The Price of Scholarly Materials, Politics, and Access

Here is the full text of an email I just sent to a faculty member and cc'd to the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. Let's watch what happens, shall we.

Dear [redacted],

Currently all books, save the [redacted] text, have been purchased and will be put on reserve if they have not already. We are considering purchasing the [redacted] text as well. However, under the current textbook paradigm there is a moral hazard, in which the library is supposed to make up the difference between the “perfect” text and a “good” one. This paradigm is unsustainable. If the price of a textbook is the primary factor in whether or not a student will add or drop a course, it is incumbent on faculty to take that into consideration when assigning materials.

Best,  

Jake

Outsourcing Technical Services: Some Thoughts on Columbia and Cornell

Last week, while libraryland discussed important issues, like the death of Aaron Swartz, and somewhat less important ones, like rockstars and egos and feelings, something very interesting happened that didn't get enough attention: Columbia and Cornell Universities are going to merge their Technical Services departments, expanding on a partnership, called 2CUL, formed in 2009.

The impetus from the initial collaboration was borne out of, in no small part, preexisting budget cuts. I worry, however, that in this latest move cause and effect have changed places. In 2009, Cornell University Librarian Anne Kenney said the partnership “will ameliorate the impact of  budget cuts while building our libraries' ability to innovate” (LJ, 2009). It was, and is, a clever solution to a series of problems concerning funding, non-English cataloging, data management, and digital preservation, among other topics, which has proved fruitful based on recent reports, quoted from a press release below, from 2CUL.

• “Allowing Columbia and Cornell faculty, students and staff to borrow materials from either library on-site and expedite access through intercampus loan delivery; 
• Building joint collections and sharing librarians and language expertise to expand access to more global resources in Asia, Latin America and Russia/Eastern Europe; 
• Uncovering issues for long-term preservation and access to e-journal literature; and 
• Creating programs to give tailored support for Ph.D. students in the humanities.” (Press Release)

Both Cornell and Columbia staff are taking great pains to note that this recent, upgraded relationship was not a merger, and a press release, again quoted below, favors the word "integration" instead, but make no mistake, this is going to cost some jobs and save some money. Job losses are, at the least, a positive externality for the two schools, in which Technical Services staff make up approximately twenty percent of library employees, if not part of the plan.

“This partnership goes far beyond avoiding costs. It extends to changing the way we think about staffing, task and expertise distribution and workflow design.” (Press Release)

It also begs the question that if two universities a four-hour drive away from each other can integrate some library departments, can it be done between schools, or libraries, that are a four-hour plane ride apart? What about a twelve-hour flight? Can Technical Services for Slavic-language materials be performed in a Slavic-speaking country? Might it be cheaper? Might some vendor capitalize on this idea and license it out to libraries? At what point does distance become a barrier?

For example, there are already digital preservation firms located in border states that take materials to Mexico where digital preservation and reproduction is significantly cheaper than it is in the United States. Is that the future of Technical Services as well?

Additionally, while partnerships, such as consortia, are formed by groups of libraries to benefit member institutions, there is a "feed the beast" mentality that often appears. 2CUL was formed to serve Columbia and Cornell, but it may not be long before Columbia and Cornell serve 2CUL in some way.

Regardless, kudos to Columbia and Cornell for truly thinking outside the box. If the merger costs jobs, as I suspect it will, I hope the losses are minimized to the extent possible. I also hope it doesn't give too many vendors too many ideas.

(Full disclosure: the author worked the circulation desk at Columbia University's Butler Library in 1999 and 2000.)
Image via http://www.future-shape-of-church.org/?e=71

A Rant On Vendor-Librarian Relations

It's January 11th and we already have our first misguided, librarian-penned, article on libraries of 2013. In the spirit of the late, great Fire Joe Morgan, I'm going to break this one down. The article in question is "Six Mistakes the Library Staff Are Making," and you can read it here, though I'll heavily excerpt below.

What follows, then, is a combination of things boiled down into six points — the most commonly reported and (in my estimation) most important mistakes that library staff are making in their dealings with sales reps. 

1. Rudeness/unprofessionalism. Let’s begin with the most egregious and patently unacceptable of the mistakes listed here — rude and unprofessional behavior. Examples include: treating a sales rep or customer service staffer with discourtesy or derision; treating the rep like one’s personal therapist; unilaterally inviting a spouse or friend to a meal hosted by the rep; or failing to show up for appointments on time (or at all). 

