ALCTS Eforum - What Does Advocacy Mean for Technical Services?

Earlier this week I was lurking on the ALCTS eforum on the advocacy of technical services. I say lurking since I didn't really get up the courage to make many contributions but I did find reading the incoming emails very interesting. This was my first experience with an eforum (being technologically slow) but I don't think it will be my last. They seem to be an excellent way to talk to others that you would otherwise have no interaction with, even if the time difference did make things a little complicated! I just wanted to touch on some thoughts that I found particularly interesting.

The first question asked to the forum focused on a definition of advocacy. Many good definitions were proposed but the one that stuck out for me was submitted by Cynthia Whitacre of OCLC. She highlighted how important it was to advocate not just to the outside world but also to others within our institutions. She says: we need our colleagues within the library to understand the crucial role that we play in making sure the library is a smoothly functioning organism.

This was a call that was echoed by a lot of other posts such as Kristin Martin’s observation that before one can begin advocating for the department, one needs to be working and demonstrating expertise to colleagues throughout the library. This was something that struck a chord with me. I’m currently trying to get a blog started in order to promote the work of the Cataloguing Department, and the rest of the division, to the outside world. I’ve had a lot of encouragement from librarians outside my library but I have to say that I’ve been disappointed with the reaction of some of my colleagues. No one has been actively hostile towards it but the most common response has been: who would want to read that? Well actually, quite a lot of people! I also worry about how many people will want to contribute to the blog. It’s meant to be a division wide project but at this point I can see it being run by only a dedicated few. If people in my own department can’t see the point of this sort of advocacy, then will anyone outside the department? If anyone has any advice on how to inspire others to get involved in projects like this then please let me know!

Heather Jardine, from City of London libraries, called for everyone who works in technical services to promote their work at any opportunity. She encouraged us to never be apologetic about our roles. I know too many cataloguers who do this, including myself on occasion. I actually really enjoy my job but sometimes I feel that cataloguers are seen as the poor relation in the library world. This is a misconception that advocacy can help to change.

Another excellent point was made by David Moody, Cataloguing Librarian at the University of Detroit Mercy. David pointed out that just because cataloguing is not a user facing service, this doesn't mean that it doesn't serve users. He makes the point that we might be serving the public indirectly, but that's still the motivation for what we do. This point was echoed by many others on the forum. Cataloguing is at its heart a user service. If the books are not catalogued then they cannot be found by users. End of story. Lauren Noel made the point that cataloguing is the first step in the reference process. If the book is not properly catalogued and indexed then how is the reference librarian supposed to know that it's there? Others pointed out that so-called ‘technical services’ help to provide the infrastructure of the library and make it possible for people to find the resources that they need. I think that this is a point that sometimes gets lost. Cataloguers tend to be perceived as stuck in a back room somewhere far away from human interaction. Whilst this might be true to some extent, I don’t think this makes what we do any less valuable. Without us the library would be a lovely building filled with resources that no one would have a hope of actually finding!

Duncan Stewart said that my experience is that most administrators are very much aware of the COSTS of tech services, but not always the benefits. This also rang true with a lot of other people on the forum and is a major reason why advocacy of cataloguing has become even more of a pressing issue. Unless cataloguers can prove their worth I'm afraid that we will be amongst the first in the firing line. The time for assuming that everyone understands the importance of what we do is long over and we need to compete with other departments to show our value.

Following on from this, several contributors talked about how to demonstrate the value of cataloguing. I'm currently researching impact (although not of cataloguing) for my MSc dissertation so this was interesting to me. I know through my own research that impact is an EXTREMELY hard concept to measure. Suggestions made by the group included a lot of statistical references that I'm afraid went way over my head, but it was an interesting concept which merits further discussion.

Several suggestions were made of ways in which cataloguing departments could promote their department. These included newsletter contributions, orientation tours for new library staff/faculty members which include a look at what the cataloguing department actually does, visits for outside librarians and various social media efforts.

One of my favourite discussions of the forum was about the 'elevator speeches' that cataloguers gave when describing their jobs in short. There were many wonderful suggestions which showcased the importance of our work but the best was from Tricia Jauquet who described working in cataloguing as basically what people think magic elves do. This has to be one of the better job descriptions that I've ever heard! But maybe it is time for the elves to come out of the backroom and show everybody else the magic?

The parting shot of the eforum was: LIVE LONG AND ADVOCATE! The forum gave me lots of ideas which I hope to be able to feed back to the advocacy group that I work with. I think that this discussion highlighted many reasons why advocacy is now a vital part of any librarians role rather than an added extra. Whilst some of the stories of woe in technical services departments didn’t make for very cheery reading, it was reassuring to know that we all seem to be facing the same problems. Hopefully now we can work together to solve them!

photo credit: JonathanCohen via photopin cc

Library Day in the Life - day five

This is my final day of the Library Day in the Life project. It's been an interesting if somewhat tiring experience writing up what I do each day!

