Some interesting statistics about how MARC usage has changed in recent OCLC cataloging--perhaps due to the influx of non-US cataloging

R2's commissioned report for the Library of Congress

LC's internal working group responds to "On The Record"

"The Library of Congress is releasing today (10/30/09) the results of its analysis of the creation and distribution of bibliographic data in U.S. and Canadian libraries.

The Library commissioned R2 Consulting LLC of Contoocook, N.H., to search and describe the current marketplace for cataloging records in the MARC format, with primary focus on the economics of current practices, including existing incentives and barriers to both contribution and availability."

Abstract
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed. (AACR2) rule 1.0E1 allows title and statement of responsibility, edition, publication and/or distribution data, and series title to be "transcribed from the item itself in the language and script (wherever practicable) in which it appears there." However, AACR2 will be replaced by a set of guidelines entitled Resource Description and Access (RDA). This article compares various guidelines from the November 2008 draft of RDA that are applicable to transcribing titles and names written in non-roman languages and/or scripts with their counterparts in its predecessor.

"Electronic Scriptorium, Ltd., provides a full line of metadata management services to world class businesses and institutions. We offer metadata modeling, taxonomy and ontology design, controlled vocabulary services and descriptive cataloging for digital assets. Let's talk about how to improve your enterprise-wide metadata model or strategies for increasing ROI from digital assets."

SkyRiver --a new cataloging utility --website is now live, but not much there  --a demo would be nice, even if it was canned

SkyRiver -- a new competitor for OCLC cataloging services -- with ties to Innovative Interfaces

OCLC has appointed a new council to develop a new records use policy--hopefully this will be an open process unlike the last go-round. 

A nice listing of links related to RDA

Back issues of CSB (1978 to current) available as free PDF download

"The Web 2.0 environment provides the opportunity for innovative use of freely available datasets and, not least in the UK, there is increasing interest from Government in making information created by public sector organisations more widely available for re-use, in order to generate greater economic benefit, social gain and improvements to public services.

These developments are creating a complex landscape for the creation and use of the traditional bibliographical data"

The Library of Congress has retained R2 Consulting, LLC to research and describe the US and Canadian "marketplace" for cataloging records and we need your help.

AUTHOR: Ingrid Hsieh-Yee
TITLE: Educating Cataloging Professionals in a Changing Information Environment
SOURCE: Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 49 no2 93-106 Spr 2008

"The information environment of the twenty-first century is highly competitive. This article addresses how cataloging education should be provided for the profession to stay relevant and competitive in the digital age. To provide a context for considering cataloging education, it describes important changes and trends in the information environment and summarizes discussions and debates within the profession. It identifies competencies cataloging professionals need to develop and offers strategies to ensure the future of the cataloging profession. Specifically, it discusses how to raise awareness and appreciation for information organization among students and non-cataloging educators, how to prepare graduates with different levels of expertise in information organization, how to cultivate leaders for the profession and produce more cataloging educators, how to collaborate in teaching and researching information organization issues, and how to engage stakeholders -- practitioners, educators, employers, funders, and professional groups -- in the preparation of cataloging professionals."

Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow
by Judy Luther (Informed Strategies)

Abstract: The white paper was commissioned by NISO and OCLC as a follow-up to the Symposium for Publishers and Librarians held by OCLC on March 18-19, 2009 to discuss book metadata. This paper analyzes the current state of metadata creation, exchange, and use throughout the book supply chain. With the number of book formats multiplying and the amount of digital content growing rapidly, the metadata required to support the discovery, sale, and use of content by a global audience is increasing exponentially. At the same time economic pressures on all stakeholders in the supply chain from publishers, wholesalers, booksellers, metadata vendors, and librarians present greater challenges to providing quality and comprehensive metadata at every point in the cycle. Through interviews with over 30 industry representatives, Luther has created a book metadata exchange map illustrating the process and has identified opportunities for eliminating redundancies and making the entire process more efficient.

Videos now available:

May 22-23, 2009
Milwaukee Central Library, Centennial Hall
Milwaukee, WI

Information organization (IO), like other major functions of the information profession, faces many ethical challenges. In the IO literature, ethical concerns have been raised with regard to, for example, the role of national and international IO standards, providing subject access to information, deprofessionalization and outsourcing of IO, education of IO professionals, and the effects of globalization. These issues, and others like them, have serious implications for quality and equity in information access. The Center for Information Policy Research and the Information Organization Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee join in presenting this conference to address the ethics of information organization.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Clare Beghtol, Professor
University of Toronto, Canada

José Augusto Chaves Guimarães, Professor
Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil

Janet Swan Hill, Professor, Associate Director for Technical Services, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, USA

New website for the JSC

"All 123 issues of Cataloging Service Bulletin (CSB) are now available at no cost. CSB is a quarterly bulletin that includes current, new, and revised information about LC cataloging and classification practices and policies. CSB lists revised AACR2 rules, LC Rule Interpretations, changes to the ALA/LC Romanization tables, changes to the LC Subject Headings, and includes "Cataloging Publication News" and "News of Cataloging Projects," and more."