Like the author, I will also plead guilty to the first instance of this category, though I suppose it's worth mentioning that as a conversation drags on, see item 2, below, the more frustrated I may become. I often, more than once a day, get cold calls from sales representatives who know nothing about this library, what library staff do, and the communities we serve. To the extent that one can do research ahead of time and recognize the milieu in which we find ourselves, which includes a consortium that may hamstring our ability to purchase materials, the more seriously a sales representative will be treated. Cold calling me to change our ILS is a nonstarter. Do your research.

2. Squandering one’s time with the rep. Wasting the rep’s time by forgetting a meeting or spending it on personal complaints falls under the category of rudeness and unprofessionalism, but squandering the time one has with the rep is a different matter. This is about failing to take into account the extremely limited opportunities that one has to work in-person with the sales rep, and consequently spending that time on activities that could and should have taken place before the meeting, or on conversations that could just as easily take place by email, or on issues that would be better addressed with a member of customer service staff.  

No. No no no no no no no. No. NO. I am not the one wasting time here. When I get cold called, my time is being wasted. There are two full-time staff here; I have better things to do than listen to a vendor try to sell me something. If I want something, I will initiate contact with a vendor. "But Jake, how do you know what's out there," you say. Well, dear vendor, that's what networking is for. That's what the internet is for. If I'm interested, I'll contact you. I'll come to your booth and take a pen and some candy (note: I will probably do this anyway). If I'm going to buy something from a vendor, there is no limit to the in-person opportunities. Seriously. We're working with a vendor right now on a Discovery platform. If I call this nameless vendor up right now, a representative will be in my office tomorrow. It's that easy. Vendors who don't provide this level of service are missing out. But I won't do that, because my time is precious, more precious than that of any vendor given our budget and level of staffing compared to theirs.

Similarly, after being given a five-minute version of an elevator speech, and on the phone it seems like an eternity, I don't really want to give a vendor feedback on their business model, as I'm often asked to do, or to recommend other libraries and/or library staff to be given the same sales pitch. If you'd like to hire me as a consultant, that's fine. I'll at least listen. But don't try to get that information for free.

3. Knee-jerk adversarialism and distrust. Many of my vendor-side informants bemoaned what they feel is a knee-jerk adversarialism on the part of many librarians and their staff. Now, some library-side readers will roll their eyes (“Of course our relationship is adversarial; you want our money, and we want what’s best for our patrons”), but the reps have a point. As rhetorically convenient as it might be to cast the library-vendor relationship as one of white hats vs. black hats, it should be obvious to any reflective person that the reality is far more complex than that. 

Based on what I've written above, I come across as adversarial. I understand that, and to the extent that I'm propagating that norm or stereotype, I'm sorry. But relations with vendors are often something like a power law. Ninety percent of my interactions with vendors are cold calls and solicitations. Yet those interactions do not take up anywhere near ninety percent of the time I spend with vendors. Rather, those ten percent of meetings, in person, on the phone, vie email, or otherwise, with sales representatives are fruitful, productive, and time-consuming. It is a disservice to many vendors to treat them with distrust, but there are also some who earn that, and they can earn it rather quickly if they don't do their research.

4. Failure to prepare for meetings. Before you meet with your sales rep, prepare an agenda. Send it to the rep ahead of time, and invite him or her to contribute to it. Know what will be discussed, prepare any documentation that will be needed in order for the meeting to be productive, and know what you hope to accomplish by the end of the meeting (as well as how you’ll know whether it was accomplished). If the rep provides spreadsheets, analyses, or specs ahead of time, you and your staff should read them beforehand so you’re not wasting time in the meeting trying to absorb the information they contain. 

Valid points, all. But I don't call meetings with vendors without doing this work, and I hope you, dear reader, don't either. It's sad that this needs to be said, and is even more sad that a librarian is the one saying it. As mentioned above, the majority of planning fails aren't on me, or library staff, they're on vendors who solicit having done no research on my library. It breeds distrust and adversity. 

5. Failure to prepare the ground for product consideration. One of the surest ways to waste both your time and that of your sales rep is to instigate trial access for a product that you know perfectly well you will never purchase, or for which it is not clear that there is real demand. Trials and pilot programs create work on both sides of the sales equation, and it’s important that the investment not be wasted. 

Confession, we have trialed products here knowing full well they would never be purchased or implemented. We've done it just to get vendors out of our hair, to show them that there's no demand. I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that. I dispute that there's anything wasted by it. At the least, I add a link to the "Trials" section of the library website and email interested parties in the community we serve. I doubt this process has ever taken longer than five minutes.

