Among the ongoing efforts with potential to change the range of options available to libraries, I would count the evolving Lyrasis organization among the most interesting, if not, certainly, the most visible. In the past few months, the organization has launched some interesting initiatives, among them a ‘partnership’ with OCLC, in the form of an “ … agreement that will provide increased consulting, education and engagement programs for WorldCat and new cooperative Web-scale library management services” and another with SkyRiver to provide cataloging services (press release available as pdf from the Lyrasis front page). Among other things, these strategic partnerships put Lyrasis in a challenging position regarding the SkyRiver/III lawsuit against OCLC, but I’m sure they’ll manage to navigate those dangerous shoals, given the careful path they’ve chosen so far.

I recently became aware of the report of their Library Director Summit on the Future of Cataloging, held on May 26, 2010, with a summary made available recently. I’m of two minds about the summary–on the one hand it’s hard to argue with the notion that if you’re in any kind of business, and have customers, it’s good to ask them about what you ought to be doing. On the other hand, I keep remembering Henry Ford’s statement that if he had asked his early customers what they wanted, they would have told him: “faster horses”. Providing some balance between what libraries tell them about their needs, and building in the leadership to provide for needs that are not yet expressed by their customers, will be key to their survival in the volatile environment of change we live in now.

Peppered in the summary report are some statements that give one hope that Lyrasis might be asking some of the right questions as they look for a business plan that will take them where they need to go, and to avoid being an organization operating primarily in the foamy wake of the big players. For example, the first bullet under “What Still Needs to be Cataloged?” says:

“Cataloging records for basic English-language monographs are commodity items. Many libraries already outsource much of this work through vendor-supplied, shelf-ready cataloging (e.g., PromptCat, YBP). As records have become commodities, libraries question why they are still paying premium prices, especially when many records are available and shared freely on the web via Z39.50.”

Much as I agree that the current record sharing market does treat catalog records as commodities, that way of thinking doesn’t get us anywhere we really want to go, witness the Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace by R2 Consulting to the Library of Congress this past fall (for my take on it, see this post). That report argued for more remuneration for LC, and put everyone else, particularly those using Z39.50, in categories with labels like ‘opportunistic.’

More on cataloging costs comes later in the summary, where the lack of transparency about costs and pricing is aired (familiar to those reading the conversations on the SkyRiver suit playing out on various library lists) and an interesting correlation is made between the current subscription pricing model used by (presumably) OCLC and the pricing model for high-cost ejournal subscriptions. I say presumably because like the gorilla in the kitchen, the entity looming over the discussion is named only in one recommendation at the end.

Further along in the summary, the diminishing role of the catalog as a discovery tool is acknowledged, as well as the continuing need for the catalog as an inventory management tool. Interestingly, the decreasing value of the “global union catalog” is also acknowledged:

“While the union catalog function was important in a print-based environment, it is no longer the key resource it once was in the book-dominated world. Once the metadata is available and harvestable, it does not necessarily have to be housed in and served from one central repository to make the content accessible.”

Resource sharing is addressed again later in the report, along with the unfortunate fact that resource sharing and catalog record acquisition are often intertwined. That said, the section on resource sharing seems a bit obscure to me, partially because that’s one of the few library arenas in which I was never involved during my checkered career in libraries.

Reading this summary, it’s necessary to read between the lines to glean much about the tenor of the conversations. The rewards for that effort are the glimpses of movement on the part of the organization and its customers on these important issues. That they’re only glimpses is unfortunate. While I can certainly recognize the need for Lyrasis to be circumspect–their survival depends to some extent on not making powerful enemies–I’d love to see these issues aired more publicly, with less dancing.

Shifting the Conversation

After the emphasis above on the good news, there are a few places where the conversation has clearly not yet shifted sufficiently from the old thinking. One of these areas is the perennial question of ‘record enhancement’ which is here discussed in the old context of ‘record perfection’ rather than the newer context around the improvement of data to provide greater value to users. This is unfortunate, particularly since the comment on ‘harvestable’ data earlier in the discussion might have led one to hope that some of the library linked data efforts had percolated up to the director level.

