A January 19 post on Jennifer Eustis’s blog, Celeripedean, shares information about the upcoming “RDA Toolkit”– the next edition of cataloging rules for much of the English-speaking world. Some details about what will be available within the Toolkit are included, as well as its price. The information is reportedly from a flyer ALA Publishing made available at ALA Midwinter last week.

An ALAConnect blog January 17 post focused on the pricing only.

Scheduled for release on June 1, 2010, RDA’s annual licensing fee for a single user is to be $325, with increasing graduated pricing for multiple users.

I didn’t attend Midwinter, haven’t seen the flyer, and missed the RDA update session. Anyone who was there care to share any additional details?

I’m really curious to know how many libraries out there plan to subscribe to RDA, keeping in mind that even if ALA Publishing will debut it in June, the Library of Congress field test will run for six months afterward. Do you have money in your budget for it? Do you see the benefits of subscribing being worth the price?

The Library of Congress proposes to discontinue the use of the word “cookery” in favor of “cooking” in most subject headings for cookbooks and such. “Cookbooks” is being proposed as both a topical subject heading as well as a genre heading; currently, it’s a cross-reference to “Cookery.”

The Policy and Standards Division (PSD) of LC’s Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate has posted a discussion paper with full details and is inviting public comment on their plans (not all of which are finalized).

An “enormous number of subject heading revisions” would be involved, for just about every library’s catalog, so if you have thoughts about the proposed changes, please send them to Libby Dechman at edec@loc.gov. The deadline for doing so is December 1, 2009.

When/if LC makes these changes, how will you go about flipping the subject headings in your catalog?

My colleague Heather sent me a link to a very interesting article on taxonomy in the New York Times. Carol Kaesuk Yoon adapts this essay from her book “Naming Nature: the Clash Between Instinct and Science,” highlighting the modern demise of taxonomy as scientists rely on DNA analysis and the technology of the 21st century to categorize organisms. Yoon cites a body of anthropological research indicating that the compulsion to name the world’s flora and fauna is a distinctly human activity across numerous cultures, seemingly necessary to our internal modeling of the world and our understanding of our place within it.

It is the latter which suffers as taxonomy dies out. Yoon posits that we loose our connection to the natural world when we fail to name the plants and animals around us. Medical research seems to confirm this; Yoon notes that individuals suffering damage to a certain region of the temporal lobe are unable to recognize, identify, or name organisms, they are “… completely at sea… not [knowing] how to live in the world” and “unable to tell the carrot from the cat.” They have no difficulty with inanimate objects, oddly enough.

So categorizing, classifying, defining things around us is not just a librarian thing, but a human one.

Rangeview Public Library (right in our back yard) made the news this week by “breaking up with Dewey.”  They chucked the 133-year-old classification system in favor of WordThink, which Rangeview adapted from BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications).  Essentially, rather than assigning an item a number that is related to a category, materials are arranged and labeled with the category itself.

 When I initially heard about this (interestingly, it was from a friend who works at a wire service and it is pretty rare that our professional worlds intersect) I thought “good for them” because I fancy myself very modern and flexible, I guess.  And then I started to think about it.  On the one hand, for those who prefer to browse and patrons who never really got Dewey to begin with, this could definitely be a move in a more palatable direction.  However, I’m not clear on how one would go about finding a specific item, and this seems problematic for patron and staff alike. 

 It also brings up the issue of standards, why we have them and what they are good for.  I generally assume that standards arise to solve a problem, like “where is this specific book within this building full of books.”  And the advantage to everyone adhering to a standard is that I can walk into any building full of books and find something specific without having to learn a new system.  Perhaps I’m thinking too conservatively.  Or maybe I’m just not ready for the relationship to be over and I still think Dewey can change, and be the system I want it to be.  At any rate, I would love to hear what my colleagues think about WordThink.

This comic strip made me laugh out loud (click it to enlarge)

It strikes a little too close to home. With all the time I spend searching the tubes for fun new toys, I tend to miss out on some of the bigger picture tidbits. It ’s incredibly hard to keep up on all of it. So, for my own professional edification – and yours! –  here are my attempts to make sense of the references in the cartoon:

