cataloging | The Nocturnal Librarian

I’ve been taking an online course from the ALA called Introduction to Critical Information Literacy: Promoting Social Justice Through Librarianship. It has been really interesting, and even though I had a basic understanding of critical information literacy, and have been interested in social justice all my life, the class discussions and assignments have opened my eyes to new ideas and possibilities.

The idea of critical info lit is to work with students to put research in context in terms of whose voices are included or excluded, what power structures prevent participation in or access to research, what inherent biases exist in publishing, and in librarianship’s frameworks, like cataloging and classification, and so forth. Even though I do some cataloging, it’s mostly from existing records, not from scratch (also known as original), so I haven’t noticed that there are a lot of words missing from the Library of Congress Subject Headings — mass incarceration, for example, as I used The New Jim Crow in one of my assignments.

There’s been a lot of conversation online about whether libraries are neutral — they aren’t, of course. Nothing humans do is neutral, when you get down to it, which is ok, as long as we think about how we’re biased and who it’s impacting. For example, some core principles of librarianship are to make information and services available and accessible to all, and to welcome everyone — which are biases, even if they are well intended, and as public librarians know they sometimes upset patrons who wish “everyone” wasn’t quite so inclusive.

Since this was a class aimed at college and university librarians, we also looked at peer review, which as you know I have been looking at critically anyway (see my last post about Retraction Watch) at work and in my courses for the MSc in Science Communication & Public Engagement at University of Edinburgh. The more I learn about it, the more I wonder if it can be fixed, especially since people deeply involved in trying to make it better agree that it might not ever be.

We talked in this course about fake news as well, and interestingly, how our desire to teach students to question everything has led to more and more people questioning legitimate sources. I maintain that if the questioning is systematic and is meant as a way to test whether a source or an article has been produced in a way that strives to be factual, accurate, and clear, and isn’t a kind of ‘trust no one’ questioning, this won’t happen. I prefer to tell students to think carefully about everything — they’ll be able to tell whether something is unfair, misleading, inaccurate, or biased if they think.

And we talked about zines, something I hadn’t really thought about much. I know of them, but hadn’t thought of zines being in libraries, or turning up on works cited lists. But zines are, like letters, diaries, blogs, and other first person accounts, primary sources. They often tell stories that have been left out or haven’t yet been discovered by mainstream researchers. One of my classmates offers the option for students in a composition class to create a persuasive zine rather than an essay, using many of the same rhetorical techniques. That seems like a pretty creative idea to me. I like the fact that zines could be an entry point into scholarly conversation for people who don’t feel like they belong in that conversation.

For our final project, we had to create a zine about the class. Below is one of my pages.

I read this week about Simon Cloudesley, who “strode 114 miles from the Bodleian in Oxford, England, to the British Library in central London to raise thousands of pounds” for ECHO, the library for refugees in Greece that I wrote about in my last post. I thought that was really wonderful and wanted to pass the story along to all of you.

The other thing I want to share is an article in American Libraries about how Georgia Tech’s dean of libraries has reorganized the technical services department using “supply chain” theory. Dean Murray-Rust explains, “Staff members will be able to switch from managing interlibrary loans to creating basic archival records, from processing reserves to ordering online, as demand necessitates. Employees are learning how to manage more than 10 library systems, rather than one or two.” Quick aside for you non tech services types: that’s the department in a library that manages the acquisition, cataloging, and processing (labeling, covering, barcoding, security taping, etc.) of print and digital materials, including purchases, patron-driven acquisitions (which are sort of temporary loans that trigger a purchase if patrons use the item 3 times), and subscriptions, including newspapers, magazines, and databases.

Obviously Georgia Tech is much larger than my university and has more libraries, but I was intrigued by this. We have a pretty small staff, and we often face having to come up with backup plan for tasks that only one or two people know how to do when someone is out on vacation. We’ve improved on this with a lot of cross training, but people mostly still work on just one aspect of technical services on a day to day basis. I’m thinking this supply chain style would mean total cross training. Anyone could do anything. It sort of sounds like what people do on a given day would depend on the greatest need that day.

On the user services side, they’re going with “portfolio management,” and transitioning their entire organizational structure, “The biggest challenge to our transformation was organizational. We soon saw that we had to change the culture of the library from passive to active, and we had to retire models that focused narrowly on the library rather than those that supported the larger institution. We had to commit to organizing in a way that envisions a future that is digital.”

She goes on to say, “Our goal is to make the transactional parts of the library’s work as efficient as possible in order to free up resources to sustain new services such as intelligent agents, visualization, and data science.” And “Most of our work is managed in a portfolio framework of 10 programs and more than 60 projects. More than half of our librarians are subject specialists who report to senior librarians who act as coaches, mentors, and performance evaluators.”

No more generalist reference librarians, and it sounds like librarians are not as involved in the traditional “transactions” that take place at service desks in many libraries. Instead, they are outside the library working with faculty and students and specializing in data management, intellectual property, and the digital preservation of research. It all sounds very interesting, and relevant to Georgia Tech.

That part of the restructuring doesn’t sound nearly as applicable to my university which is more of a teaching/learning institution than a research hub. But there may be ideas from this transformation that we could adapt to our use. It’s all very intriguing and worth thinking about as it becomes common even in academia for people to question why libraries are necessary. Just this week I ran circulation numbers to show faculty at one of our largest departments that their students are in fact using books.

If you work in a library, what are you doing to transform?

The Nocturnal Librarian

Musings of a night owl librarian . . .

Tag Archives: cataloging

More on ECHO Refugee library and “supply chain” library management