Another area in the report where discussion clearly needs to shift is in the notion of what’s to be done with the cataloging staff when we’ve changed how we look at cataloging? What are we to make of this?:

“A whole generation of catalogers is at retirement age. Some describe themselves as “depressed” because they believe they will never be replaced, that this is “the end of our profession,” and libraries are “undoing their life’s work.” Nonetheless, one library reported that recently it had intentionally hired two new catalogers because its believes it is still valuable to have a cataloging-articulate perspective and voice within the library. The new librarians hired to fill this role are described as being more tuned into how to bring the users in to interact with the catalog and have a more external (user-centered) viewpoint than previous generations.”

Well, now I’m depressed. As someone who’s been speaking (and writing) on this topic for years to anyone who will listen, let me say that any library who is not now engaged in exploring what their catalogers need to know to make an effective transition to a new environment is not just missing the boat, but leading the way down the deep, dark path that will be where libraries who think change is not inevitable will be going when it’s no longer possible to dodge the bullets. Directors–do you have anyone else on your staff, besides the catalogers, who is capable of thinking about your catalog records as data, and not just catalog records? If you do, consider yourselves lucky, and please, treasure them. If you don’t, start investing in some training for those catalogers, because you’ll need them and their expertise, no matter what happens and no matter what external services you see in your future. Trust me on this. Oh, and if you think that anyone will be able to persuade your users to interact with the catalogs you have now, I have a bridge you might be interested in purchasing for your front lawn.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, on to the rest of the summary. I admit to a bit of confusion on the first point under “What Should be Done Concerning Cataloging of Local Digitized Collections?” The point is well taken that libraries are not now able to measure the value of their digitized collections to researchers generally and that usage data is missing on how researchers find these collections to start with, but there are a couple of sentences embedded in the first paragraph of that section that left me scratching my head:

“Libraries gave strong support for the idea to develop a scholarly “impact factor” that measures the value and return on investment of digital collections. Such a factor may require data to be embedded within the metadata for these collections.”

I think I keep pretty good track of what’s going on in the world of metadata, both within and outside libraries, but what is meant by ‘ … data to be embedded within the metadata …”? Are we talking about licensing, viruses, or what?

The recommendations on the last page, couched as answers to the question “What Can Lyrasis Do To Help?” seem like the most conservative outcomes one could imagine for what may have been (hope springs eternal) some pretty interesting conversations. How about at least one game-changer in there, like:

* Lead. Explore ways for libraries of all kinds to participate in the data revolution happening around them, sometimes referred to as library linked data.

For the past few days I’ve been in Denver, as part of a commitment to present at a program entitled “The Semantic Web and RDA: Making the Catalog a Networked Bibliographic Environment.” The other speaker on the program was Karen Coyle, and both sets of slides for this program are available publicly, Karen’s on her site: kcoyle.net/presentations/ and mine at www.slideshare.net/smartbroad/aall-denver-2010.

The presentations went well, and as Karen says “Every time we talk about this stuff, a few more people ‘get it’.” True enough, and though neither of us think we’re quite at the tipping point, it seems closer, somehow, when we present these ideas and people get excited.

As we were having coffee after our star turn, a young woman came up to us and told us that, after two years as a law cataloger, she’d been thinking seriously about shifting into systems, but she was ‘really re-energized’ by our talk. That’s the best kind of compliment, and the kind that personally keeps me doing this, despite the downsides of travel and the cost in time it takes to do these presentations on a regular basis. Sadly, these kinds of gigs are really meant to be done by people with institutional support, like working librarians with real jobs, who do this sort of thing as a way to give back, to create a tenure record, or just to have time in what passes for the spotlight in librarianship. Karen and I are each trying to make a living as independent consultants, and the value proposition is very different for us.

But the trip and the interactions gave me more ideas for my workshop, and that’s a good thing.

One of the things that always happens for me after ALA is a compiling of notes and some reflection on what I saw and learned while in the whirlwind of meetings and activities. This year is no different. There were few real surprises—after all, like most of you I keep in pretty good touch with what others are talking about and thinking about all through the year. But in those areas where I play the closest attention, I’ve seen some important shifts in thinking, and it’s at the meetings at ALA that I see those shifts playing out. Another thing I like to do after conferences is to look and see what other people are saying about the meetings. Sometimes this helps me catch up with meetings I couldn’t attend, sometimes it gives me different perspectives on ones I did. One such post was Eric Hellman’s post about the linked data meetings at Annual on his blog, ‘Go to Hellman.’