Today was very much like any other day in the English Cataloguing Department with the usual mix of tasks that I've outlined in my previous posts. In addition to these, today I catalogued some music books. Although we have a music department the responsibility for cataloguing so-called secondary music books falls to us, for example biographies of musicians or music textbooks. The music shelf can always be guaranteed to turn up some gems, such as "Elvis and his Pelvis" or today's biography of Boyzone!

My favourite book in the department today has been one that I didn't personally work on but I think still deserves a mention. "Knitted Dinosaurs" is one of those books that everyone wants to look at and one reason why we are so keen to start a department blog. I also think it does a good job of showing that not all the material that we process is the standard academic type that most people expect. I've said it before but the diversity in the material is one reason why I really do love my job.

At lunchtime today I watched the live chat at the Guardian website which focused on "The Evolving Role of the Higher Education Librarian". There was a lot of interesting discussion and I hope to go through the chat later and maybe write up my thoughts. I wish I could have contributed but I felt that everyone else was already saying what I was thinking and in a much more eloquent way!

I hope that anyone who has stuck with me for the past week has enjoyed reading my posts. I know that I've enjoyed discovering a little more about what people do in their different library environments each day.

Library Day in the Life - day four

Day four of my contribution to the Library Day in the Life project has been pretty similar to the last few days. Cataloguing is a repetitive job by nature but this doesn't mean that it has to be boring. One advantage to working in a Legal Deposit library is that we get a huge range of books so we can be dealing with the latest celebrity biography one minute and a book on quantum physics the next. This helps to stop the work becoming boring, for me at least!

Only a couple of differences in today's work flow. As well as the usual fast-track procedures I catalogued some periodicals. Whilst this is usually the job of the (you guessed it) Periodicals Department, some of the issues are classed as needing separate cataloguing. Usually this is because they are special issues such as conference papers.

The other new activity for today was a brief discussion about starting a blog for the Collection Development and Description Division at the library. We want to explain more to our users and other librarians about what we do and a blog seemed like a natural way to do this. I'm pleased to report that things will hopefully be progressing soon so we had a (very) mini brainstorming session about how to move forward with it.

Tomorrow is the last day of my libday8 week - hopefully I can still find something interesting to say!

Library Day in the Life - day three

Welcome to day three of my Library Day in the Life!

Since today is another English Cataloguing day I started off with some reshelving. Thankfully there wasn't too much today and only one reader query so I was back to my desk fairly soon. The next task was to finish off the work that was left unfinished as a result of the computer problems yesterday. This involved updating the records of the books that I had fetched and passing the entered books to the catalogue before taking them to the Labelling Department.

Another job of the fast-track cycle is to upgrade the basic BNB records that we download at the time of the books receipt. These basic records are on our system with the expectation that they will be overwritten by the full level record as soon as it becomes available. This happens in almost all cases but there are always a few that get missed for one reason or another and require some cataloguer intervention. Usually this is because the book is a reprint or a new edition and the system is not one hundred per cent sure that it matches. These records only require minimal editing so the job didn't take too long. There were a lot of sports books in this batch though - not really my favourite area!

My next task of the day was to work through some series queries. Cataloguers on the fast track team get periodic reports of records that have entries which claim to be series titles and need manual checking. This is a really straightforward process since almost all of the time the problem is that there's a slight difference between the series form as it appears on the book and its authorised form. For any non-cataloguers out there here is an example: an edition of Pride and Prejudice by Penguin may have the series "Modern classics" on the title page. The authorised version is actually "Penguin modern classics" and so this would need to be reflected in the record. Again, this is just a quick job which can be done with one click of the mouse but requires human eyes to make sure that everything goes where it belongs!

For anyone still with me (and not yet in a coma from my description of cataloguing!) I'll describe my final couple of jobs for the day. I did some copy cataloguing of a batch of bought material (see my day two post for a description) and finished off the day by cataloguing some audio-visual material. This was mostly CD-ROMs which come with the books and require a little extra attention.

And that was pretty much it! One small extra that I did at lunchtime was to read a couple more libday8 posts by fellow cataloguers. There is an list on the excellent HV Cats blog for anyone who wants to read a far more interesting account than this has been!

Library Day in the Life - day two

This is day two of my week for the Library Day in the Life Project, Round 8.