6. Putting political library concerns above patron needs. I’ve saved for last the “mistake” that I know is likely to be the most controversial, but I think it must be said. Because the issue is so complicated, this will be a topic for a full post at a later date, but for now I’ll just say that it has long seemed to me (and comments from my vendor-side informants seem to confirm it) that too often, we in libraries put politics ahead of mission and service. By “politics,” I mean our personal views about how the world ought to be, and more specifically our views about how the scholarly communication economy ought to be structured. 

Putting politics above mission and communities served is not so much a vendor issue as it is an "everything, everywhere in all workplaces" issue. In the context of library-vendor relations, I don't begrudge vendors profiting off the current state of scholarly communication, but there is a limit to those profits, as some vendors have realized. Even if all content were open access we would still need vendors to solve the coordination game of getting all this "stuff" in one, or a few places, making it as user-friendly as possible, for both patrons and library staff. There's plenty of value to be added by vendors even in the most utopian model.

Furthermore, politics is not just external, around the library, it's internal, within library departments, within a community. Vendors can and do benefit from the latter in the mad rush to allocate resources. The money I choose to spend on Discovery, for example, could go elsewhere. But it's going to a vendor. The allocation and distribution of scare resources, be they money, time, or staff, is politics. 

Keep in mind that this author is himself a library director, and has also written about what vendors and sales representatives should do before meeting with library staff, but does it look remotely equal to you? On which side of the equation does the money and staffing lie? Vendors can and should work harder, work more, and work better to serve libraries and library staff. I'm already on record as that library staff, especially fellow directors, should as well. Because we're the ones with two full-time employees. Not them. We all have responsibilities, but from where I sit, more of the onus is on them.

I'm Famous! Brief Musings On Libraries, Vendors, & Open Access

Thanks to this post, I somehow find myself quoted in the most recent issue of Chemical & Engineering News. Though The American Chemical Society publishes C&EN, I found the article to be impressively fair and balanced to librarians and vendors alike. It's worth a read. On a related note, library-vendor relations are going to drastically change in the near future thanks to the promise of open access. Vendors can help us with the perils by aggregating content and designing user-friendly interfaces. Such changes are already taking place in the field of particle physics.

Images via a google search: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/don't-touch-me-i'm-famous

Supposed To's: An Open Letter to Library Directors

A library director balances the library budget with the needs of the community, and for it is hailed as a hero.

There is something wrong with this picture.

You're supposed to be doing that!

Here's what Jenica Rogers did, working with faculty, administration, and other library staff to reduce dependence on American Chemical Society resources.

Given that there was no apparent ACS-based solution to our budget crunch in the face of what we feel is unsustainable pricing, we went to our Chemistry faculty and discussed all of this with them. This was not our first meeting; we’ve been discussing this since fall 2011 when we clearly understood that ACS pricing would continue to increase, and was pushing at the ceiling of what we could sustain.  Along with two librarians – the Collection Development Coordinator, and our subject liaison to Chemistry – I laid all the facts out. We described our subscription history in support of their scholarship, teaching, and learning needs, pulled out the costs for ACS content when we first subscribed in the early 2000s and referred back to the discussions we had then (when I was CD Coordinator, not Director), laid out the current cost of ACS publications and the price increases over the past five years, and estimated what our 3-year prices would be. Based on our discussion, I think that some of our faculty were surprised, some seemed resigned, some were horrified, and they were all frustrated by what seemed to be a plate full of bad options. However, after two meetings and much discussion of how to reconfigure our ACS subscriptions to meet our budgetary constraints, I believe that we all agreed that this goes beyond having a tight campus or library budget: this is simply not appropriate pricing for an institution like ours. The result of our first meeting was that the chemistry faculty agreed to take their concerns to the ACS based on their individual professional involvements with the organization, talking with sales and the Chemical Information Division about their concerns, and we agreed that we’d look into other library solutions to their chemical information needs.

Some analysis, via another library director:

To underscore just how radical this is, Jenica spells out that the American Chemical Society “is in the unique position of both approving programs and selling the content necessary for approval” — an egregious conflict of interest.  (I’m wondering how unique this is, actually.) For this, the ACS extorts free labor from faculty who have no choice but to publish (or perish) — free labor to the ACS, but certainly not free to the supporting institutions — then turn around to charge increasingly high prices for their product. Jenica notes that “the ACS package would have consumed more than 10% of my total acquisitions budget, just for journals for this one department.”
N.b.: this also points to the importance of including librarians — or at least librarian-informed judgment –  in the university program approval and review process; some universities understand this, while others do not. It is to Jenica’s credit that she has built the organizational relationships to make possible the necessary conversations to do what elsewhere would be unthinkable.