“I’ve been at the American Library Association’s Annual Meeting this weekend. Given the common purpose of libraries and Linked Data, you would think that Linked Data would be a hot topic of discussion. The weather here has been much hotter than Linked Data, which I would describe as “globally warming”. I’ve attended two sessions covering Linked Data, each attended by between 50 and 100 delegates. These followed a day long, sold-out preconference. John Phipps, one of the leaders in the effort to make library metadata compatible with the semantic web, remarked to me that these meeting would not have been possible even a year ago. Still, this attendance reflects only a tiny fraction of metadata workers at the conference; Linked Data has quite a ways to come. It’s only a few months ago that the W3C formed a Library Linked Data Incubator Group.”

In the same conversation where Jon made his point about the the increase in interest in linked data over the previous year, I tried to convince Eric that the work we’d done on the RDA Vocabularies was a step in the ‘warmer’ direction, but I clearly didn’t make my point, to him, at least.** I think, though, that the ‘tiny’-but-growing fraction of metadata workers (both at the conference and not), are starting to get the point. It’s not an easy point to get, if you’ve been traditionally trained as a cataloger or not exposed to much of this work. I hope that the formation of the Library Linked Data Incubator Group will be very useful towards this end—ironically one of the arguments against a part of our work on the RDA Vocabularies, primarily from the more conservative members of the library world, is that as librarians, we’re not in a position to know what the Semantic Web wants and needs. If nothing else, the LLDIG will make those needs known, and we hope, do that as clearly as possible.

Eric went on to talk about the follow up to the preconference:

“On Friday morning, there was an “un-conference” organized by Corey Harper from NYU and Karen Coyle, a well-known consultant. I participated in a subgroup looking at use cases for library Linked Data. It took a while for us to get around to use cases though, as participants described that usage was occurring, but they weren’t sure what for. Reports from OCLC (VIAF) and Library of Congress (id.loc.gov) both indicated significant usage but little feedback.”

I was at the ‘unconference’ as well and participated in different breakout sessions than Eric did, but found them very useful to my own thinking (summaries are posted). Plans are in place to do additional follow up to those conversations at the Dublin Core Conference this fall, and then at Midwinter in San Diego. In particular I participated in a session led by CC:DA chair John Myers about increasing the understanding of the library community generally in regards to the ideas and technologies of linked data. As someone who frequently speaks at conferences and workshops, I believe this is a particularly important issue as the abstract ideas become understood and the implementation questions become more compelling. As a result of that discussion, I’ve been thinking seriously about developing a new workshop that I would attempt to take ‘on the road’ to groups and institutions. Given that my previous experience with doing this kind of thing in collaboration with institutions has been mixed (my discouraging experience with my Metadata Standards and Applications workshops comes to mind), it seems to me that it’s time to try doing it on my own, and, ensuring as well that I’m getting adequate compensation for the time spent providing it.

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to rely on interested members of the community for feedback as I think through the process of developing this kind of workshop. Watch this space for more …

** More about the building of the vocabularies can be found in our article in the January issue of DLib Magazine.

Corey Harper seems to have started a collection of statements taken out of context, some of which I’ll share here:

“If it’s not fish it has to be linked data” –Jennifer Bowen

“I’m too far underground to know where I am” –Jon Phipps

When I used the word “curmudgeon” in my previous post, I had an apparently uncommon definition in mind: unflinching truth teller. I’ve actually taken minute pleasure in thinking of myself that way ever since, in the not-so-long ago I asked my new boss what my new role on the team would be and, knowing me, he said “curmudgeon?”. I had to hunt a bit to find a definition that wasn’t the Andy Rooney-esque “crusty, ill-tempered, old man”, but I kind of liked this one:

…Nature, having failed to equip them with a servicable denial mechanism, has endowed them with astute perception and sly wit.