• American Idol Finale is tonight (who knew?), with Kris Allen and Adam Lambert squaring off. Apparently, they both feel pretty good about it.
• Google Book Settlement: everyone is confused. Ars Technica does a pretty solid job of summing it up, though. The best I can figure, the settlement that allows The Google to scan and sell out of print books makes libraries (and many others) nervous, and so ARL and others have voiced their concern to the court, highlighting “Two areas that the agreement is largely silent on [which] are traditional concerns of libraries, namely public access to information and user privacy.” Maybe? My esteemed colleague Heather Clark points out that this is a heckuva lot more complicated than what I’ve written here, of course, so click through the links above and read on. Here’s hoping HC pipes in on the comments to make it a little clearer.
• OCLC: A November 2008 policy change caused a bit of a kerfuffle, voiced by one librarian here.  The Thingology Blog at LibraryThing described the November hubbub thusly: “… it looked like OCLC was going to succeed in locking down the world’s library data, converting a wonderful sharing and coordination tool into an unbreakable data monopoly.” Apparently, the ruckus made by librarians has prompted OCLC to hold off on implementation of the new policy until further review. If that’s not enough, OCLC also recently announced they’re planning to add circulation, acquisition, and other modules to Worldcat.org – effectively offering you a web-based ILS. Which might have something to do with the whole afforementioned kerfuffle.  And… er, my esteemed colleague Linda Gonzalez points out that this is a heckuva lot more complicated than what I’ve written here, of course, so click through and read on. And maybe we’ll hear from LG in the comments.
• CommonCraft: If you don’t know it, go check it out! These guys create fabulous 2-3 minute videos explaining sometimes complicated concepts in an entertaining and easy to understand way.  My favorites: RSS in Plain English,  Zombies in Plain English, and Wikis in Plain English.
• 2007: The year that was.
• Twitter: In Plain English. Essentially, a micro-blogging tool that people just can’t love enough.
• Flickr Labs: Unless I missed something huge in 2007 (entirely possible) this is probably a reference to bighugelabs.com’s flickr toys where you can just play, play, play with your photos!
• Animoto: Cool slideshows made easy.
• Wordle: Take any chunk of text, and make a word cloud out of it! Like so… 

And with that, I’m exhausted. Does anyone out there have any updates on the OCLC or Google Books stuff? Now that I’ve learned this much, I might as well keep up with it!

(hat tip to Kieran at the John C. Fremont PL for the cartoon!)

I’ve been reading OCLC’s report of its survey of online catalog (specifically OCLC WorldCat) users (“Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want” ). The survey focused on the quality of data in the catalog—what users’ (and librarians’) perceptions of quality are. The results are interesting from several perspectives.

Not only do “end users” (meaning users who aren’t library staff) have a different idea of data quality than does library staff, staff performing different jobs in a library have different ideas of what “quality” cataloging data means. While over one-third of end users ranked having more links to online content and full text as their most desired enhancement in WorldCat, library staff across the board ranked the elimination of duplicate bibliographic records their most wanted enhancement.

Other than sharing their number 1 most-wanted bibliographic database enhancement however, librarians working in different areas of the library have very different ideas of what should be done to improve the quality of data in their catalogs. Library directors in the survey didn’t even place the upgrade of brief records in their top 10 while for catalogers this was the third most popular of potential enhancements. Resource sharing staff also omitted brief record upgrades from their top 10; for them improving the accuracy of holdings information was the 3rd most popular enhancement (no surprise that). Making holdings correct didn’t make catalogers’ top 10 though (no surprise that, either).

Whether or not the survey results can be generalized to all library OPACs is a subject I’ll leave open for others to debate. I think it’s valuable to ask ourselves not just what our patrons want, but what do our colleagues want? Have you ever asked them?

The Library of Congress recently debuted its Authorities and Vocabularies service on the web at http://id.loc.gov. Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are at present the only controlled vocabulary available, but there are plans to include others in the future.

This service “enables both humans and machines to programmatically access authority data at the Library of Congress” by requesting URIs established for each entity’s authority data. That’s my understanding, at least (see details here). And, it’s free.

LC is interested in hearing others’ opinions and thoughts about it, so you (and your computer) may want to poke around. Feedback is via a form.

Recent entries on 025.431: The Dewey blog (http://ddc.typepad.com/) include some help with classing works on presidential pets (either under an individual president’s administration or under collected biography of United States presidents–973.099).

On a related note… Portuguese water dogs class with “Working and herding dogs” in 636.73.

Cattle are some other animals in the press lately, as recent reports of the sequencing of the cattle genome have circulated (http://www.animalgenome.org/cattle/updates/). For advice on classing any works you might get on the topic, you may want to review the Dewey editors’ post here.

Not many people are aware that the Library of Congress has made available, for free, the material from several cooperatively developed workshops. The Catalogers Learning Workshop (CLW) arose from the 2000 Library of Congress conference “Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium.”

A joint effort by the Program for Cooperative Cataloging and the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, the CLW makes available for free material for workshops ranging from creating name authority records to digital library development.

While there are limitations in having just the material from a workshop, without benefit of an instructor and fellow participants to share ideas, if you can’t find anyone offering a workshop in which you are interested you can still gain helpful information from the material itself.

The BCR workshops “Understanding the Fundamentals of Series Authorities” and “Fundamentals of Creating Series Authorities” are adapted from the CLW worshop “Fundamentals of Series Authorities.” The material is thorough and well-organized, prepared by experienced catalogers– hard to beat.