ACOC 2010 - Describing resources in a web services world

The Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC) 2010 seminar was held on October 21 at the National Library of Australia. I've summarised each of the talks below.
Papers, presentations and audio are available at http://www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/papers2010.html

Keynote Address – David Lindahl – eXtensible Catalog
http://www.extensiblecatalog.org/
This very interesting talk focused on an Open Source product called XC or the eXtensible Catalog.

• The development team for his company is made up of an anthropologist who studies librarians and library users, a librarian and an IT expert.
• The software is designed to empower users to study their clients as well as the way they use library systems
• XC is an Open Source catalogue or OPAC which is designed to link in with all major library systems. It has been developed on the Open Source platform ‘Drupal’ and is easily customisable without having to know any coding. It looks similar to what the current EBSCO interface looks like, but as it is easily customisable, it could look like basically anything we wanted. A sample look of the opac is available in the powerpoint presentation.
• Kyushu University has an instance called Cute.Catalog http://search.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/catalog/en . A results set showing how a student can limit their result is available at http://search.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/catalog/en/xc_browse/search/7/%20%28murder%29%20_rows%3A%2820%29?search_type=browse
• XC also provides a ‘Metadata Services Toolkit’ module which presents a faceted browse/search of problems with data. It was very interesting in that it could pick up various coding problems and then tell you similar records with the problems. You could then use the facets to see if there was a particular ‘theme’ amongst these problem records so you could perform mass changes. The facets also helped visually view problems such as spelling errors.
  

Cataloguing in a ‘Discovery Layer’ world – Karen Stone – State Library of Queensland (SLQ)

Karen talked about ‘Discovery Layers’, a single source/page/search engine that will search across lots of library holdings. An example would be SerialsSolutions which searches across a number of our database platforms (although they aren’t as seemless as some others).

• SLQ implemented OneSearch from Primo (I think). She talked about their experiences.
• Mentioned that data quality is important when implementing a platform like this, all kinds of coding errors stood out (very obviously).
• Mentioned problems when having local solutions that were non-standard, such as coding a set of databases in a certain non-standard way which caused them all to be displayed as ‘books’ in the system. Also mentioned not performing changes on old records when major areas changed (ie when the form subdivision in subjects changed from $x to $v).
• There are ways of finding such things in the local system and doing mass changes, but these are very time consuming.
• She also mentioned that the TAFE libraries in Qld would never be able to do this due to what they include in their catalogue data, but that SLQ had a history of high quality data and this was essential for successful use of this program.
• The entire talk questioned whether we should catalogue things differently to work with a discovery layer, but her opinion was that we should catalogue correctly and to standards in the first place and that things will work out.

Making the most of your metadata, and cataloguing in a web services world – Monica Szunejko – State Library of Western Australia (SLWA)

A rather ‘interesting’ talk on having your users contribute catalogue records. I could feel the tension in the room as people listened to her. I thought it had merit though.

• Library catalogues are not where people go for information because it is out of date and the terminology is bad. Also mentioned that no thesaurus is neutral and that our library catalogues are filled with loaded terminology, so why not embrace this and use common terminology instead of our unwieldy thesauri?
• SLWA have created a site where their users can catalogue their ‘artefacts’ directly into the system. They fill out a form, select some dropdowns and tada a marc record is created in the background. Use of extensive notes fields combined with URLs to link pictures to catalogue records.
• Shown an example of someone who uploaded 6 personal photos in a series and annotated what the photos were about. The annotations showed ‘voice’ and depth to the information that would have been lost if catalogued by a librarian.
• Interesting example of people powered cataloguing of indigenous artefacts at www.irititja.com
  

From container to context: how cataloguers can drive a fundamental and necessary change in resource description – Kent Fitch – National Library of Australia (NLA)

Another ‘interesting’ talk, this one on the uselessness of LCSH and other major thesauri out there. Less tension as he was incredibly amusing, but still quite controversial.

• Search engines are wonderful because they allow users to type random words in a box and receive help.
• Google pre-empts the search of a user (as if by magic) and that’s what library users are beginning to expect. Google also answers simple questions quickly, but doesn’t do so well with the more complex questions. Library catalogues are worse at it (if you are looking at the slideshow, see the pages on railways society mid west nineteenth century
• Library catalogues need to increase what’s in their catalogues.
• Presented findings from a paper by Cory Doctorow in 2001 who said that metadata was metacrap, due to:
• People lie
• People are lazy
• People are stupid
• Mission: Impossible (aka people lie, are lazy and stupid)
• Schemas aren’t neutral
• Metrics influence results
• There’s more than one way to describe something
  
• Showed examples of a book having 4 subjects in a library catalogue, 7 in Wikipedia, 40 tags in LibraryThing and 29 tags in Amazon (plus reviews, plus references to citations), then google scholar had references to even more citations
• What do we do? Stay in our small insular world with LCSH and RDA or expand and embrace new things (tagging/open source/having clients do descriptions)