Curmudgeons are mockers and debunkers whose bitterness is a symptom rather than a disease. They can’t compromise their standards and can’t manage the suspension of disbelief necessary for feigned cheerfulness. Their awareness is a curse.

Perhaps curmudgeons have gotten a bad rap in the same way that the messenger is blamed for the message: They have the temerity to comment on the human condition without apology. They not only refuse to applaud mediocrity, they howl it down with morose glee. Their versions of the truth unsettle us, and we hold it against them, even though they soften it with humor.

- JON WINOKUR

Today I participated in a Linked Data Unconference at ALA 2010 in Washington DC, which was remarkably successful. Organized by Corey Harper from NYU and ably moderated by Karen Coyle, about 50 of us held two sets of three hour-long, highly engaging breakout discussions with reports back to the larger group. I participated in a discussion of some of the practical difficulties encountered trying to implement Application Profiles in a far from perfect Linked Data environment (I strongly recommended creating a local mirror of inadequately expressed in RDFS/OWL, but otherwise useful, data models) and a discussion of scholarly Linked Data use cases and data reuse (we looked hard at VIVO and VIAF and discussed metering data usage). It was fun! I was surprised.

Afterwards a few of us had a fine lunch together, discussing the nuts and bolts of RDA and the future of cataloging, a lively and fascinating discussion in the best possible sense of ‘lively’ and ‘fascinating’. It strikes me in retrospect that we formed a kind of curmudgeon’s table — Diane Hillmann, Corey Harper, Eric Hellman, Ed Summers, Karen Coyle, and me. All of us sharing strong opinions, agreeing and disagreeing whole-heartedly and with considerable good humor and affection. A table of warm and engaged people, knowing that it’s too late to save the world, maybe too late to save cataloging, but it would still be really interesting to try. It was great fun. I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

I had hoped to write more about my teaching experience while it was happening, but as go so many good intentions, I couldn’t quite manage it. Part of this is because I forget, in between my ‘normal’ 5 year cycles of teaching, how much time it takes to do at all, much less do well. As a result, I really haven’t blogged at all since the end of March, when I started on my latest teaching adventure, and I’m sure a lot of people thought I’d dropped off a cliff. Well, I did, sort of, but it wasn’t really a bad experience.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was very happy about the support supplied by the UW iSchool—a group very experienced in helping virtual teachers and students have the best experience possible. This, and the high caliber of the students, made the experience overall the best one I’ve had. There were parts of it I really enjoyed, primarily the discussions with the students, their willingness to start new discussions and read widely about the topics at hand, and their ability to think about issues that they’d not really encountered before. Their interest, curiosity and enthusiasm kept me willing to work through my screencast software problems (“Oh yes, this is a known bug, we expect it to be fixed in subsequent releases.”). There were the inevitable problems keeping up the grading on their assignments—my weekends evaporated in the face of piles of writing I needed to read then supply feedback about.

But, I realized again that I’m a sprinter, not a marathon runner (odd as that analogy may seem to anyone who knows me or has seen me in front of a room). I still think I’m better at the one shot workshop than the semester or quarter course of 10-15 weeks. Not that I’d never do it again (never say never), but it’s hard work, and not well paid, so I’d have to give it some thought before jumping in again. And I’m thinking about a new workshop I’d like to develop, and when I do, I might see who’d be interested in hosting it.

… the more they stay the same.” How many times has each of us taken comfort in that phrase (and no, I’m not going to cite the French version or the source—it will just distract me from my main purpose!) I found the phrase ringing like a large bell right next to my head as I listened to the speeches from the 2010 ALISE Conference. The three presentations were largely about the last big transition for library cataloging: the AACR2 implementation, which dominated libraryland for many years prior to (and after) the January 1981 switchover. I remember those days well, as I was a newly minted librarian at the time, who had learned cataloging not via cataloging courses (I never took any in library school), but instead via instruction by a number of supervisors/trainers, some very good, others absolutely awful. I remember particularly when I was still a paraprofessional (and library student) showing my supervisor (the head of cataloging in the library I was working in) the place in the “red books” where free-floating subdivisions were described. She knew nothing about them …

But back to the speeches. Most interesting to me was the speech by Michael Gorman, editor of AACR2 and definitely the man who knows where the bodies are (still) buried. I don’t always agree with Gorman, but he is one of the most interesting people you could listen to on this subject, and he outdoes himself in this presentation. As one who’s been more seriously involved in the current transition (at least we hope that’s what it will be), I was interested (and somewhat depressed, to be honest) to hear that some of the same things that were wrong with AACR2 (according to Gorman, and me) are still wrong with the RDA rules.