"Unthinkable?" Really? Isn't this what library directors should be doing? Are our peers really this deaf to the milieu in which libraries find themselves in the twenty-first century? To trends in scholarly communication? To the value of building organizational relationships?

What Jenica did only works if others do it. She can't be the lone voice in the wilderness. Don't praise her for doing her job. Look in the mirror and do your job. You're supposed to be doing that!

Indeed, in 2011 we ended our relationship with the Nature Publishing Group, whose namesake print publication was responsible for more than fifteen percent of our print serials budget. Fifteen percent! I'll let that sink in, and feel free to do the math if you'd like. Library staff worked with the provost and affected faculty when eliminating Nature. It helps that we're a small university without graduate programs in the sciences, and with faculty focused more on teaching than research, but SUNY-Potsdam's experience is proof that larger institutions can and should be investigating and then acting on alternatives. Because, you know, that's part of our job. That's what we're supposed to be doing.

Libraries and (Post)Modernity: A Review of Radical Cataloging

Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front,[1] (henceforth RC) edited by K.R. Roberto, a librarian at the University of Denver, is a collection of essays about the power of catalogs and classification, and how information professionals can use these tools to their advantage.  First I provide background on radical cataloging via the work of Sanford Berman, Head Cataloger of the Hennepin County (MN) Library system from 1973 to 1999.  Second, I discuss commonalities found throughout this edited volume, concentrating on catalogers’ attempts to make Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSHs) more user-friendly and representative of reality.  Third, I evaluate how radical the agenda of this volume is, concluding that many of the policies and schemas proposed by RC authors, where applicable, are, in fact, incrementalist in nature.  Fourth, I summarize and recommend successful strategies one can use to catalog.  I conclude by offering resources to those readers interested in becoming radical catalogers.  The book itself is divided into three parts, the first of which loosely concerns Berman’s fight against LCSHs.  Many of the more radical chapters in RC, especially in the second section, lack solutions all together, seeking to illuminate and educate readers with regards to theoretical problems in cataloging, perhaps leading to resolutions at a later date.[2]  The third part deals with tools and policies the authors of RC use to catalog, analogous to the fourth section of this paper. 

The Roots of Radicalism: Sanford Berman

The radical cataloging project originates with the pioneering work of Sanford Berman.  In 1968, he took a job at the University of Zambia Library in Lusaka.  There he learned that “kafir,” a racial slur directed at black South Africans, was being used as a LCSH.[3]  Berman argued that LCSHs had a conservative bias towards the status quo; subject headings reflected societal power relations at the time.[4]  He sought to change and influence Library of Congress (LC) cataloging by creating additional subject headings for use by Hennepin County and urged the LC to add new headings, often imported from Hennepin’s catalog, making the LC catalog more user-friendly and diverse.  He recruited like-minded librarians to lobby the LC as well, known as “Sandynistas.”[5] Thanks to his work, the content of the LCSH “Electric lamps, incandescent” moved to the more intuitive “Light bulbs” (Berman 9).[6] 

The far majority of his work dealt with issues of social justice and inclusion.  What was once the LCSH for “God” became the disambiguated “God (Christianity),” a change implying that the Christian conception of God was only one point of view rather than the sum total of LC holdings.  He successfully petitioned the LC to add subject headings for topics like “Plutocracy” and “Culture Wars,” among others, but was unsuccessful in others, such as “Native American Holocaust.”  When his attempt to get the LC to add a subject heading for “National Health Insurance” failed, he lobbied late Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) to pressure the LC.  “National Health Insurance” was added to the subject headings (Berman 8). 

In acting as a thorn in the side of the LC, Berman influenced a younger generation of catalogers and librarians, many of whom are represented in RC.  By focusing on headings written in plain English and standing with interests often lacking power or representation, he has made it easier for patrons to find materials in catalogs and given voice to those without it. 

Radical Cataloging: Taking on the LC

Like many left-wing movements, the essays in RC are a group of divergent interests united under an umbrella of radicalism.  Roberto purposefully chooses to leave “radical cataloging” undefined, noting that the term originated in a listserv discussion that became political (Roberto 1), but Jennifer Young argues that “Radical cataloging is the notion that catalogers are users too” (Young 84).  Roberto’s goal is for this book to become a resource for catalogers and advocates (Roberto 3), one that is for the most part achieved thanks to the diversity of subjects throughout the text. 