RDA Update session – Deirdre Kiorgaard – NLA

• No plan for a national licence of RDA
• RDA records may begin appearing on OCLC soon, we need to watch out for them
• Training materials for RDA will all be on the ACOC website at http://www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/rda.html
• RDA implementation has been pushed back until second quarter 2012.
• NZ cataloguer’s wiki will also have some information – http://nznuc-cataloguing.pbwiki.com/RDA-page
  

Koha and Kete non-English implementations – Irma Birchall – CALYX Information Essentials

Koha is an open source library management system, Kete is a commercial addon for Koha

• CALYX have integrated Google Translate into an opac. Standard Koha allows you to customise the interface to be in different languages, but this doesn’t alter the catalogue data. The Google Translate widget allows the full details to be translated (by machine) including all bibliographic information.
• Example is Emmaus Bible College’s catalogue at http://library.emmaus.edu.au/ - they joined with a Korean school and this allows some level of usage by the 100% Korean speaking students
• Very easy to embed a widget with Koha and this was demonstrated
• Also mentioned Forvo, this is a translation pronunciation tool. Native speakers record themselves saying a particular word, and then it can be embedded into catalogue records. Alliance Francais’ catalogue has this feature in some parts of it.
  

Using the library as a central repository for the parent organisation – Sharron Zuodar – University of South Australia (UniSA)

Sharron proposed advertising library services to the parent institutions such as:

• Inventory control for the AV department
• Software tracking for IT
  • Create brief bib records for software
  • Use fields to represent usage
  • Loan it out to IT staff if they have it so it’s easily traceable
• Registering copyright material (ie docuteck)
  • Create bib records containing all needed data
  • Ie illustrations/length/pagination
  • Ensure it is standard
  • Easily pulled out for reports at audit time
• Photography department
  • Inventory
  • Asset control
  • Holdings are suppressed from display
  • Records photography equipment as well as an inventory of important photograph collections held
• Artwork department
  • Register artworks (ie create bibs)
  • Link to pictures
  • Have locations for which stores they are in or where they are being displayed
  • No accessible opac due to copyright of images
• Talked about supporting the parent institution in whatever they need to do as the library has the skills and software needed.
  

Web transaction log analysis – Brad Cummings – Music section of the NLA

Brad talked about analysing web transaction logs to work out what a user of the system has been doing. This is a project the NLA is working on and they are not finished.

• The NLA collects multiple logs (catalogue, web, content, user database) so this makes it difficult to track things
• Once you screen out all the noise (downloading images, requesting style sheets, search engine crawlers) you are left with quite specific data on what a user has done
• Can work out where they’ve come from, what they’ve clicked on, types of searches they’ve done, if they’ve been to other parts of the website, sometimes even where they’ve gone to
• When aggregated can see what users are commonly clicking on (or never clicking on).
• It involves a lot of work and a high level of experience in coding.
  

Recent developments in cataloguing/marc – Catherine Argus – NLA

• Multilingual dictionary of cataloguing terms and concepts has been developed (I didn’t see by whom, sorry)
• 008/23 and 008/29 have new fields for electronic resources to describe databases vs websites
• Cookery subject heading has gone (YAY!) to be replaced by cooking. See www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/h1475.html (Kath sent an update about this but I must have missed it, it is very exciting for me coming from a public library background).
• Library of Congress Genre and Form Thesaurus has been created. This will go in to 655 #7 |aFORM HEADING|2lcgft . These will be authorised headings for the format of items, instead of the free text 655 that most people seem to use.
  

Recent developments in cataloguing/Dewey – Anne Robertson – Australian representative Dewey Decimal Committee

• DDC 23 is being released mid next year. It will be tangerine in colour
• Major changes to law (340) and religions (200).
• Law has been changed to reflect differences in European vs British vs Australian vs US law. Updates to areas that have common terms that don’t mean common things.
• Religion will have some changes to Islam currently, but a supplement will be released after DDC23 incorporating major major changes such as equalising the number schedule to include all major religions and removing the huge Christian bias.
  

Using my phone for work (not as a phone)

Recently I purchased a brand new HTC Desire phone. It's like an iPhone but doesn't allow me to access Apple's iStore. The software in the phone is called Android and has been designed by Google. It's quite swish. HTC (and Telstra) have both modded the phone though so it now has some fancy HTC usability features (woo!) and some useless Telstra marketing things I can't get rid of (less woo).

Apart from being able to look up restaurants and know the weather at a glance, the phone has some interesting apps which I was able to download to help me at work. One of these apps is a barcode scanner that uses the camera to 'scan' the barcode. I can then transfer my scanned barcodes to my PC.

Now this may not sound that exciting to most people. But anyone who has had to fork out hundreds of dollars for a wireless barcode scanner can probably see where I'm heading with this.

Picture me standing in a bunker. The bunker contains a compactus. The compactus contains books. Some of these books have a barcode. Now, instead of me having to write down the barcodes of these books onto a piece of paper, and then typing them into a computer (or taking a laptop down there and typing them direct), I just whipped out my Desire, pressed 'barcode scanner' and merrily went scanning things. I still have to write down the numbers on books without a barcode (although I should look at some kind of OCR thing that would scan the printed numbers) but I'm still doing things a lot faster and more accurate than if I had to write/type these numbers into the system.