But even if you don’t care anything about that, listen to it for the history of cataloging rules, from the point of view of the ultimate insider. A flavor of Gorman’s speech below (from a lightly edited transcript available from the same page as the speeches):

“And what happened was the 1949 rules were just completely disregarded in outside North America. The 1950 Library of Congress rules for descriptive cataloging, similarly, were, basically instructions on how to construct a Library of Congress card. Which is what cataloging aimed at in this country for many years. And there was [by] the early 60s, there was clearly a need for a new code. The British needed something that was‐ that actually didn’t just post‐date the invention of flight. (laughter) And the Americans needed a kind of coherent standard. At the same time, things like MARC were brewing. OCLC was brewing. … And there was a real pressure for standardization, both internally within the countries involved, but, I think even more importantly, externally. Those of you as old as I am might remember that there were, for example, floods of books coming from South Asia into American libraries by virtue of various arrangements and treaties. And what was needed was some kind of standard cataloging data for these things. The Library of Congress was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the cataloging output required by the libraries of the United States. So there is automation, there is pressure for standardization, and so on.”

So how familiar is that? Change in cataloging rules driven by changes in technology? [Ding]

Gorman goes on to describe the three most “grievous errors” made in the run up to AACR2:

“One was that, not to involve Seymour Lubetzky, who was still at that time perfectly active. In fact he lived for many more years after that. And I can tell you I attended his hundredth birthday celebration and I’ve had far less incisive conversations with people who are fifty. So, he could’ve easily participated in it and would’ve brought, I think, an air of authority to it because by that time everyone recognized that Lubetzky was right. You needed a code that embodied principles. And you could work out the details in the cases if you could deduce from those principles.

“The second thing‐ the second grievous error, was pretending that this new code was a revision of the 1967 code. It was nothing of the sort. It was completely new code on new principles, organized in a completely new way. Had they had the‐ and I say ‘they’ because I was just a humble editor, you know the policies were taken‐ you might think they were taken by the Joint Steering Committee‐ they were not. They were taken in the National Libraries. The National Libraries determined that the profession would not stomach an entirely new code a decade after they’d already adapted to the previous one. So you had to pretend that this was a revision of it. Had they had the nerve to say‐ had they had the wisdom to foresee there was going to be a fuss anyway, so you might as well have a big fuss about something worth fussing about‐ they would have called it the New Anglo‐American Cataloging Rules, or something of that nature. … But, we probably wouldn’t be here because what we’d be discussing would be something like the third edition or the fourth edition of the New Anglo‐American Cataloging Rules, or the New Descriptive Cataloging Rules. Call it whatever you want. Call it George. (laughter) So we’d be discussing George IV, there wouldn’t be anything like the fuss, there wouldn’t be anything like the need by the people who are currently doing the RDA to come up with new contrivances. To come up with something quote “completely different.”

“And the third big mistake was to allow conservative, I mean, small c, interests to dictate that new code would contain substantial chunks of the old practice. What would be much better would be to have a completely stripped down code that just gave principles. How you arrived at access points, what the description is, and so on. And then people interested in that kind of thing could produce manuals on how to catalog treaties using that, how to catalog liturgical works. And I think that that substantially weakened what AACR2 could have been because it sort of delegitimized the enterprise. So here we’ve got a structure that’s based on principle from the other hand we’re going into page after page after page of how to catalog the Bible, how to do all kinds of esoteric things. And so there we were. It came out in 1978. There was huge pressure from the Association of Research Libraries who’d heard that this was the downfall of Western civilization as we know it, was going to cost them fortunes, was going to blow up everything. I remember Lucia Rather giving a talk that brought tears to everyone in the room about how difficult it was to change a single heading in the Library of Congress card catalog, it involved, you know, boatloads of Egyptian slaves carrying cards from one building to another, and so on. (laughter) But anyway, so there was this terrible panic in the air‐ what are we going to do, how are we going to accommodate this dreadful thing? Not recognizing that the reason why it was going to be a big change was because their catalogs didn’t really work very well and weren’t user friendly, weren’t anything, you know. They were just a mess. Particularly in the card form. And particularly, if you worked as I did shortly after at a place like the University of Illinois that had a nine million card catalog in, you know, the ark of the catalog in the center of the library, this ecclesiastical surroundings with these nine million cards, where a misfiled card was lost for eternity. (laughter) You would never see it again. So, there was this huge fuss.”

