That’s something else I’ve been thinking about lately. The volume of information both accessible “online” & unaccessible except through gatekept systems (in libraries or in books/print materials only) has skyrocketed. Part of my job is to help libraries scale up to the volume of information available to them electronically. We don’t deal with nearly as many titles as OCLC, but we track around 4000 databases (and have more that we don’t track), and have around 1.3M journals & …3M? ebooks? Everyone knows that LoC doesn’t have all titles cataloged. And OCLC considers us a competitor so though we’ve tried to work something out with them, we’ve thus far not come to a workable agreement (and OCLC doesn’t have everything cataloged either, not by a long shot!). I have two catalogers and there’s no way we have time to catalog all of it, much less the $$$ to pay outsourced catalogers to catalog all of the remaining & ever increasing content we have libraries that are subscribed to. We have a autocreate program that uses publisher info to make brief MARC records based on publisher info to cover the things for which we don’t have full records. At least there’s *some* record that way otherwise no record means no way to search for it for our client libraries. We also buy Bowker records (created from publisher info sent to Bowker as part of establishing the ISBN), which also informs LoC’s CIP program, and we’re increasingly reaching out directly to publishers for MARC records for their content with decidedly mixed results.

The long and the short of it is — no record means no access. A “poor” record may not provide all the various access points that one might wish to exploit, but it catches the major ones of title, author, publisher, and a few other data points (barring diacritics issues in various programs along the way which is something we definitely struggle with).

Libraries are backlogged in cataloging some several years behind. There’s just a lot of material out there requiring metadata and no one in the library world, libraries, vendors, or anyone else, can keep up with it. No one in the internet world can keep up with it either, but the expectation is much lower there. Library, catalog thyself! If we use “lower quality records” to provide some degree of access while we painfully slowly bring up quality (millions of records with two catalogers is not something one does over night), at least we are trying to provide some access for everything instead of waiting for everything to be fully & perfectly cataloged… Quality vs. Quantity, you can have two of anything: Time – Cost – Quality… We’re trying so hard to provide as much quality as we can, but… damn, the quantity & pace at which that quantity is growing is Freaking Insane.

Ok, first the gatekeepers issue, or… we’ll start there because that’s what struck me first. I can’t remember what I was reading or overhearing or … what. I think the context was how it was great that libraries/librarians are the gatekeepers of information and knowledge and how librarians vet and serve out The Best™ Information, that pep talk we give ourselves about the service we provide to our various communities.

I think I might be in a minority in that I mostly use my library card for searching for articles that come up in Google behind paywalls. Now and again I’ll get a book, but like an increasing amount of people, one of my earlier stops in the information gathering process is to check out what’s online in the great unwashed, dirty masses of Google. Maybe I’ll ask Google to take me to the Wikipedia article – it’s still somewhat unwashed, but it usually gives some pointers to some relevant and somewhat better sources. Or maybe I’ll just see if something fits in the top ten to twenty results (unless I’m really obsessed – I’ve been known to go hundreds of pages deep poking at what’s out there, less so more recently though).

The majority of the time, for my personal purposes, I find what I’m looking for without busting out the library card. For professional purposes, I… well, I follow largely the same pattern. Don’t need a library card because I’m in the library/publishing industry & I have access to certainly not all of what I need, but a fair amount of it & if the price is right, I can buy what I need, if I don’t have access through work or a library or Google. But most of the time I can find what I need online.

I get it when people say “I can find what I need online – why do we need libraries?” I can find what I need online to my authority qualified standards. I may disagree with someone else’s assessment of what’s an authority but that’s going to be true still if I’m standing behind a ref desk helping them try to find something too. Librarians may be gatekeepers of information, but with the internet seems to be a low barrier to information & an easy fence to jump. Might not get into the ivory tower, but there’s plenty of goodies in the king’s woods.

What I worry about with the gatekeeper metaphor is that “normal people” will start seeing the ‘gatekeeper’ mentality is less one of Information For The People! than truly a gatekeeper mentality of Information For Our People. There’s a tension between The library is free! Information wants to be free! and the reality of the cost of that information and who, in reality, pays for and gets to use that information. Libraries have their audiences. Public libraries are funded and supported (or not as the case sadly seems to be increasing) by their local tax base and it’s hard, if possible at all, to get a library card for the next town over. Libraries do provide interlibrary loan, for which I’m thankful. I’ve gotten good books that way (and interlibrary doc delivery supports my brother, for which I’m also thankful, he does some awesome stuff).