This final report reflects the comments from the BIBCO community as they relate to the TG charge to define a set of required elements for bibliographic records for monographs using a single encoding level. Our tasks were:
• to develop a "model" for bibliographic records using a single encoding level to replace the BIBCO full and core levels
•to use the BIBCO core level record as a starting point, and
•to focus on a model for the printed monograph to be used as a basis for models for other formats

Tool for catalogers allows searching for MARC tags; assigning cutters; etc.

The Review Board on the proposed OCLC Record Use Policy made an interim report to the Members' Council on Monday May 18, 2009.

Jennifer Younger, the Chair of the Board, gave our report and it has been recorded. The podcast and the accompanying PowerPoint slides are on the Review Board's web page: http://www.oclc.org/us/en/worldcat/catalog/policy/board/default.htm

"The Library of Congress today announced the next phase of its investigation into the creation and distribution of bibliographic data in U.S. and Canadian libraries. The Library has commissioned a study to research and describe the current marketplace for cataloging records in the MARC format, with primary focus on the economics of current practices, including existing incentives and barriers to both contribution and availability. The study will be carried out by R2 Consulting LLC of Contoocook, N.H."

A revision of the Paris Principles

"In response to requests from the cataloging community, OCLC is introducing the Expert Community Experiment, which enables cataloging members to make more changes to WorldCat records. During the Experiment, members with full-level cataloging authorizations have the ability to improve and upgrade WorldCat master records. The Experiment begins in February 2009 and lasts six months."

This is OCLC's response to the question 'what if WorldCat were more like Wikipedia'--I wonder how succesful this will be, considering the questions asked during the webinar.  It was clear that many of the participants hadn't been making upgrades and doing enrichment as previously possible with the same authorization level.   So, will this change people's behavior???

Cataloging productivity suite:

* Web-based cataloging client
* Supports copy & original cataloging
* Search millions of freely licensed records
* Share your records with other libraries

"In a series of webcasts, Dr. Barbara Tillett, Chief, Policy and Standards Division of the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate, presents information about Resource Description and Access (RDA), the next generation cataloging code. Presentations currently available include one providing background and an overview of RDA, and one on the cataloging principles of RDA. Future presentations will focus on Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records (FRBR), Functional Requirements of Authority Data (FRAD), and the content and structure of RDA. "

Home page of LC's Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate

"In response to requests from the cataloging community, OCLC is introducing the Expert Community Experiment which enables cataloging members to make more changes to WorldCat records. During the Experiment, members with full level cataloging authorizations have the ability to improve and upgrade WorldCat master records. The Experiment begins in February 2009, and lasts six months."

Dated June 2006

GODORT's Toolbox for Processing and Cataloging Federal Government Documents

The OCLC GovDoc service, available to regional and selective depository libraries, provides up-to-date, MARC-format cataloging records for U.S. government documents. As a GovDoc subscriber, your library regularly receives bibliographic records for only the government documents it holds. GovDoc is available to all federal depository libraries-institutional OCLC membership is not required to use the service.

More on the OCLC record-use policy

A 3-part blog on the OCLC record-use policy and what steps we could take

KAren Calhoun's blog on the new OCLC policy

More on the new OCLC policy restricting reuse of records.

The full draft of RDA is now available for comment.

Heidi Hoerman's presentation on RDA from the 2008 OLAC/MOUG/NOTSL Conference.  She reviews RDA and predicts: 

"RDA will die a quiet death.

AACR2r2010 will be published.

RDA's aims will be realized in due time."

Worth viewing the slides--wish I could have heard the presentation!

This paper seeks to provide a philosophical framework for choices made about library priorities and cataloging policy, the contexts in which they are made, and the consequences they have for users. The authors invoke the notion of utility as a philosophical backdrop for dealing with competing library choices and the fallout from those prioritizations. They then look at how general utilitarian principles can contextualize the layers of wants, needs, and resource allocations in the research library environment. Finally, they examine issues and recent developments at the Cornell University Library as a case study with which to illustrate some of these principles.

"This paper seeks to provide a philosophical framework for choices made about library priorities and cataloging policy, the contexts in which they are made, and the consequences they have for users. The authors invoke the notion of utility as a philosophical backdrop for dealing with competing library choices and the fallout from those prioritizations. They then look at how general utilitarian principles can contextualize the layers of wants, needs, and resource allocations in the research library environment. Finally, they examine issues and recent developments at the Cornell University Library as a case study with which to illustrate some of these principles."