Chapters focus on a variety of topics, from cataloging outsider art (Benedetti); to fanzines, also known as zines (Freedman); to organizing popular music by genre (Summers); to automating OCLC’s Connexxion client to perform low-level intellectual tasks (Preston).  Much of the collection expands on Berman’s critique of LCSHs, often by specialists concerned with LCSHs in their areas of expertise.  tatiana de la tierra (the lowercase name is her choosing) bemoans the lack of a subject heading for lesbian Latinas (de la tierra 100), while Tracey Nectoux’s chapter attacks the LCSHs for its use of “cult” because of the negative connotations surrounding that word (Nectoux 107).  Brian Hasenstab’s annotated bibliography of radical cataloging is a good place to start for readers interested in the history of activism and cataloging.  Although unconcerned with identity politics, Christopher Walker’s article criticizes LCSHs for inconsistencies with regards to species, hyphenation, and plurality (Walker 131-132).[7] 

Ultimately, however, the far majority of these authors recognize the usefulness of LCSHs.  They merely want to improve them and make them more inclusive, or, as Hasenstab notes, “helpful, equal access to all types of information for all patrons” is not radical (Hasenstab 76).  Walker in particular concedes this point, writing, “LCSH is more baby than bath water” (Walker 137).  Yet this begs the question, what is radical? 

This is Not a Radical Catalog

The first truly radical shots fired in RC come from Jeffrey Beall’s chapter on OCLC, a company that sells cataloging data and centralized interlibrary loan interfaces to libraries.  Beall’s critique of OCLC is set up as if libraries are developing countries while OCLC is a profit-hungry multi-national corporation.  This allows him to attack the organization, “malevolent… in the way that all large, rapacious, transnational conglomerates are” (Beall 85), under the guise of Gramscian critique.  Just as raw materials come from developing countries and are made into finished products elsewhere only be to sold back to those countries,[8] OCLC buys cataloging data from libraries and then sells them to other libraries at a substantial markup.  OCLC also discourages the sharing of MARC records between libraries, although how exactly this is done Beall does not say.  The author also accuses the company of being “an information sweatshop” whose “mission… is to separate libraries from their money” (Beall 87).  OCLC does this by employing temporary workers and computer scientists at the expense of librarians.  While I find this inflammatory rhetoric entertaining, the author proposes little in the way of substantive strategies of resistance. 

Tina Gross takes aim at the Calhoun Report,[9] arguing that its focus on speed and cooperation with the private sector constitutes a manufactured emergency, a false crisis in which the dissent of catalogers is marginalized in the name of modernization, efficiency, and cost savings.  Gross posits that the policy recommendations of the Report prevent libraries from being self-sufficient and stifle dissent.  Calhoun’s conclusions paint all who oppose it with the same brush, those who attempt to stem this tide are called “selfish” or “dinosaurs” regardless of motives (Gross 141).  The author does an admirable job separating the luddites from those who have legitimate concerns regarding the future of cataloging.  Thomas Mann’s chapter on the LC expands this critique, noting that many librarians would label the Calhoun Report as radical (Mann 170).

Elsewhere in RC less economic and more philosophical forms of radicalism abound.  Bradley Dilger and William Thompson think that cataloging should become more prevalent, more public, in library settings.  Using Derrida’s discussion of play as a point of departure, they argue

Cataloging assuages an absence, a desire for getting at the knowledge contained in a library’s collection and creating new knowledge from it. Catalogs still act as permeable boundaries between people and ‘real’ knowledge and ‘potential’ knowledge contained in the collection, mediating the indeterminacy between what is known (a work’s title, author, or subject) and the desire for the unknown (the work’s content, and more importantly, its potential use) (Dilger and Thompson 45).

While these authors use a (rare) uplifting strain of postmodernism to elevate the catalog to an object of protection, Emily Drabinski challenges the very concept of a catalog, contending, “Political efforts to change terminology or localize classification schemes are inevitably limited by the nature of classification itself” (Drabinski 198).  Although humans have been cataloging and classifying for thousands of years, she sees these tools as hegemonic; to overhaul this structure one must step outside of it.[10]  Her chapter is a powerful rejoinder to Berman and others because it implicates them as part of a system in which incremental changes to LCSHs are epiphenomenal, obscuring true power structures and those that might benefit from them. 

