Is Cataloging Dead: Advocacy for Bibliographic Control

Randy Roeder and Rebecca RouthILA/ACRL Spring Conference

Davenport, IowaMarch 3, 2008

What catalogers do …

“What catalogers are like …

• “Set in their ways”

• “Blindly follow the rules”

• “Cranky, anti-social”

• “Put the periods in the records.”

• “Nit-picky perfectionists”

• “Out of date when it’s out of backlog.”

What catalogers hear from others…

• “Description is not important”

• “No one does subject searches”

• “Full text searching makes metadata obsolete”

• “Cataloging is too expensive”

So, how did we get to this disconnect?

(made buggy whip obsolete)

The chains of the past …

• MARC

• AACR2

• local practice

LCSH is showing its age …

• largest controlled vocabulary in English language (good)

• designed for an alphabetical environment (bad)

• pre-coordinated (bad)

• often too general

“Failures of catalogers …”

• assume the value of their work is self-evident

• tend to view their work as an endless stream of materials to be processed

• focus on the resource, not its use

• tend to ignore hard-to-catalog resources (the long tail)

New Directions

New Roles for the Library of Congress

WoGroFuBiCo

Eliminate redundancies Re-design work flows to make data more

accessible Recycle data from other sources

Focus on the “long tail” (unique and rare collections)

Think and plan for global access

OCLC record

OPAC record

All that’s needed is one good record

The analog past

Curses!Curses!Oh dear…another goof!

                                                             

              

ONIX for Books

Internet Movie Database

WorldCat Identities

The Long Tail

• Unique and rare items• Archival materials• Hidden collections• Digital projects

VIAF Project

• Virtual International Authority File • Cooperation between OCLC, Library of Congress, die deutsche

Bibliothek • Links authority records from different national libraries• Name registries and subject headings

• Multilingual, multi-script, with variations in spelling and

romanization

The next generation catalog is affecting cataloging

• results not alphabetically displayed

• not premised on the retrieval of print material

• no decisions about format or location before search

• no a trip to another ‘silo’ to retrieve digital content

• does not ignore the social side of research

One-box metasearch (Are we there yet?)

Easy integration of digital resources

Recommendations & more …

Integrated instructional content

Faceted browse & relevance ranking

WorldCat LocalThe shot heard ‘round the world…

Inexpensive ‘next gen’ catalog?

Does not display local record!

Jane Eyre the Novel

• Author• Title• Genre• Period• Subject

EditorsPublishersPrinters

The Book

Book in translation

• Parallel titles• Translators

The Film Adaptation

Writer DirectorProducerActorsCrewDistributors

The Remakes

The Music

ComposerLyricistLibrettistPerformersRecording studios

The flat record model

• One record contains all entities• Navigation awkward• Relationships unclear• Redundant

FRBR Relational Model

“Bibliographic control is increasingly a matter of managing relationships—among works, names, concepts, and object descriptions—across communities.”

Report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, January 2008

• Successor to Anglo-American Cataloging Rules• Based on FRBR data model• Content standards for all formats • Guidelines for best practice• Online resource• International in scope• Coming soon

Advocating for more of this will fail…

A better vision

• A web page for every book, film, recording

• Collaborative bibliographic data • Linked author & publisher information• Relationships -- editions, formats and languages• Linked critical works & scholarship

• “A community of experts” adding value

Cataloging staff

• training for a new skill set

• working in a more collaborative environment

• more accountability

Cataloging isn’t dead -- it’s changing.