Problem statement: Cultural heritage, bibliographic and archival communities use different controlled vocabularies for the resources that they manage. These controlled vocabularies may not be recognized by very diverse user communities, and ignored by large commercial information hubs and Internet search engines. Metadata needs to flow among diverse environments and reach users wherever they are. The semantic, hierarchical, and granular relationships in controlled vocabularies are often lost when retrieved outside the environment in which they were created.

Problem statement: Creating metadata that suits local needs, readily aggregates across communities, and is easily exposed to Internet search engines remains a costly enterprise. Metadata created by libraries, archives and museums is generally not available to the user communities that look first to Internet search engines. Although mapping data structures has become a commonplace solution to integrate descriptions, real interoperability across the libraries, archives and museums communities cannot be achieved without addressing differences of description at the data-content level.

Objective: Engage the RLG partnership in adapting descriptive practice to economic realities, user expectations, and the requirements of network-level services. Set new expectations for investing in metadata creation and maintenance, model attendant workflows, and facilitate the discovery of research institutions' resources by users wherever they are.

"Cataloger's Learning Workshop is a clearinghouse portal for cataloging and metadata training resources for information workers. The scope of Cataloger's Learning Workshop includes bibliographic information training in the context of formal library and information science degree programs, as well as continuing education for library practitioners. Cataloger's Learning Workshop is a cooperative project of the Library of Congress, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, and the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, a division of the American Library Association.
"

The Cataloging Distribution Service, Library of Congress, has posted to its web site an announcement that the training materials posted to the Cataloger*s Learning Workshop will be available for downloading at no cost on or about 1 October 2008.

Famous Catalogers’ Course

Handy chart for interpreting German Fraktur

"OCLC has launched a pilot project to explore upstream metadata capture and enhancement using publisher and vendor ONIX metadata. Pilot partners from the publishing, vendor and library communities are assisting us in this effort. We hope the pilotwill result in ongoing processes for the early addition of new title metadata to WorldCat and enhanced quality and consistency in upstream title metadata used by multiple channels."

Deanna Marcum's response to the "On The Record" report of the LC working group (June 1, 2008)

Goals of this unit

1. To acquaint and/or refresh those who need to become familiar with current aspects of descriptive cataloging specific to serials
2. To acquaint those who need to become familiar with historical trends in serials cataloging

Formerly Promptcat

The Future of Cataloging: A PALINET Symposium (Thursday, May 29, 2008, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia)

Keynote Address:Karen Calhoun, Vice President, OCLC WorldCat and Metadata Services, will present an overview of the current state of cataloging and the future direction of bibliographic control.

Now updated with audio recordings and slides (from most of the presenters)!

My slides from the The Future of Cataloging: A PALINET Symposium (5/29/08).   I was part of a panel responding to Karen Calhoun's keynote address:  Traveling Through Transitions in Technical Services: From Surviving to Thriving

John Mark Ockerbloom's review of the Palinet Symposium on the future of cataloging

BIBCO's core record standards combined in chart form

This is a revision of the 1961 "Paris Principles"

Comments due by June 30, 2008, to Barbara Tillett, Chair, IFLA's IME ICC Planning Committee at btil@loc.gov or fax to +1 (202) 707-6629.

See form at: http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/icc/IME-ICC_final_vote_form_200804.doc

"Planet Cataloging is an automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata"

From Cataloging Futures: 

"Martha Yee has a new article available at the UC eScholarship repository, Cataloging, Compared to Descriptive Bibliography, Abstracting and Indexing Services and Metadata."

Denton, William. "FRBR and the History of Cataloging."

Chapter 4 in Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval, edited by Taylor, Arlene G.

An explanation of where FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) comes from, given by a look at the work of librarians such as Panizzi, Cutter, Ranganathan, and Lubzetsky, and an examination of four themes in the history of library cataloging: the use of axioms to explain the purpose of catalogs, the importance of user needs, the idea of the "work," and standardization and internationalization.

Announcing the 13th bienniel Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC) Conference. In 2008, the conference is being held jointly with the Music OCLC Users Group (MOUG). This year's conference is in Cleveland, Ohio and includes: Preconference: a one-day Map Cataloging Workshop on Thursday, September 25

A blast from the past (including good old electric erasers ;)

Now updated to include preservation and circulation artifacts, and other misc. library 'technology' 

Cataloging is the foundation of librarianship, and catalogers are professionals with special skills that set them apart from the profession in general and give them unique ethical responsibilities.