Drabinski also argues that classification and cataloging are “products of human labor that carry traces of all the intentional and unintentional racism, sexism, and classism of the workers who create them” (Drabinski 198).  While Berman and other authors in RC agree with this statement, her conclusions do not logically follow.  Drabinski’s solution is to borrow from The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which a dialectic of education and liberation in information literacy can free one from hegemony.[11] I propose a more modest goal: historicize the catalog.  Instead of abandoning or overthrowing it, realize and then teach that catalogs and systems of classification are not only social constructs, created by humans, but also historical constructs, created at specific points in time.  Recast in historicist light, Berman’s work on LCSHs appears more radical as he and others worked to revise and dismantle subject headings that reflected a white male power structure while many did the same with regards to society at large.  In short, by asking the LC to add, amend, or eliminate some subject headings, Berman is historicizing the catalog.  I suggest that creations dates of LCSHs be added to LCSH authority records so patrons can see when headings were created.  Others, like dates of major reorganizations, should be entered as well.  Doing so will make it easier for users to view catalogs as products of their times. 

UnRadical Cataloging: What Works

The authors in the third part of RC shy away from the confrontational tactics of those in the first part,[12] and lack the philosophizing of those in the second.  As a result, many readers, especially information professionals, will find the focus on pragmatic strategies and solutions the most useful part of the volume.  Perhaps not coincidentally, this is the least radical section of the book.  Librarians would be wise to implement many of the suggestions in the third portion, regardless of their dubious connection to the first two. 

Jennifer Erica Sweda’s chapter proposes tagging as a way around inflexible LCSHs.  Tom Adamich adds metadata regarding the educational quality of items in the 505 and 586 fields of MARC records to show teachers searching for resources if an item has a certain theme, meets a state standard, or has won an award (Adamich 242, 244).  Dana M. Caudle and Cecilia M. Schmitz propose that catalogers spend time at the reference desk, while A. Arro Smith (yes, that’s his name) encourages catalogers to think and act like reference librarians.  Altering MARC records to aid patrons’ searches is the goal of his chapter.  He adds “Harry Potter” to the 240 field, making books about Harry Potter more visible for patrons, increasing their circulation (Smith 296). 

In sum, the authors in RC are united by little more than a desire to help patrons find what they are looking for, the goal of any catalog, and are bound by the beliefs that cataloging need not be boring and should be a force for good.  The collection of essays is disjointed and not always radical, but it is thought-provoking and offers up something interesting for catalogers of all persuasions and interests.  The work of Berman and others to update LCSHs is a noble and worthy cause; one all information professionals should pay attention to. Although RC lacks the theoretical and analytical rigor needed to properly historicize cataloging, it is a qualified success and an important first step towards that goal.  Finally, the recommendations of the third section will prove invaluable to many librarians. 

Appendix: So You Want to be a Radical Cataloger

If you are interested in current issues in radical cataloging, the following are good places to start. 

• Join the Radical Cataloging listserv, RadCat, at http://www.listserv.uga.edu/archives/radcat.html. (Caution, may contain Comic Sans.)
• Read and subscribe to Sanford Berman’s library zine, The Unabashed Librarian: http://www.unabashedlibrarian.com/.
• Bookmark or add The Library Juice blog to your RSS feed: http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/.

Read up on the history of radical cataloging.

• Olson, Hope A. The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.
• Roberto, Katia and Jessamyn West, eds. Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2003.
• The Sanford Berman Website. http://www.sanfordberman.org/.
• West, Celeste and Elizabeth Katz, et al., eds. Revolting Librarians. San Francisco, Booklegger Press, 1972.

Practice it!

• Keep tabs on new and updated LCSHs: http://www.loc.gov/aba/cataloging/subject/weeklylists/.
• Propose a few of your own: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/prop/proposal.html and http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/saco/sacopropform.html.

References

from Roberto, K.R., ed. Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland and Company, 2008.

Adamich, Tom. “CE-MARC: The Educator’s Library ‘Receipt.’” p.241-245.

Beall, Jeffrey. “OCLC: A Review.” p.85-93.

Benedetti, Joan M. “Folk Art Terminology Revisited: Why It (Still) Matters.” p.112-125.

Berman, Sanford. “Introduction: Cataloging Reform, LC, and Me.” p.5-11.

Caudle, Dana M. and Cecilia M. Schmitz. “Drawing Reference Librarians into the Fold.” p.251-254.

de la tierra, tatiana. “Latin Lesbian Subject Headings: The Power of Naming.” p.94-102.

Dilger, Bradley and William Thompson “Ubiquitous Cataloging.” p.40-52.

Drabinksi, Emily. “Teaching the Radical Catalog.” p.198-205.

Freedman, Jenna. “AACR 2 – Bendable but Not Flexible: Cataloging Zines at Barnard College.” p.231-240.

Gross, Tina. “Who Moved My Pinakes? Cataloging and Change.” p.140-147.

Hasenstab, Brian. “This Subfield Kills Fascists: A Highly Selective, Slightly Irreverent Trip Down Radical Cataloging Literature Lane.” p.75-82.

