Aurlog

More Cataloger's Desktop comments

The Library of Congress's Cataloging Distribution Service is doing a survey on the development of its Cataloger's Desktop, which they are planning to overhaul. They seem keen to rework it for the web rather than replicating the CD product it is based on. I hope they think profoundly about this to make sure it is properly a web-based resource or, as I would prefer, a loose collection of separately accessible resources. Below are the comments I put in answer to one of the earlier questions on general satisfaction:

The content is second to none, but the presentation of the content is appalling:

  1. It is extremely unwieldy: there is no reason to shoehorn everything into one package and one great list. E.g. AACR2 would be better presented as a separate product as it is complex enough as it is. Rather than having shaky preferences, I would like to see separate sites for which I can produce my own list of links, as I do anyway for other sites.
  2. Despite being presented on the web, the site tries its hardest to discard the advantages of the web by imposing its own interface. This is bad practice as it means another interface to learn and is not intuitive (e.g. I cannot use the Back button to go back, or link to a section of a resource). Standard HTML pages are more than up to the job. I don't think a system like this is very successful if you have to provide training in how to use it: it would be like inventing a different kind of book where you have to train readers in how to turn the pages.
  3. There is no need to have a system which has to find its way round popup-blockers: this just shouldn't be an issue. These factors prevent me from using Cataloger's Desktop nearly as often as I should. I mostly want it for quick look up of AACR2 and other standards. Instead I often find myself referring to an out-of-date paper copy for simple rules and abbreviations. I was hoping to have weaned myself off it by now.

My previous comments on a similar survey in 2005 are here.

A.D. IX KAL. MART. MMVIII

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Birthday

Today is my birthday. Hooray. Inspired by sil's age-guessing quizzes, I here present some library and information science equivalents. My age is now the same as the following:

The last one is a right giveaway.

NON. FEB. MMVIII

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Queen of cheese

To us it is a glorious theme
To sing of milk and curds and cream

While cataloguing some poetry books I came across a book called Pegasus descending : a book of the best bad verse / edited with notes and an introductory dialogue by James Camp, X.J. Kennedy and Keith Waldrop. In it is a superb poem, written in Canada in the 19th century by James McIntyre, called Queen of cheese. It was written about a prize 4 ton cheese made in Ingersoll, Canada, which later went on a tour of Toronto, New York, and Britain. The third stanza particularly appealed to me:

Cows numerous as a swarm of bees
Or as the leaves upon the trees
It did require to make thee please
And stand unrivaled, queen of cheese.

Now that's poetry! McIntyre became known as the Cheese Poet. Wikipedia quotes one of his other poems about cheese in Canada called Oxford Cheese Ode:

The ancient poets ne'er did dream
That Canada was land of cream,
They ne'er imagined it could flow
In this cold land of ice and snow,
Where everything did solid freeze
They ne'er hoped or looked for cheese.

Interestingly, the last stanza of the Oxford Cheese Ode also re-uses the comparison of many cows to a swarm of bees:

Cows numerous as swarm of bees
Are milked in Oxford to make cheese.

If you want to read more, which I am sure you do, Poemhunter has the full text of James McIntyre's poems, including the two above, although beware of pop-ups, even with Firefox with the pop-up blocker on.

A.D. IV KAL. DEC. MMVII

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No evidence on bibliographic issues

Lorcan Dempsey makes a much overdue point:

In all the discussion about bibliographic data and catalogs, and about their advantages or disadvantages when compared to other approaches, it is striking how little appeal there is to actual evidence.

I've noticed this on email discussion lists where appeals are made to personal experience (of the librarian/cataloguer) and to how a user should use a catalogue, but rarely is this backed up by research as to how library users could use catalogues most intuitively and effectively and how they want to use catalogues to find material. I think this has profound implications for the cataloguing rules and OPAC design.

I expect the framers of RDA are using a wealth of such research data diligently compiled by the researchers at our library schools to compile the rules. With this much academic research behind us, Amazoogle doesn't stand a chance!

NON. SEPT. MMVII

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Public library cataloguing savings

Tim Coates thinks the unthinkable about cataloguing in public libraries: Fifteen million pounds each year to re-catalogue books that have already been catalogued. If I understand him right, he wonders why all the public libraries in the UK are all cataloguing the same books, when the booksellers supply perfectly good records in the first place. This kind of idea has occurred to me in the past:

Why are thousands of trained cataloguers around the world all cataloguing the same books so we can all put variant records onto international cataloguing utilities? In the vast majority of cases, we would surely only need local holdings appended to one centralized catalogue record.

My idea differs in one significant point, in that I would prefer to see at least one library cataloguer go near the record, with great care, to make sure it is properly up to scratch. Vendor records are sometimes, though by no means always, a bit iffy. I'm not familiar with Neilsen Bookdata and or Bibliographic Data Services records, so I can't comment on them. As long as someone dedicated and trained in the relevant standards looks at the records and is willing to vouch for their quality, then that is good. A second person shouldn't have to.

The great difficulty here is arguing myself and my colleagues out of a job. For the forseeable future, I don't think this could possibly be an issue. There are the still enormous backlogs of retrospective cataloguing, upgrades to cataloguing, and bumping up the newer cataloguing units to a strength that they are able to deal with swift and very high quality records that everyone else is able to trust (I'm thinking in terms of academic libraries more than anything). It would also release cataloguers to deal with special collections, really have a proper go at decent serials and electronic records to share, not to mention journal issues and articles. That wouldn't save the money that Tim Coates would like, though.