Today was my other Monday of the week - the day that I start my job in the English Cataloguing Department. It can be quite a challenge having two jobs in two departments and I sometimes feel like I have to take off my Tower Project head off on a Monday night and put on my English Cataloguing one!

Today began like every other day in English Cataloguing with some reshelving. I'm sure this is a task familiar to many librarians! I quite enjoy starting my day this way since it usually doesn't require too much thinking and so proves a nice way to ease into the day. Also, since most of my job is behind the scenes, it provides my main contact with readers. I always get quite a sense of satisfaction when I can help them find what they want. Only a couple of queries today.

The English Cataloguing Department works on three week long rotations and my team has just started the so-called 'Fast Track' cycle. This is exactly what the name implies. Since Cambridge is a Legal Deposit library we have a huge intake of English language material and it's necessary to process this as fast as possible. The fast track cycle involves less original cataloguing and more copy cataloguing - hence the fast part of the title.

The morning started with a batch of continuations which were left over from the end of last week. These are essentially books which had already had a classmark assigned and so just need to be catalogued before being passed to the catalogue. Usually the senior members of staff assign a classmark to material once it has been catalogued but continuations are part of a series so already come with a classmark. Today's batch included some slightly more complicated AV material which took a little while to sort out but I got it done in the end.

Next up was copy cataloguing of some bought material. Since we receive most of our material on Legal Deposit this mainly consists of American and European material and the selection can be quite varied! Today I came across a book about using Zotero in libraries that might be worth a read later...

Unfortunately the afternoon brought a power cut and an unexpected system downtime. Although this was disruptive it gave me a chance to catch up on some other work. I went to the stacks to fetch some books that I need to double check the details of, which always takes more time than I think it will! Next up was some entering. Each book is manually entered into a handwritten log where it is assigned a unique running number. This might seem like a slow process but it helps to keep an accurate shelf list. These are all jobs that I will finish off tomorrow when (hopefully) the computer system will be up again!

Library Day in the Life - day one

This is my first post for the Library Day in the Life Project, Round 8. For anyone who doesn't know I work as a cataloguer in two departments at Cambridge University Library, the Tower Project and English Cataloguing.

Monday is the one and only day of the week that I spend working with the Tower Project at Cambridge University Library. The project originally started in order to catalogue the secondary Victorian material in the tower and has since moved on to the Edwardian period. This material was considered of limited academic importance at the time of receipt and so was stored away with little or no thought as to how it would be retrieved. The Tower Project was set up to provide catalogue records for these books and has been a resounding success.

Currently I'm cataloguing books from 1913 and that’s how my day began today. There was the usual mix of fiction, school books and religious pamphlets. These all require cataloguing from scratch since there are no quality records for the material. Today provided some interestingly titled books such as “Why Girls Go Wrong: How the White Slave Gangs Work” which was a novel featuring a cover picture of a rather dastardly man in a top hat attempting to kidnap a young lady whilst twirling his dangerous looking moustache (just to make it clear that he’s a bad guy!).

I spent most of the day cataloguing and dealing with the usual complications that this throws up. Today I had some horrid German fiction (which people on Twitter generously offered to help me with) and some authority problems to solve. The research part of cataloguing has always been my favourite part of the job. I like to see if I can solve the puzzle of finding the correct author or subject heading. Today’s selection required more effort that the usual glance at Wikipedia and took a good portion of the day.

My other main activity for today involved putting the finishing touches to this week’s Tower Project Friday blog post. We try to post a ‘fun’ item every Friday and this week it’s my turn. I spent some time correcting mistakes in the post and playing around with the arrangement of the pictures to try and make the post look appealing. Contributing to this blog has been a good way to develop my web developer and art skills! I really enjoy the blogging part of my job with the Tower Project since it allows me to do a bit of outreach and show off some of our finds. It’s a way of reaching out to the wider world and showing them what we have that I find very rewarding.

I spent some time at lunch reading through various blog posts and having some discussions with other cataloguers on Twitter. One blog post that particularly caught my eye was @millieshoes post about the value of the library MA. It's a really interesting read which has provoked a good discussion.

From tomorrow I spend the rest of the week in the English Cataloguing Department, but more about that later...

Coming up this week

Just a quick reminder that I'll be taking part in Library Day in the Life starting tomorrow. I've been looking forward to it, I just hope that I can think of some interesting things to say! Since (dare I say it) I'm actually making some progress on the dissertation, I think I'll be able to stick to my plan of daily updates.

I don't have anything out of the ordinary planned for this week but that's probably a good thing since it will help to give a more realistic picture of what I do all day. Almost seems a shame that I catalogued the 100% official Justien Bieber story last week though. That would have been 'interesting' to blog about.........!