Mann, Thomas. “What is going on at the Library of Congress?” p.170-188.

Nectoux, Tracey. “Cults, New Religious Movements, and Bias in LC Subject Headings.” p.106-109.

Preston, Carrie. “High-Speed Cataloging Without Sacrificing Subject Access or Authority Control: A Case Study.” p.269-276.

Roberto, K.R. “Preface: What Does “Radical Cataloging” Mean, Anyway?” p.1-3.

Smith, A. Arro. “Cataloging Heresy.” p.291-299.

Summers, Michael. ‘The Genre Jungle: Organizing Pop Music Recordings.” p.53-68.

Sweda, Jennifer Erica. “Dr. Strangecataloger: Or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tag.” p.246-251.

Walker, Christopher H. “Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic: A Drowning Cataloger’s Call to Stop Churning the Subject Headings.” p.126-140.

Young, Jennifer. “Ranganathan’s Forgotten Law: Save the Time of the Cataloger.” p.83-84.

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[1] Jefferson, NC: MacFarland and Company, 2008.

[2] What constitutes “radical” for our purpose, as will become clear later, is a postmodern/poststructuralist or Gramscian worldview as applied to library and information science in general and cataloging in particular.  If these terms are meaningless to you, I suggest Palmer, Donald. Structuralism and Poststructuralism for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1997, as well as the Wikipedia pages for Antonio Gramsci <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramsci>, postmodernism <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism>, and poststructuralism <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poststructuralism> as introductions to these contested terms.  

[3] Gilyard, Burl. “Sandy Berman’s Last Stand.” City Pages 20(971). July 14^th 1999, p.3. <http://www.sanfordberman.org/cityp/ber3t.htm> Accessed April 11, 2009. 

[4] Briefly, this means that dominant groups within a society have the power to name and classify, often at the expense of those who do not.  Hope Olson agrees, arguing that first term subject headings “masquerade as neutral when they are, in fact, culturally informed and reflective of social power.” Quoted in Drabinski, 200. 

[5] Gilyard. 

[6] A LCSH for “Incandescent lamps” remains in use, albeit with much less content. 

Please note that all references from Radical Cataloging will be in text parenthetical, followed by a works cited section at the end of the paper.  Other references will be footnoted. 

[7] Walker also points out that in the 670 field of authority records you may come across a “Hennepin” note, a reminder of Berman’s influence.  See Walker 133.

[8] The world economy functions with more complexity than this.  What I describe above is more akin to 19^th century imperialism than contemporary Gramscian neo-imperialism in which corporate and other non-state actors are sometimes able to dictate and control national economies. 

[9]Calhoun, Karen. “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools.” Prepared for The Library of Congress. March 17, 2006. < http://www.LC.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf> Accessed April 11, 2009.

[10] In Gramscian thought hegemony is an ideological superstructure that exerts influence unconsciously.  The fact that it goes unnoticed, assumed, and taken for granted by most is proof of its effectiveness.  The first step to challenging a hegemonic structure is realizing that it exists. 

[11] Freire, Paolo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2007.  According to Drabinski, what Freire termed “banking education,” in which rote memorization is valued over critical thought, is too common in contemporary information literacy.  Freire’s solution is “problem-posing education,” in which students are each given complex problems.  These individuals in turn teach each other, as well as teaching the teacher, and the end result is that student and teacher alike are made aware of hegemonic forces that surround them.  How one could apply this to information literacy goes unmentioned in Drabinski’s chapter, and her use of “banking education” is a straw man argument, since rote memorization is by no means the dominant form of teaching information literacy.  In fact, she does not even summarize or describe current trends in information literacy and pedagogy.  See Drabinksi, 202-204. 

[12] A notable exception is Drabinski’s article, which appears in the third part because her focus on critical pedagogy is seen as a solution. 

Is Information Snobby? Is Craft Beer?

To me, the statement "I care about my library members but I don't care about what they read" sounds like cognative dissonance.
— Andy Woodworth (@wawoodworth) May 19, 2012

The library where I work doesn't do a lot of reader's advisory; we're an academic library with a very limited selection of books that, on average, people read for pleasure instead of scholarship. But I'm hesitant to label this a "public library issue," and move along. Librarians, you should care what gets read. But first, some background, via Andy Woodworth's blog, Agnostic, Maybe. Be sure to check out the comments on those posts; there's a spirited back and forth.

I wrote this in 2008:

Information, and access to it, is a powerful leveling tool.  By teaching patrons to access information, librarians and other library staff make it possible for students from traditionally underserved backgrounds to have the same access to information as more advantaged groups.  This equality of opportunity also plays an important role in civil society and democracy.

