Talking Points on LC's Working Group on Bibliographic Control (Randomly Organized)
(Feel free to make use of them)
For a long time LC has been moving away from being the institution in this country that is principally responsible for providing quality bibliographic records. This is the consequence of a wide confluence of factors and new technologies, but much comes down to budgetary constraints.
At the inaugural meeting for the Working Group “…Dr. Marcum noted that LC has no special funding for sharing bibliographic control with other libraries, and Congress has asked the Library of Congress to analyze its base budget and demonstrate efficiencies before it requests additional funding.”
Many catalogers who were once able to accept LC copy without review are beginning to re-think that decision based on the quality of the copy they are finding. This will impact productivity in OCLC libraries, even in libraries where acquisitions staff are instructed to accept what they find, simply because the poorer quality records contribute confusion during the bibliographic establishment process. But smaller libraries that are not OCLC libraries will be impacted the most, as LC is the chief source of their bibliographic data, whether through a vendor or Z39.50. These less well-staffed institutions are also the least-equipped to manage this change.
At the very least, I expect that one consequence of the committee’s work to be the further erosion of LC as the gold standard for cataloging copy.
LC’s decision to shift resources from the creation of series authority records (SARs) has also had consequences for libraries. The decision by LC has left many of us gun-shy—what else is on the block?
Libraries with Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) catalogers are better positioned to respond to decreased series control and decreased numbers of series authority records.
Obviously one of the things on the table at the Working Group’s wide-ranging discussions is LC’s maintenance of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in its current form. We all know that the LCSH is costly to maintain and to use. Further, there are many who believe that subject access that is under authority control is no longer necessary in the library catalog, and won’t be necessary into the future. There are those who believe that controlled subject access can be adequately provided by a less highly-structured subject heading system or by keyword access and social tagging. Their goal is to take the human cost of determining these intellectual linkages out of the cost of providing access.
My current automation system would return much less specific and more poorly-organized results sets in the absence of controlled headings than it does in the presence of them, whether or not the headings are LCSH.
A deeper issue than LCSH is the value of controlled vocabularies and their associated syndetic structure in the library catalog. Currently we need both—we need librarian-provided intellectual connections as well as patron-supplied tags and keywords. In my opinion, keyword searching fails to adequately discover and collocate materials in the library catalog at this time.
What Keyword access does do, however, is provide a darned good key for discovering the vocabulary actually used. Lately I’ve adopted the idea (and I really can’t remember where I first read this) that the syndetic structure works best when the machine is doing the connecting—better than in the old manual catalog. Therefore we need more connections—not fewer, and therefore more authority control records. In other words, it doesn’t really matter what the terminology is, if it is well-connected. Specific terms become more valuable in well-connected environments.
MARC21 is the only metadata schema that includes a method for providing these linkages. Other metadata schemas are currently adopting and creating content standards, interestingly enough.
The usefulness of faceted access to library collections, as demonstrated by the Endeca software, is dependent on the consistent application of controlled vocabularies.
Currently, artificial intelligence cannot adequately support this and automating subject access has been called “problematic.”
Wikipedia is interested in “disambiguation,” their term for resolving conflicts in article titles that occur when a single term can be associated with more than one topic.
Access to library collections by browsing is dependent on the existence of a classification scheme. If LC is not maintaining and providing this classification, then libraries will be doing it themselves or paying vendors for it. How will we collectively manage such a scheme?
In the long run I think the metadata proponents are right. While books will be around for a long time, the future is clearly digital. I believe that we will see machine intelligence that is equal to much of the intellectual work needed to manage and provide access to mainstream library materials—those that begin their bibliographic life as ONIX records in particular.
In the long run, the use of more machine created records will free technical services librarians to begin describing the materials that are unique to their institutions, perhaps via MARC21, perhaps via another metadata opportunity.
Would libraries think that the solution to providing reference service was to buy cheaper, but poorer quality materials for the collection today so that we could purchase more expensive materials in the future? No, they would not.
Would anyone consider that the solution to the future of reference assistance was to tell the reference staff to provide their current patrons with less information so that we can put more resources into providing access to the patron that will be walking in the door a week from now?
Wouldn’t a more cost-effective solution be designating LC as a national library, and funding them to provide bibliographic control for the nation? The real difficulties with this solution are not financial or technological in nature.
If the Library of Congress abandons classification and subject access, perhaps the answer will be a growth in positions in technical services.
The closer you get to the ground, deep inside our libraries, you hear the comments and the plans. If you don’t need to classify materials, and don’t have to provide subject access to them, you can justify moving professional positions out of cataloging and into some other area.
Access to library materials through the library catalog must be maintained in the near term, regardless of the future.
Libraries will have to decide how to respond, as will every library that depends on LC for cataloging copy, LCC and LCSH. Somehow it seems to me that designating LC as a national library, and funding them to provide bibliographic control for the nation, is the more cost-effective plan to follow.
I feel relatively confident that we will end up someplace that provides our users with an appropriate amount of access, especially given how passionate the proponents of this future are. It’s the process of moving to that environment that scares the willies out of me.
What LC decides to do will have economic or access consequences for libraries, or both.