[Ding, ding, DING]

And there’s more: about LC and ARL determining to postpone implementation for a year, while the Brits and others around the world started using the new code right away. [Ding]

Janet Swan Hill, the second speaker, wandered around a bit but had some interesting points about training:

“Something that we did right with the implementation of AACR2 was to mount a tremendous training effort. There were very large regional training institutes and a lot of people traveled to them and they spent a couple days in a hotel, and a couple of days in seminars learning and learning about the new rules. There were also hundreds and hundreds of lesser, smaller institutes scattered all around the country. And I know that today a lot of people are very likely to think that we don’t need the same extent of regional institutes that online training, and webinars, and self‐directed training of various kinds will do just as well. And that administrators and other people who are really worried about money are likely to balk at the expense of sending a lot of people off to regional institutes and seminars and they will be very eager to prefer computer‐based training on the grounds of money alone. And while online instruction and computer‐based training has improved a very great deal in the last decade, I would like to point out a few things in favor of face‐to‐face encounters. Of the shared experience and the camaraderie that arises from attendance at those training institutes and attendance at the bar afterwards. And to express, therefore, some concern about relying too heavily on remote, one‐by‐one personally isolated training methods that you get when you rely too heavily on computer‐based instruction.”

In fact I attended one of those institutes, and was there exposed for the first time to cataloging history and theory, filling in all those empty spaces from a library education that lacked those subjects. I gained a good bit of confidence from those, and enjoyed them thoroughly, for some of the reasons Janet cites. But in this day and age, the likelihood of repeating that huge effort, particularly since there will be no generally agreed date of implementation, is infinitesimal. Not with library budgets in the state they’re in at the moment.

And I would say that I think what we need more than training is decent tools, not necessarily for the rules themselves (I think RDA Online will do that fairly well, for a price), but to create the data, and start sharing it.

Arlene Taylor was the last speaker, and towards the end of her presentation she quoted from her mentor Kathryn Henderson:

“It was a valuable experience to have been present in the last four years of code revision in the 1960s. I learned much about the politics of code revision. I can well remember revision members from large institutions like Yale standing up and saying, “We will not change our catalogs to the new forms.” Of course, that was in the days of card catalogs. But I don’t know if it’s really any easier to change them today. Change always comes hard. From what I hear, politics is still the driving force.”

[DING, DING, DING]

During my professional life, I’ve agreed to teach graduate courses just about every five years. I joke that it takes that long for the memories to fade sufficiently for me to agree to try again. Mostly I’ve taught cataloging courses at Syracuse (my alma mater and the closest program to where I live), though my last effort was a team thing with my Cornell colleague Marty Kurth, where we substituted for Dave Lankes (who was on sabbatic leave) and taught his Information Architecture course. This was about five years ago, so as per my usual schedule I agreed to accept an invitation to develop and teach an online “Intro to RDA” course for the University of Washington iSchool.

I have a few theories about why I’ve never really gotten comfortable teaching “regular” courses. It’s not that I don’t like teaching (I do)—I just seem to like it better when it’s not quite so extended, a bit more in sync with my increasingly short attention span. I particularly like doing half-day or even full-day workshops for groups of practicing librarians—these are my “peeps” and I think I understand them well enough to do a good job getting them enthusiastic about some of the stuff coming down the pike for all of us. I also do a fair number of conference presentations, which tend to be much shorter, sometimes too short for me to get more than a few points across.