Now, we can have an argument about whether or not Twilight is information, and whether or not it contributes at all to civil society. Here's one pro: Benedict Anderson defines nationalism as an "imagined community" in which people who will never meet engage in the same thoughts and same activities and, knowing this, develop feelings of affection and affiliation. In Anderson's argument, these communities are spread and fostered, in large part, based on the rise of the printing press, which disseminates information, including novels, at speeds previously unknown and unheard of. Anderson draws no distinctions, at least in the initial outlay of this argument, between high and low culture, speaking only to "print-capitalism." While the internet has played a role in fragmenting popular culture, take a gander at the Twilight book sales, and you'll see that commonalities are alive and well in the twenty-first century.

I'm comfortable in a world in which all texts are valid, though I'm also comfortable saying some are more valid than others. If Twilight is what gets you reading, then I'm okay with that, because I think of popular fiction as a gateway to something more. Is that snobbish? Maybe. I'm also comfortable being called that name. I have thick skin, and I suppose if the shoe fits....

The concept of something pop, something low or middlebrow as a gateway to something more, something subjectively better, is widely applicable. It's getting warm out, so in particular, wheat beers and witbiers. InBev, which owns Budweiser, makes a wheat beer called Shock Top. You've probably seen it. Miller Coors has Blue Moon. You've definitely seen it. These are gateway beers. They are conscious attempts by large companies to make a beer that is "like" craft. They are not. No matter, though, because these are the beers that will get you into craft beer, such as Allagash White. Who will do this? A good bartender, or, because we are nothing without titles, a beer director, or a friend whose opinion you respect. Such a person will see you with a Blue Moon or Shock Top, and recommend the next level up. I feel comfortable saying that nobody in the history of the world, ever, who has had Allagash White and Blue Moon prefers the latter. And so Blue Moon and its ilk are useful idiots. Yes, there is a teleology here.

And so it is with information. Some information is craft, some is not. Information is better than no information, and craft information is the best information of all. It is my hope that librarians practice craft information to the extent possible at their workplaces and in their lives.

New Year, New Library Quarterly Report: Spring

At the end of last year, I held a staff meeting in which I told other librarians and library staff to treat the library like a lab. So far, this is what we're up to.

I began my tenure here in Technical Services, which included interlibrary loan (ILL). There was one problem: I had no prior experience in ILL outside of using RLIN and OCLC Passport in the early 00s (yes, I'm that old), and there was nobody to teach me how to do it. We use OCLC's FirstSearch and I was able to somewhat train myself, but there were features of that platform that I did not use, nor did I have the time to play around with, because I was also cataloging, working with the budget, instituting an information literacy and library instruction program, etc.... You fellow overworked librarians get the idea.
The solution: off-load this responsibility to another staff member, telling them to take the time to fully explore OCLC's features, and then train others on it. This has worked. We're now using FirstSearch in a more effective manner. This includes taking advantage of tracking loans and generating labels in ways we weren't. It isn't sexy, but it's something.

We have been lucky to see modest budget increases, but in some ways this is a fool's errand because we have little time to properly evaluate resources when developing the collection with such a small staff. Bad librarian that I am, I gave back a lot of money last year because of this (after leaving $4.76 in the till in 2010). It will not happen again, mostly because I've given each library staff member some money and an area in which to improve our collection. We are two weeks out from reporting on this, but I intend to spend a lot of money in May. Then I intend to promote the heck out of what we purchase via the (too quiet) library blog; taking advantage of "Months," such as April's National Poetry Month; and summer/beach reading; among other options. I am very open to suggestions here, so if you have any ideas on how to market a collection or collections at an academic library, please let me know, either in the comments or via twitter.

We have done a fair amount of cross-training, so that of the six (6) staff members we have, four can do copy cataloging. Two of them, including myself, can do original cataloging. This forces staff on the desk to think like catalogers. Perhaps more important, we have no one person dedicated to cataloging, so everyone is out on the reference desk, working with patrons, observing how they use library resources.

We tried to "embed" librarians and library staff in specific courses in Moodle, our course management software (CMS). We "piloted" a program in which we had library staff in 63 courses. We created 63 "Ask a Librarian" discussion forums. Over the course of a semester, two (2, t w o) students took advantage of this. That's a disaster. We're scaling back, using widgets to give the library an online space in our CMS and customizable databases, but we've scaled back from "push" to "presence," which we will monitor.

We have a few other big things lined up as well, but I'll wait until I have more news, good or bad, to discuss in this space.