I think libraries are really important. I have to believe that libraries have a place in our future. Maybe not because “that’s where we keep our books, our trusty knowledge repositories” but we do keep our knowledge repositories there with professionals who can help us find and retrieve them when we can’t find them. If we know they can do that. Yeah, and here is where my thinking breaks down because nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

I do wonder about the assumption that “everything is online” and think it would be really awesome if libraries could get localized matches in search engines. Somehow. I know. And then there’s WorldCat. Still never seen that show up in an internet search result despite that being kind of the point of it. Weirdly, I do see LibraryThing fairly frequently. What is LibraryThing doing right that WorldCat isn’t?

I don’t know – it’s rambling; there are holes in my logic big enough to drive a parade of MACK trucks through. But I think there’s something there at the core, that might be true, and that little piece of truth nags at me. And there was a small bit of illumination that just came to me & left again. It’s been a long week of thinking about things.

• Admin Metrics 8:00-9:00 Taking a first look at result of metrics. Looking… Ok. As there have never been metrics established prior, there will be some experimentation involved to refine them, as well as this being the first week that we’ve actually kept ‘em and metrics tell more over the long term than they do in the short term. We’ll get there. I’ve got an awesome team now, figuring out where we’re getting randomized and tightening up will just make us even better.
• Admin Meetings 9:00-9:15 Planning for team mtg.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 9:15-10:00 Outsourcing process doc. How we’re going to decide what to send out & technical details of how we’ll pull it.
• Admin Meetings 10:00-10:30 Cat. team mtg. Pretty laid back today.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 10:30-12:00 Outsourcing process doc. Yep, back to this…
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 12:00-13:00 Emails to answer a test question about what we would expect a “contains” search to include (string match of the terms entered? keyword “AND”?). What we would expect (AND/NEAR) was not the case (exact string match to be included in rest of the search). Which is fine. I’m glad I know that’s the case now!
• Outsourcing Vendor Management/Review 13:00-13:30 Outsource pilot lead had questions. I had answers.
• Admin Metrics 13:30-14:00 Looking at updates to the incident metrics. They look good. Better, anyway… we’ll get there, we’ll get there…
• Admin Overhead 14:00-14:30 Spilling water on my computer & keyboard because that’s just how I roll. *sigh* Cleaned up, no damage done. Back to more interesting things.
• Admin Overhead 14:30-15:30 Sales/sales support client call post-mortem initial write up, set mtg for Monday review/feedback from team.
• Admin Overhead 15:30-16:00 Planning Monday. (Why, Brain? What are we going to do Monday night? Monday night, Pinky, we’re going to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!)

Came home. The little girls showed up fifteen minutes after me & we had a lazy daisy evening. Although M2 decided to clean her room. I think she did a better job than I do. When she sets her mind to it, she is really an amazing little cleaner upper. I wish she’d take initiative to do it more often, it’s truly amazing.

• Admin Billing 8:00-9:00 Straightening out billing stuff with a MARC record supplier.
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 9:00-10:00 Mtg. to help a sales guy figure out how to approach a current client.
• Admin Billing 10:00-10:30 Send on the billing stuff for signatures.
• Admin Overhead 10:30-12:00 Restarting computer due to updates, getting stuff ready for bugzilla bash.
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 12:00-13:30 Bugzilla bug bash! w00t! Taking a look at bugs & figuring out how to put together something our awesome director can go into a meeting with to help us get some leverage for stuff that would improve the cataloging workflow.
• MeSH Meetings 13:30-14:00 Sorting out a MeSh mess, sorted & resolved. Yay! My recommendation to resolve the issue is what the dev was thinking too & we’re golden!
• Outsourcing Research/Gathering Info 14:00-16:00 Looking at top dbs that could be outsourced & what sorts of ‘packages’ we could set up for varying markets (mostly med as int’l has yet to be determined). What can we put together (for example, normalizing the top 25 med. databases to 100% — so MARC records and authority records for all holdings within a particular provider package).
• Admin Overhead 16:00-16:30 Prepping for tomorrow.

I feel like there were some wasted cycles in there. Not because I wasn’t trying, but I wasn’t getting as much accomplished as I wanted to. But I feel like we made a dent in some other stuff. Then I came home, fed the cats, & met my parents & girls at the lake. I had the best intentions to go swimming today, but by the time I got there, all I wanted to do was nap. So I sat in the lawn chair & kinda snoozed without really ever sleeping while crazy beach mayhem ensued around me. Then we had a lovely dinner, ending with sweet tasty watermelon. And then we came home. It’s too hot here.