"The full text of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) incorporating the amended definition of the expression entity as well as the errata identified to date has been made available on IFLANET in both PDF and HTML formats.

For the first time, the HTML versions of both the current text and the original 1998 text include the tables, rather than just references to the PDF version."

PCC members will find the information in questions 3--6 relevant to matters of languages, dual fields, bi-directionality, spacing, and the eventual use of non-roman data in authority records."

The paper is intended to generate comments useful in making
recommendations for the future direction of PCC series practices and policies. Any individuals or organizations interested in series control policies, practices, and services are welcome to comment.

The task force membership and charges are available
from: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/archive/SeriesReviewTF.html

Draft Recommendations (October 2007)

"A reference card (4 pp.) listing (1) cataloging activities authorized for each OCLC authorization level, including Search, Limited, Full, and higher, and (2) types of master record updates authorized for Full and higher authorizations. Covers both the Connexion browser and client."

Especially note the last page which notes types of record updates possible (Minimal level upgrade, database enrichment, and enhance)

"This group recommended a new level of cataloging, emphasizing data elements that allow catalog users to search for and find records, while de-emphasizing data elements that have traditionally been used in full level records to describe and identify the resource but are not as relevant to remote access electronic resources, or do not support resource discovery."

Site includes links to the report, Mandatory Data Elements, Draft Cataloging Guidelines and several PP presentations about the project

With this document, the [CCS Executive Committee] hopes to provide catalogers and cataloging managers a tool for describing the critical importance of cataloging librarians.

Cataloging librarianship is, at its heart, about service. Cataloging librarians provide customer service, through their work, to thousands of users who use library catalogs and databases on a daily basis, as well as supporting future library users. They create coherent catalogs, which enable a reliable search experience for users, many of whom use the catalog remotely without access to a librarian who can interpret results or respond to questions."

Dated 6/2006; posted on ALCTS web 2007

Collections Define Cataloging's Future
B Simpson - The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 2007 - Elsevier

Mostly a review of the literature, but also a call to change the focus of catalogers to work on special collections. 

Save the date!  The 2008 joint conference of OLAC (Online Audiovisual
Catalogers) and MOUG (Music OCLC Users Group) will take place in
Cleveland, Ohio, from Friday, September 26 - Sunday, September 28, 2008.
Preconference will occur Thursday, Sept. 25th.

A prototype of how RDA might work as an online tool

6/13/07 The co-publishers of RDA have created a short survey on user preferences for a print version of RDA. 

Brief blog entry comparing tagging and controlled vocab.

"tagging has brought metadata to the masses"  

And the harm this causes.

Roy Tennant sampled 856 fields in MARC records to see whether there is a reliable method of determining the availability of the full text access based on the coding the the 856.  His results show wide variablity in the coding, and he argues for one consistant method to code for full text.

A new blog on the future of cataloging. 

"The focus of this blog is the future of cataloging and metadata in libraries. The preparation of the new cataloging code, RDA: Resource Description and Access, is a significant issue. The future of the MARC 21 format will also be explored. ILS/OPAC's future will be touch on also, but will not be the central focus. Also, I hope to use this blog to collocate some of the important papers, articles, websites, etc. that deal with the future of cataloging and metadata.
"

"The Program for Cooperative Cataloging is an international cooperative effort aimed at expanding access to library collections by providing useful, timely, and cost-effective cataloging that meets mutually-accepted standards of libraries around the world."

Library Journal's take on the LC working group on Future of Bibliographic Control. 

Interesting that the represented group include Google and Microsoft, in addition to the regular library reps.

The Library of Congress announced a Working Group to discuss the future of Bibliographic Control.  

They will sponser several regional forums to gather info. and release a draft report for comments by Sept 2007,

with a final report by Nov. 2007

I believe that this is the follow-up promised following the announcement of the changes in series access

announced earlier in 2006. 

RDA is scheduled for release in early 2009.

The virtual reality site Second Life has several virtual libraries and is now looking for catalogers to help with
creating a virtual catalog for their virtual resources [yes, this is for real  - or is it???]

Empirical evidence regarding the utilization of MARC content designation in our current library information retrieval systems can contribute to discussions regarding the future of MARC and its place in the rapidly evolving networked information environment The absence of any solid empirical analysis in the past 30 years, beyond that of frequency of MARC tag use, is a major motivation for this study.

Provides information on how to do this same analysis on our own collection.  Do we want to do this? 

Created by the ALCTS CCS Committee on Education, Training and Recruitment for Cataloging (CETRC), this outline and bibliography is a useful tool for training catalogers.   (PDF)

LC's Press release on Karen Calhoun's report  "The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools"

PDF report at:  http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf 

URL for white paper is:   http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/BSTF/Final.pdf