{"id":19,"date":"2009-05-11T09:06:19","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T14:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/managemetadata.org\/blog\/2009\/05\/11\/ready-for-change\/"},"modified":"2009-05-11T09:06:19","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T14:06:19","slug":"ready-for-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/11\/ready-for-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Ready for change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday I was in Hyde Park, NY, at the site of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, attending the NYLINK<\/a> Annual Meeting. I\u2019d been asked to come and talk about change in cataloging. NYLINK, formerly the SUNY\/OCLC Network, is one of the struggling regional service providers that used to be the primary brokers for OCLC services for smaller libraries, and did most of the training for OCLC in the process. These organizations are now providing other kinds of services and training for a wide variety of libraries, and are still one of the best places for figuring out what working librarians are thinking.<\/p>\n

I was particularly impressed with how this day-long meeting was organized. After the welcome and logistics, two speakers\u2014Liz Chabot from Ithaca College and Susan Currie from Binghamton University\u2014got things off with a bang by proposing seven \u201cwhat ifs\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n\u2026 we stopped cataloging?
\n\u2026 librarians individually and as a profession promoted, used and helped develop Wikipedia?
\n\u2026 we accepted open source software as a way of being in control of the customer experience?
\n\u2026 we required all library staff to have expertise using technology?
\n\u2026 mistakes were expected and embraced\u2014and librarians became the mistake masters?
\n\u2026 we didn\u2019t make our customers work so hard?
\n\u2026 we let customers determine their loan periods?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meeting participants spent some time talking about these questions, in the meantime getting to know one another at their tables, and getting fired up about the topics. The morning speaker, Joe Lucia from Villanova University, then started off with this energized group, and did a great job putting the important issues in a more general perspective. He spoke compellingly about our plight in libraries and the parallels with newspapers, described changes in how people deal with linear text vs. Hypertext, and pointed out the work of R. David Lankes (a colleague of mine at Syracuse University), who talks about the \u201clibrary as conversation<\/a>.” Joe\u2019s primary point in bringing together these threads is his contention that libraries are not in the \u201cinformation\u201d business so much as we are in the \u201cknowledge and conversation\u201d business. He talked very passionately about the library as a \u201ccommons\u201d where knowledge and conversation happen with the active engagement of the library as organization, bringing students, faculty and others out into the open for exchanges of ideas, not just providing places for their solitary study.<\/p>\n

But of course it will be no surprise that I was most engaged with the question \u201cWhat if we stopped cataloging?\u201d I\u2019m not sure that question is the right one, or perhaps just not specific enough. I might recast it as \u201cWhat if we stopped cataloging the same old stuff?\u201d By \u201csame old stuff\u201d I mean the secondary products of academic pursuits: books, journals, government documents, etc., the stuff that we have always cataloged. What if we began to catalog different stuff, the stuff we\u2019re publishing ourselves, the podcasts we create of the talks given by our own faculty and those who visit us to discuss their research, the exhibitions we create out of our collections and materials borrowed from others, the primary materials our former faculty members have donated into our care\u2014the things that we\u2019ve always consigned to others (archivists, perhaps?) or not cataloged at all. What we have called cataloging, when it is not done for the first time, is these days for the most part consigned to staff who may not be catalogers, bought from vendors, or automatically claimed from larger databases to populate ours. Insofar as we have used these more efficient, more automated strategies, we have indeed \u201cstopped cataloging.\u201d What we haven\u2019t done is modified our missions and our budgets to take more responsibility for these other often unique things that we have neglected, and as such we have been the instruments of our own demise.<\/p>\n

So as we hear the bemoaning of the profession of cataloging, and ourselves sometimes obsess about the \u201chow\u201d of the changes in our lives brought on by technology, financial distress, and various other pressures, we would do well to remember that behind all this, the mission of the institutions we call home is changing significantly, and we can\u2019t answer those \u201chow\u201d questions without looking anew at those shifting missions.<\/p>\n

My presentation and Corey Harper\u2019s came after lunch, and the group was exceptionally ready to hear what we had to say, thanks to the fabulous preparation provided by NYLINK, Joe Lucia, Liz Chabot and Susan Currie. I had some great conversations there, and on the ride home thought quite a bit about how proud I am to be a librarian, and the wonderful opportunities I continue to have to get to know some of the best people in the business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday I was in Hyde Park, NY, at the site of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, attending the NYLINK Annual Meeting. I\u2019d been asked to come and talk about change in cataloging. NYLINK, formerly the SUNY\/OCLC Network, is one of the struggling regional service providers that used to be the primary brokers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meeting-reports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}