So I forgot to add yesterday that I’m also the executive producer of a couple other sites & one of them got hit hard with spammers, so I spent about 1.5 hours cleaning that up too…

But today… Took the little girls to Auntie’s & made it to work in an hour. Woo!

• Admin Overhead 9:45-10:30 Email, setting up conference rooms for mtgs.
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 10:30-12:30 THE mtg & half hour to follow up on action items. I hear it all went very well. It’s hard to tell over a bad phone connection & not being in the room, but the folks that were there said it went well. Yay!
• Incidents Incident Resolution 12:30-15:30 Normalization issue for a client libraray. Not finished with all the journals that need to be rematched to their target MARC records yet, but… soon.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 15:30-17:00 Trying to pull together the process, priorities, and workflow for what material goes for outsource assistance.
• MeSH Filing or commenting on bugs 17:00 18:30 MeSH taxonomy bug. Easy fix, just need to use the unique MeSH id to identify paths rather than internal tools path id & we’re golden (hopefully those aren’t famous last words! Last time I said that it was requesting recursive queries in a directed acyclic graph database… And that actually is not, by definition, an easy fix. In fact, I believe it’s impossible. These minor details…)
• Admin Overhead 18:30 19:00 Planning tomorrow…

There was also some time spent after that sending loltaxonomy images due to a polyhierarchy issue that reared its ugly head during the MeSH thing, but that was just muckin’ around having fun. :) Then I logged off & came home. And now here I am, dreading to go inside my 95F house. It’s so much more pleasant out here on the deck, although the only light is from the laptop screen & it’s starting to burn into my retinas. Good times, people, good times…

Round 1 July 2008
Round 2 January 2009
July 27th 2009 begins the Second Annual

Eh, so I’m starting a day late. I’m the cataloging team manager for Serials Solutions. I’ve been in this position about 5.5 weeks & I’m still learning the ropes and wrapping my head around things. I think I’m getting there, but I also have a ways to go before I’ve mastered the finer details. I got my MLIS in 2005 & I’ve been working in various library environments for the last 12 or so years.

MONDAY

It’s an early morning for me. It’s warm in the house already. I get in the car & make it to work in about 35 minutes — it’s a *good* morning. Except I overslept because it was so hot, and so I walk in the door right when I wanted to get there. Woo!

• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 8:00-9:45 Trying to get my ducks in a row so I’m prepared for an upcoming client meeting.
• Admin Billing 9:45-10:45 Reviewing and sorting out billing issues and changes to MARC records provider contracts.
• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 10:45-11:30 Back to trying to organize those ducks for the client meeting.

• Normalization Normalizing 11:30-12:00 NORM! 29 records reviewed, two normalized. Sadly, I think I messed up both records. On the upside, one of my excellent team members caught it & promises to continue to help me out until I have it all down.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 12:00-13:30 Outsourcing strategy overview. Completed with minor exceptions (Normalization plan, largely…). The volume of materials we have has increased exponentially & to continue providing the services at a reasonable cost in a reasonably efficient manner, we need some extra hands!
• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 13:30-14:00 I know, I’m preparing a lot — there are a lot of details and I want to get them right. This is tying up loose ends before meeting with one of my awesome team members who will promptly provide me with a hydra of questions… :) Also a moment of recursive brain explode-y as we contemplate how things might go with this library. They’re kind of a unique case. Everyone’s library is unique, but this one is even uniquer than most…
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 14:00-16:00 And here’s the hydra. For every question I get answered, five more questions pop up in the first question’s place.
• Acquisitions Research/Gathering Info 16:00-16:15 Reviewing MARC records received from one of our international libraries that I had to do a lot of clean up on last week. Yay for learning regex! Regex is *neat*.

Leave work — the blast of hot air from the elevator warns me that it’s ridonculously hot outside. Drive in hot weather for an hour to fetch The Girls from Auntie’s. Drive another half hour to get home, pick up everyone’s swim suits, a book, and some other stuff. Drive another half hour to meet my parents & husband at the local beach for dinner. Eventually come home to a freaking hot house (91F when we got home at 9ish).

TUESDAY

Late morning for me — that means I take the girls to Aunties. Made it to work in a little over an hour round trip from my house to Auntie’s to work — not too bad, considering I usually chat with Auntie a little.

• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 10:00-11:00 New client agenda for the meeting I prepared for yesterday. Filling in what I can as pre-prep mtg prep.
• Outsourcing Research/Gathering Info 11:00-12:45 Composing email response for a library who might help us with foreign language cataloging to help fill in some of our gap records. During this time, my lovely bosslady brought in the book The Time Trap for my team and me. Looking forward to seeing what kinds of things I pick up from this book…
• Admin Billing 12:45-13:00 Responding to library MARC record resource that updated their contract based on info from our lawyer. This doesn’t appear to be a super-easy renewal. We’ll see where things go from here…
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 13:00-14:00 Prep mtg for tomorrow’s client mtg with my team. Because they are totally awesome, they feel confident that we’re prepared for this meeting. I still feel very new & am nervous about it, but I’m glad they’ll be there because they know their stuff. They’re really amazing & I’m lucky to have another good team. Hoorah! I’d like to bring them with me to InfoCamp & do something, but I don’t have any idea what that something might be.
• Acquisitions Research/Gathering Info 14:00-16:30 *cries when mrk -> mrc borks the int’l records* Send stuff off to library that might help us with it. Really, this is a cross between the outsourcing stuff I’ve been working on and the records acquisition stuff. Ball’s in their court!
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 16:30-17:00 Setting up bugzilla bash & NOMS. We need to organize the outstanding bugs that are getting in the way of our productivity for the director. She wants to get some of that fixed for us which would be really great. A lot of the fixes are “well, I guess we do have a work around…” but none of them are efficient & some of them are only barely functional. But other stuff has a higher priority and yada yada… so to have someone with a little more leverage say, “yep — time to add some extra resources and Get That Fixed” will be a good thing.
• Admin Overhead 17:00-18:00 Organizing & planning for tomorrow. I know it sounds weird, but by taking about a half hour to wrap up & another half hour to plan the next day at the end of a day, it makes it much easier for me to come in and get right to work the next day. I don’t have to try to remember where I left off, what needs to be done, what my priorities are, because it’s all set up for me by my very own best administrative assistant — me, the night before. :) As I get more settled, this routine may go by the wayside a little, but at this point I’m tracking so much stuff, I think this might be How It Is for me from here on out. And in the name of productivity, I’m totally cool with that.

In the meantime, I’ve walked across the street to get a pint of blueberries & the heat outside is ugly. At the end of day I head out into the heat. Just straight home this time. Sit on the back deck & eat some fruit & chicken. It’s actually pleasant out there. I surfed for a bit as the computer was out there, then we came in to watch Deadliest Catch & Chopped because clearly we’re crazy. It’s come down several degrees in here since we came in. It’s only 90F. It was 94F when I got home. Uck. We shall see what tomorrow brings!

“Where am I?”
“In the Village.”
“What do you want?”
“Information.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“That would be telling…. We want information. Information! INFORMATION!”
“You won’t get it.”
“By hook or by crook, we will.”
“Who are you?”
“The new Number Two.”
“Who is Number One?”
“You are Number Six.”
“I am not a number — I am a free man!”
(Laughter from Number Two.)

Damn that was a good show. As soon as we move, we’re so finishing the series via netflix. In retrospect, maybe not a librarian because a librarian would perform a ready reference interview & mysteriously provide a large sheaf of papers… and there’s just no fun in that. OH! Maybe the #2, et al, is Teh Man wanting stuff that invades patron privacy though! Ok. I’m down with that interpretation.

Bwah!

Right now he’s looking for any and all useful & constructive feedback both on content & architecture, particularly for the Library 2.0 part, but if you have opinions on the rest of it, I suspect he’d like to hear it too. Comments can go on the blog or probably the wiki too (since it’s a collaborative effort)…

Thanks for any help you can provide, and feel free to forward this on!

Reading the abstract for “fuck”, I was reminded of Pat Califia’s comment in… oh… THAT book, I can’t remember it’s name because I’m tired… anyway, something said along the lines of eye rolling and ‘what — we’re not supposed to fuck, we’re all supposed to hold hands and dance in a circle and then fall in a heap asleep? How BORING!’ Yep, the article was all about how the word fuck only degraded every body and blah-blah-blah. The articles on naptime looked much more interesting.

But I do believe the demand for the services that we have talked about [information intermediation services] will be increasing in the coming years. In times of great political uncertainty and technological change, levels of anxiety, levels of urgency, levels of alienation increase making it more difficult for people to function in their information environment. Consequently, the role of the intermediator becomes more important, and ultimately, more critical, and more valuable to the user. (M. Saxton, iSchool, Final Lecture for LIS520 — Info Resources, Services, & Collections, 12 March 2004)

ARG! I wish he’d dropped this on us at the *beginning* of the quarter so we could discuss everything in light of this comment rather than being left to go back through everything (who has time to go through stuff when next week, before this quarter is even done, we’re starting homework for Allyson’s 530?). Ah, the joys of graduate school & sneaky professors.