FUNimation is putting out Soul Eater?! Oh, I've wanted to see that one for ages!
Welcome to the NHK - I found out about this when I was trying to put together read-alikes/watch-alikes for Train Man.

Sick brat (er, rat...)

2009-09-17T11:18:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was day 2 of giving my rattie boy Bear medicine on my own. As usual, hardly any of it got inside him, or even on him. I'll just have to hope that he's getting enough to help him feel better.

Yesterday morning, Bear had me all worried, because he didn't eat when I fed him and his brother. He wouldn't lick me either (sometimes he reminds me of a little dog, he likes licking my hands so much). He didn't look listless, and he didn't look any worse when I came home that day, but he still barely ate and there was so little water missing from the water bottle that I'm guessing Bear didn't really drink from it that day.

I fed them again before I went to bed (I divide feeding time up, because when they were younger they'd overeat if I gave it all at once). Only a few minutes after I turned out the light, I heard somebody munching away. It was Bear, the little brat. I think he was just sulking about being given the medicine, because he ate like usual this morning.

What a relief, but argh. Pets can make you crazy sometimes.

Yet another stray cat in need of a home

2009-09-17T10:12:00.003-05:00

I'd love to find a home for this guy (girl? I'm not actually sure...). This kitty is a sweetheart and, as far as I can tell, has no actual street smarts, despite that ear notch.

The Interactive Dan Brown Sequel Generator

2009-09-16T17:40:00.000-05:00

Dan Brown's next book, according to The Interactive Dan Brown Sequel Generator and my selections:

The Invisible Temple -- An ancient code in the monuments of Dallas. A ruthless cult determined to protect it. A desperate race to uncover the Boy Scouts of America's darkest secret.

Wow, I had no idea there even was a secret branch of the Boy Scouts of America...

Seriously, try this out, it's worth some laughs. I used to have a collection of links to various generators, but I left all that behind when I last got a new computer...

More on the Google Book Settlement

2009-09-10T18:14:00.003-05:00

Is the Google Book Settlement Dead? - Just saw this blog post. Considering all of the "Google Books is leaving/is going to leave libraries in its dust" stuff I've been reading lately, this made for interesting reading. I recommend reading Marybeth Peters's entire testimony, which can be found here. The testimony is far more readable than I expected and clearly highlights several concerns about the settlement.

RSS feeds for electronic journals

2009-09-09T17:00:00.004-05:00

I don't know if this is something that would necessarily interest our undergraduates too much, but I love it and I think our faculty, at least, would find it useful (if they don't mind RSS feeds in general).

I'm subscribed to several feeds for blogs about cataloging, FRBR, LibraryThing, and more, but I hadn't thought about RSS feeds for journals. While looking up an article in Technical Services Quarterly, which we have access to through Informaworld, I discovered that I could subscribe to an RSS feed for that particular journal. It's not hard to unsubscribe to a feed if I don't like it, so I decided to try it, and I love it! When a new issue of the journal becomes available, I get emails corresponding to each article in that journal (as well as reviews or other things the journal contains). The emails aren't very informative - all I get is the title and author of the article, no abstracts (although this may differ from publication to publication) - but it's still better than trying to remind myself to check and see if anything new has come out and if I want to read it. Plus, this way, if there's nothing I want to read, I don't have to sit and wait for Informaworld to load - I just delete the emails and forget about it.

I haven't looked to see if other electronic journals I should be keeping up with also have RSS feeds, but I will. I'm sure Informaworld isn't the only one doing this sort of thing. It's a nifty way for professionals to keep current.

I ♥ RSS feeds.

John Adams, prolific writer of erotic fiction and children's stories

2009-09-08T08:26:00.005-05:00

This came up recently in some AUTOCAT posts, in a discussion about retaining or deleting relator terms and/or codes in records. Back when our Validate Headings Wizard was much more sensitive, I used to delete all relator codes and terms, because they made it impossible to properly validate name headings that had them. Now, I retain them - who knows, we might one day actually be able to make use of them in the way that WorldCat Identities does.

Of course, even WorldCat Identities can give out garbled results when it only has garbled data to work with, as can be seen in that example from AUTOCAT. John Adams, an active writer from 1651 to 2008, is rarely written about although he himself is a prolific writer of such varied works as erotic fiction and children's stories. He is a businessman, mayor, and legislator, as well as a performer, conductor, speaker, and more. Truly, this is a renaissance man. Or maybe vampire.

Google's Book Search

2009-09-02T17:00:00.002-05:00

"Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars" by Geoffrey Nunberg

As a cataloger, I find this article darkly amusing. It's an example of why good metadata can't (yet) be created quickly and automatically. Too many errors crop up, and bad metadata is as bad, or worse, than no metadata at all. If your metadata is bad, you just spent time and money creating something that is almost unusable the way it was intended to be used. As painful as it may be, it still takes time and the work of someone (often many someones) who knows what they are doing to produce really good, really worthwhile results.

Work-time listening: Digital music

2009-09-01T12:00:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I listen to audiobooks, online radio, or webcasts. For the past couple weeks, I've been listening to the digital music we recently provided access to through our OPAC (although we've had access to it via our databases page for some time now - it's all from Classical Music Library). Last week it was Chopin - The complete Chopin piano works, which brought to my attention the difficulty of getting exactly what you want when all the links look the same. Every one of those links on that record takes you to a different volume, although the only way someone using the OPAC would know that is if they clicked on each of the links (like I did - I listened my way through the whole thing) or changed the display to "Unformatted display: Yes" (which makes the links disappear, by the way, so there'd be the added annoyance of copying and pasting the URL in order to get to the page). If I had realized how this was going to display, I would've added "do something about the subfield 3's" to the list of changes we decided to make to the records. Maybe there's still something we can do about that, though. I'll have to look into that. Maybe the subfield 3 info can be made to display. I wonder if other libraries display their subfield 3 information...?

Anyway, this week's listening fun is Brahms - The complete piano variation so Johannes Brahms. I like piano music.

If you want to do a search in the catalog just for our digital music, go to the Power Search screen (advanced search) and selected "Digital Music" under "Type." I know Tracy loaded something like 400 records, and many of them have more than one link in them, so that's a lot of music.