Mr Coates also has a go at CILIP:

I see that CILIP are organising conferences to teach public librarians how to do cataloguing at a rate of 400 pounds per admission for 3 days in London. Why?

A.D. XVII KAL. SEPT. MMVII

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WorldCat puns list correction

Following my post about my list of author-title puns on WorldCat, Andy Havers (Manager, Branding and Creative Services at OCLC (who run WorldCat)) contacted me to let me know that the book I said wasn't on WorldCat is on WorldCat: Wieber E. Bijker's Of bicycles, bakalites, and bulbs. I have duly added it.

I'm not sure what this means for my 133t catalogue searching skilz.

A.D. VI NON. IUL. MMVII

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WorldCat puns list

I discovered via Outgoing (via Planet Cataloging) that you can now create lists on WorldCat. This sounded a good place to maintain the list of author-title puns compiled by a recently retired colleague. I have now therefore created my Author and title puns list on WorldCat. There are a couple of small tiny problems with it, in that the punning name is not always the main author so the joke is less obvious (in the case of Insects and gardens the photographs by Carl Goodpasture are not mentioned in the record at all so I had to add a note; but at least you can add a note), and one of the titles was not even on WorldCat (Wieber E. Bijker's Of bicycles, bakalites, and bulbs).

Anyway, do let me know if you come across any more.

A.D. IV KAL. IUL. MMVII

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Author and title matches

A colleague who is shortly retiring has for a long time compiled a list of books whose authors match the titles. Unlike these (including Hole in the mattress by Mr Completely and the more archaic Lilburn Stript and Whipt by Colonel Birch), the ones my colleague has collected are real and can be confirmed by visiting the catalogue she was working on when she spotted most of them.

I have obviously simplified the citation. The author in some cases is one of several and, if the second or third, wouldn't normally be cited as the main author; in one case the name given is an editor of an authored work and I haven't mentioned the main author; &c. I don't think this matters.

I am interested in trying to maintain this list and add to it. This is a hard topic to Google, although I did find a post about Author-title puns by Michael Hendry which had the following:

I used to think that Origen, On First Principles was the best-ever match of author to title, but have just run across the gloomy Sonnets de la Mort by the French Baroque poet Jean de Sponde.

Do suggest more if you know them. Please give evidence if you can: e.g. found on a particular catalogue, on Amazon, a bibliography (preferably on the web), etc. Do leave a comment (I don't get many) or email me.

A.D. XVI KAL. NOV. MMVI

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Excellent book title

I came across this excellent book title today: The techniques of sprang. The subtitle gives a little more away: Plaiting on stretched threads. Sprang is apparently an ancient fabric-making technique and is one of those words that is probably not nearly so funny after a slight acquaintance but which I think is excellent nonetheless. Incidentally the book is by Peter Collingwood.

A.D. IV ID. OCT. MMVI

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Catalogue language frequencies

One of our systems librarians wanted to create a language filter for the library catalogue and asked me for a list of codes, to which I replied with the MARC21 language code list, while recognising that this isn't really very useful. So, I offered to compile a list of common codes, thinking that this would be a matter of common sense and wouldn't be very long. However, reality and a need to take into account politics, together with various specialist collections and institutes with special language biases, made the list rather long. I sorted the list by numbers of records we have, which meant we could apply an objective cut-off. It's still difficult, as some of our prestige collections, such as Hebrew, which I would have included in any list without thinking, don't turn up as often as I would have thought. On the flip side, you can tell we recently merged with a specialist Eastern European studies institute by the second most common language on the list, which I reproduce below, although with the actual numbers of records omitted:

  1. English
  2. Russian
  3. German
  4. French
  5. Italian
  6. Polish
  7. Dutch
  8. Spanish
  9. Czech
  10. Hungarian
  11. Swedish
  12. Latin
  13. Norwegian
  14. Danish
  15. Finnish
  16. Hebrew
  17. Yiddish
  18. Bulgarian
  19. Croatian
  20. Icelandic
  21. Romanian
  22. Slovak
  23. Ukrainian
  24. Serbian
  25. Estonian
  26. Lithuanian
  27. Portuguese
  28. Latvian
  29. Greek, Ancient
  30. Belarusian
  31. Macedonian
  32. Slovenian
  33. Albanian
  34. Greek, Modern
  35. Welsh
  36. Afrikaans
  37. Turkish
  38. Catalan
  39. English, Middle
  40. Chinese
  41. Arabic
  42. English, Old
  43. Moldovan

However, I will say that English was about 10 times more common than Russian, with the frequencies declining gracefully thereafter. Taking the Eastern European languages out of the list, I am still surprised by German coming second rather than French. I suspect the Second World War has made us largely forget the importance of German as a cultural and academic language, e.g. in literature, archaeology, medicine, and philosophy (and probably Easter European studies).

The list is also quite badly skewed by errors and idiosyncracies in coding in the 008 field. E.g., English (eng) as the default in templates is often left there by mistake, the 041 is rarely entered fully, and one language I left off the list, Faroese, is represented in our catalogue by two codes, one of them wrong. Nevertheless, I think it is interesting.

A.D. V ID. OCT. MMVI

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Tom