Frankly, there hasn’t always been a good fit between me and the grad students I’ve ended up teaching over the years as an adjunct faculty member. I’m not quite sure whether it’s age, style, or exactly what dynamic or chemistry thing is going on there, particularly because with those five year intervals, each class has been so totally different that I’ve found it impossible to come to any firm conclusions. I remember in particular one class I taught about 10 or 15 years ago, where I had a group that was fairly evenly mixed between normal grad student age folks and older, second career students. This was an advanced cataloging class that I was doing for the first time, and I freely admit that in my impatience with normal pedagogical methods (not to mention my general ignorance of same) I managed to annoy the grad-student-agers in the class and they returned the favor by complaining to the school about me and how I was conducting the class. (They particularly didn’t like the fact that I gave them readings and assignments THEN lectured on the topic, rather than the other way around.) The older students, on the other hand, really seemed to like the course and were far more open to trying things out that were totally new to them. The class evaluations were absolutely split down the middle—half were extremely negative and the rest were very positive, no middle ground whatsoever. I got the impression that the school didn’t quite know what the heck was going on, and interestingly, never asked me about it.

So here I go again, this time teaching students about a new cataloging standard that is not only uncooked at present, but has divided opinion in the library community to an extent that reminds me of the current war on health care reform. My approach to RDA emphasizes the data aspects of the effort, and I’m pretty sure that nobody else is doing anything like this. Most sensible people, including most teachers, like to wait until things settle down before trying to set up a course to teach actual paying students about it. As usual I’ve decided to live a little more dangerously, and I certainly hope the students can sign on for the class recognizing the adventure, rather than focusing on the chaotic quality of the world of RDA at present. Just to keep things interesting, this is an online course, and I’ve never done one of those before, though I’m fairly comfortable in the online world generally.

The nice thing about the experience so far is that the UW iSchool has been really supportive as I’ve been attempting to develop this course, and are making a big effort to make sure that the course will be successful for the students, and for me. They’ve got a nice infrastructure (with tools!) set up for adjunct faculty and special help for those of us teaching virtually. There are grad students to help us set up our web presence and templates to make it easy and reasonably complete for the students deciding where to spend their time and bucks. So far I’m impressed, and optimistic that this will be a different experience to add to all those quinquennial teaching gigs of the past.

Part of the adventure, from my point of view, will be delving into what’s flying by at the moment, and putting it in context, given the long and winding road of RDA development. Of course, I have a dog in this fight, and will be clear about disclosing that (and my many other biases) to the students. The data is my thing, not the guidance text, and that’s part of the course description—those students who want a walk through the “new rules” would be wise to pass this course by. I’ve asked to set up a blog for this course, and will be encouraging students to post there. I’ll post there, and here, about the experience, as I can, and as there’s something to offer the wider conversation—including those who think they’d like to try going out on this limb themselves.

The final student projects will ask the class to envision themselves as a librarian with a director who’s just come back from a meeting where someone has convinced him/her that RDA will bankrupt the library’s cataloging operation, and s/he wants a briefing on this scary standard. Now, how many of you have been in that kind of situation? All of you? Amazing!

The class starts at the end of this month and lasts for 10 weeks, so stay tuned …

As one who entered college in 1966 and experienced the sixties from the front lines, I sometimes wonder how I got to be so old and stodgy. I particularly think of this when I pass plate glass windows while walking on the street and glimpse my reflection in them. Who is that gray-haired old broad in the window? It’s always a shock, despite the fact that I’ve been gray-haired for a very long time, and demonstrably growing old at the same rate as everyone else.

I’m sure some people reading this are laughing at the self-characterization “stodgy,” given that in some quarters I know I’m thought of as a very radical library ex-cataloger with unfortunate tendencies to disparage the status quo and suggest outlandish changes to how things are done in libraries. I suppose I use the “stodgy” bit to suggest that it isn’t necessarily the case that I believe we have to throw out everything we’ve done in the past in pursuit of new approaches. I do a lot of evangelizing on this point, both because I think it makes change less frightening, and because I believe we know a lot more than we think we do about what needs to change, we just have trouble separating that knowledge from the familiar and comforting packages we know so well. We’ve been distributing our knowledge in those packages for a long time, and it’s human nature to stick with what we know when we’re challenged. After all, in our early days as a species, we learned to eat the familiar stuff because we knew it wouldn’t kill us. Those who preferred the new and unfamiliar invariably ran into trouble, and often failed to pass on their genes. Our genes come from the people who knew that the new stuff could kill you.

