The future of cataloging - yes, I said cataloging

Taking a slight detour from surveying, last week I gave an invited presentation on the implications for archives and special collections of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control at PALINET's Future of Cataloging Symposium. Since the audience was made up almost entirely of catalogers and heads of technical services for academic, public, and special libraries, this was not my typical crowd, or my typical subject matter. It was a really interesting experience, however, because both preparing for my talk and listening to my fellow speakers drove home how similar the challenges we face are.

The crux of the presentations I attended, as well as the LC Working Group report, was that people are looking for ways to improve access, streamline procedures, increase efficiency, cut costs, be more responsive to user needs, adapt to new technologies, and integrate data better into the increasingly web-centered world of information. Sound familiar?

Although I was impressed and even inspired by the LC Working Group's effort overall, and especially encouraged by the attention that "rare, unique, and other special hidden materials" receive in the report, one of the points I made in my presentation was that few special collections professionals, and virtually no archivists, were involved in the Working Group's research or the writing of the report (though the Bibliographic Standards Committee of RBMS submitted a detailed and well-reasoned response to the draft report). It's a shame, because clearly so many of the issues for which the group was proposing recommendations directly impact, and have in many ways begun to be addressed by, those of us who work most closely with archives and special collections materials, with the PACSCL survey as just one example. One of the report's main recommendations for special collections is that access should be integrated with access for other library materials. I would argue that holds true not just for access to materials, but involvement in developing standards and systems and professional discussion as well. (By the way, I'm not exempting myself from the group who didn't get involved even though I had been vaguely aware of the LC Working Group for awhile - without the impetus this presentation gave me, I might not otherwise have read this report all the way through, which would have really been a shame.)

For those who are interested in learning more about the people's thoughts on the future of cataloging, and how it parallels trends in archives and special collections, all of the symposium presentations were recorded and should be available from PALINET soon. If you're interested in one archivist's take on the LC Working Group effort and future directions for "bibliographic control" in archives and special collections, the PowerPoint slides from my presentation are available here.

If it's Thursday, this must be Temple

We've just started at our next site, Temple University’s Special Collections. Subject matter-wise, it's one of the more abrupt shifts in the project: after nearly two months at the Academy of Natural Sciences surveying the papers of ornithologists, malacologists, ichthyologists, paleontologists, and just about every other flavor of natural history "-ologist" you can think of, we're now immersed in the records of leftist and counterculture organizations like the Socialist Review and Liberation News Service, among other topics.

This is also the first place we've been where a significant number of the collections we’re surveying are housed offsite. (Luckily for us, "offsite" in this case means a building that's a five-minute walk from the main library, so we can still avail ourselves of Temple's many food trucks.) The warehouse doesn't quite have the rarified atmosphere of some of our other stops, or one that conforms to the idealized representations of archives in movies and literature as quiet, dark-paneled nooks -- it's kind of like working at Home Depot, except that instead of 2' x 4's and plumbing fixtures there are boxes upon boxes of incredible manuscript collections.

I think this kind of shifting – of atmosphere, of subject matter, of routines, of personalities – is beneficial to us and to the project in a lot of ways. It shakes up our preconceived notions and we get to observe all the different ways people do things, benefit from their differing perspectives on many of the same types of issues, and understand why they collect what they collect. If we got too entrenched at one place, we might start to see things through only one lens, or expect things to work only a certain way. (Of course, one doesn't need to physically change sites as often as we do to maintain perspective; mental shifts – accomplished by going to a conference, visiting a colleague’s repository, or keeping up on professional literature and listservs – go a long way.)

It certainly isn't as comfortable as coming in to the same desk, coffee cup, and co-worker faces every morning, but it definitely makes us informed about (and open to) the complexities of our field, which should help us keep complacency at bay when we eventually settle back into a less nomadic work existence.