I love my phone...except that I linked it to my work email and now it bings at me every time I get one...I should undo that. Otherwise all good!

Interesting theses

So I've spent the last few weeks faffing about in our archives doing a stocktake of our pre-1990 theses collection. In 1990, the Canberra College of Advanced Education (CCAE) became accredited as a university and tada, the University of Canberra was born. My task is to work out what CCAE materials we had and ensure we had a copy in our archive and one that was loanable to students. It turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought and I've spent ages fixing mistakes in the catalogue.

Anyways, in my travels, I have come across a number of interesting papers (well, interesting titles anyway). And due to the wonderful power of the interweb, I can share them with you.

1. Horsies
   We all love horsies. Some people love them so much that they write all kinds of things about them, from gambling to sexism, we have it all (well, not all, there's only a couple really). My favourite is Burr, Sandra : Women and horses : a study of Australia's recreational horsewomen . I love the picture of the horse ring.
   
2. Boring reading
   Don't you hate it when you're teaching a class to students and they all doze off because the textbook chosen is boring? Well someone studied that in 1982. Newton, P. V. : An examination of reading material used in year 11 with special attention to social science texts. Only the abstract is there but the full report talks about ways (that could be exploited by a computer) on making the textbooks more usable.
3. Enjoying your job
   I cannot find the text, but one work I was looking at was asking the question "How much do librarians like their jobs?". It examined government librarians and surveyed them to see if they were bitter. The results said no. Ooh, found it. Barnes, Helen : The work attitudes and job perceptions of Commonwealth Government Libraians : with descriptive data on Commonwealth Government librarianship as an occupation

That's enough for this time. Enjoy!

University of Canberra Libraryland

Wow, university libraries are so different. I've been here a few weeks now and am amazed by some of the differences.

1. People are quite happy to listen to instruction.
Me: Well I know you need to know about how feminist theory has destroyed micro-lending schemes in Cameroon, but did you know you can find this all out yourself?
Student: No, really? I'd like to learn that.
Me: Really? Where's the hidden camera?
Student: What hidden camera? I'm very excited about finding journals through your databases.

2. They write all over the toilets. Whole stories. With drawings. And people add comments. It's like a web 2.0, except in the toilets, so would that make it dunny 2.0? Social looworking :)

3. The crazy people are intelligent. They can actually prove that the aliens are reading their mind (although I must admit I've not really had crazy people here, everyone is quite nice).

4. Staff talk at a much higher level than what I'm used to. Who uses 'ennui' these days? And when talking to people? Pfft. I'm going to need to buy a dictionary to translate what some of the academics here say.

5. EMBATAPLH - even more bloody acronyms than a public library has. There are so many of them that they gave me a glossary of UC library acronyms when I started. I had to carry it around for 2 weeks to work out what was going on (add to that the point above and it's like I'm talking to someone in German... I can understand every 8th word, but most of that is the word 'the').

And some of the non-differences.
1. Still a bureaucracy. The IT department and most HR functions have been outsourced to India because it's cheaper. So if I have a problem with my pay or my computer, I ring Mumbai.

Actually, come to think of it, the bureaucracy thing covers all the non differences. Tasks are a tad less fluid than a public library and I'm always worried about overstepping my authority or stepping on someone's toes, but at least I usually know who to send things to.

All in all I'm enjoying things. All of the stuff that I was worried I wouldn't be able to do, I'm allowed to do. I've done training (a little anyway), reference stuff, research. I'm even in charge of two subject guides (software engineering and information systems). Oh, and I don't really even have to catalogue (much). It turns out I'm in charge of copy cataloguing...and I can copy well!

If I remember, I'll write my next blog post on some of the odd things that people write their theses about (being in charge of them is quite amazing).

New Library (details)

Interesting development in my new library job. I was going to start working at the University of Canberra as a Librarian/Information Officer. The position descriptions for the library are all left very vague so that you don't really know what you'll be doing, but from questions I asked, I knew I'd be working with the Academic Services Team. This would mean I'd be doing some reference work, some training (woo!) and a bunch of other stuff that I'm a bit hazy about. Unfortunately the Cataloguing, Theses and E-Document Coordinator got a promotion. Unfortunately because it means I now have to learn how to catalogue again.


That's right, due to generic position descriptions, my background as technical services team leader for a bunch of libraries and a merit-based job system, I was assigned the job. Honestly, I don't mind doing the job. I'm just a bit worried I'll end up typecast as a technical services librarian...you all know the type, hair in a bun, twinset and pearls, etc (although I must admit, if I had enough hair to put it into a bun, I bet it'd go fabulous with my twinset).


From a management point of view, having generic position descriptions is great...it means you can move staff around to places where they'll be more productive (or less productive if you're vindictive and want to get rid of them). But I haven't even started!!!


It's nice to be wanted...but I really really really wanted to do information literacy training.


Oh, and for you all (click for larger copies):