My own experience with change has been a mixed bag, certainly. When I was in college I worked for the campus radio station (I was a TV-Radio major). Because I had radio experience in high school, I got a “job” immediately in my freshman year, doing a program called “Dinner Date” which utilized only a certain narrow set of recordings (then on vinyl only, of course). I was supposed to play only instrumentals in the genre that we now refer to as “elevator music.” I tried, in vain, to shift the playlist a bit over to slightly jazzier stuff, bossa nova, and suchlike, but that didn’t go over very well with the then powers-that-were. (I should point out that in those days women weren’t allowed to read news because our voices didn’t have the proper authority—but that’s another story). The mission of the show was to provide quiet background music for people who might be eating their dinner, the music also interspersed (and this was not explicit, but we all got it) with a sexy female voice to keep people coming back. This was an interesting time to be doing educational radio–which was what we were supposed to be doing–before NPR and public radio, when there was a distinct boundary being maintained between commercial and non-commercial radio which didn’t have anything to do with the presence or lack of advertising. Rock and roll, which was what we all wanted to play instead of the classical music leavened with a bit of folk, jazz and elevator music on the side, was not allowed.

Our Music Director at that stage, in charge of our quite extensive library of recordings, was a fellow who rather blindly followed the practices of the past, and as part of his job he reviewed all new records that flowed in on the gravy train of freebies provided by record companies. As he reviewed, with the use of a sharp tool, he rendered unplayable all those tracks unsuitable for the mission of the station at that time. After his tenure, a real musician became the Music Director, and he put a stop to that practice, but in the meantime, the station and its music collection was permanently disabled. When the station began to change (it’s now an NPR station specializing in Jazz) their collection of recordings was almost unusable. (Now that I think of it, this strategy reminds me of the practices I railed against in my early days at Cornell, where catalogers were told to delete MARC fields that the library then had no use for, which subsequently had to be laboriously re-done when fashions changed.)

I’ve been reading Karen Coyle’s “Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata,” (Library Technology Reports, Jan. 2010) both because I want to comment on it more fully in this space and because I’m preparing for a class I’m teaching in the Spring quarter at the University of Washington (more about that later). Since I loaned my paper copy to Jon and won’t get it back until Friday, I’ve been limited so far to reading the first chapter, “Library Data in a Modern Context,” which is available online, and includes in its closing paragraph the following:

“The need to change does not mean that what you are doing is wrong. Instead, it often means that something in your environment has changed, something that you cannot control.”

This strikes me as a critically important point. Looking back I can see that much of our conversation about what is happening in our environment, and what needs to be part of our change strategy, is being heard as blame: “You’re doing this all wrong.” And that’s simply not true—if you don’t believe me that where we are makes perfect sense if you understand the ‘why’ of it, read that first chapter. Karen has a wonderful way of explaining things (one that I envy, I have to say), and she does a great job in taking the reader from the nineteenth century and Panizzi to the present day, and it all hangs together. It’s clear that we’ve been responding appropriately to the change in user needs and technology, and I for one think we can do it again, once we move beyond the blame game.

I get a lot of questions about how and when this change will happen—nobody really wants to be on the bleeding edge of some of this, nor to they want to be left behind, but the effect of all the strategic planning seems to be that we are all teetering on the verge of some tipping point we can’t quite see clearly. “What’s it going to take?” they ask, and I have to be honest, I don’t know. Maybe the smartest thing would be to just declare that we’ve passed that tipping point and stop waiting for somebody else to take the first plunge. Maybe if we could get everyone to read Karen’s report (the printed version can be ordered from ALA directly), as well as to look for the February issue, which will also be Karen’s work, we’ll have the courage to make a move in the right direction. Hope springs eternal (and perhaps that’s the ‘drug’ referred to in the title!).