Taking off the rose-colored glasses

Week 6

This week I had the opportunity to sit on a big department meeting with monographic services at UW.  “Monographic Services” is the name that has been given to the department that does the majority of acquisitions and cataloging work for UW.  The exceptions to this rule are the East Asian library, Health sciences library, and serials, which do some if not most of their own purchasing and cataloging. 

ok...maybe not that boring but how cute is this cat?

Having read the five page summary of what the meeting was going to about beforehand, I went into this meeting with one opinion of the issue at hand, but I definitely left with another. The gist of the summary and purpose of the meeting was to discuss some suggestions that a committee and outside efficiency expert had made upon observing the organization of the monographic services department, focused mostly on Acquisitions. The changes being proposed are that all cataloging and acquisitions should happen in one place.  By consolidating these services, it is thought that the university will save money on but would be, “…better for communication, more effective allocation of resources, and better use of the subject librarian time”. ( If the subject librarians in East Asia and health sciences no longer had to purchase and catalog their own items).  Most of the discussion revolved around Acquisitions’ with implications that cataloging was next in line for recommendations .The head of monographic services basically wanted to meet with his department to get a feeling for the reactions of his employees.  They went through the suggestions one by one and everyone had the opportunity to express their concerns and questions about any changes that might be coming down the line.

 

My first reaction to having been invited to this meeting was excitement.  I have never sat in on a departmental meeting in a large inter-nationally acclaimed university. After just a few minutes though, my bubble had been burst, which is probably for the better. The less rosy my glasses are when entering this field, the less likely it will be that I will be disappointed down the road. This meeting was very similar to  the multitude of meetings I had attended in my years as a manager in food service. The difference was that I was in a room full of technical services introverts and people were generally polite and professional. Otherwise, it was more or less the same drill.  No matter where you work, there always seems to be an “us” vs. “them” mentality playing out in some way.  In this case it was an interdepartmental feud that has been going on for years.  Unfortunately the issue at hand added fuel to the fire. 

The one department that had been omitted from this whole departmental review was Collection Development (CD), who are responsible for the selection of items and also contains the librarians who work on licensing for materials. Why they were left out appears to be a political question.  It would only make sense if they were brought in on these changes, because normally, the collection development and acquisition departments work hand in hand and usually are housed in the same location.  Not so at UW, CD is in an entirely different location and from what I can gather, they do not communicate often or well with Acquisitions.

To make a long story short, nothing was decided in this meeting except that whoever made the suggestions obviously did not know enough about the departments or think through things very clearly.  I believe that the idea of consolidation is a great one, only if the plan to do so is complete.  The main concern is that if the subject librarians at the specific schools are no longer doing acquisitions or cataloging work for their schools, then who is?  This question does not seem to have an answer.  There may be an underlying assumption that the work is going to be absorbed by the existing acquisitions and cataloging librarians, who are already stretched very thin in their current positions.  One thing is for sure, there are no plans to hire on additional staff except to replace the one or two people who are retiring. 

I’m really not an idiot

Week 5

These are my current mantras,“I am not an idiot”, “I am smart and capable”. Maybe if I keep telling myself these things, I will stop making so many silly mistakes. 

"I will not make (too many) cataloging errors"

After having left my notebook at home the week before and not having tried my hand at assigning accession numbers of basically dealing with the Millenium OPAC (they call it iii, so that’s how I will refer to it from now on), I took a stab at it this week. Now, Cate had showed me how to do all of this two weeks prior, unfortunately, if I do not physically use the information I have been taught within a few days, I may as well have never heard it at all.  I was able, after much trial and error, to sign into iii, but that’s where it came to a halt.  It's so frustrating how not knowing just on tiny step, one tiny click, can bring your work to a standstill. But as it had been said, the best way to learn is to make a mistake….or something along those lines.

So when Cate came in she showed me the link I was looking for and all went well with assigning accession numbers and adding barcodes.  Easy, schmeasy.  The next challenge was bibliographic overlay.  I and e-mailed myself the document on how this is done and read it over, but having never seen it done, it was like reading gibberish.  I had no conceptual model to apply it to so I used the conceptual model that we use at the community colleges, thinking, “How different can it be?” Very different. Unlike at SCC UW does batch processing which means that they do not import records directly from OCLC to iii, instead they use a field ( 948) and enter a code  (.b) that signifies what record to overlay on top of the existing record in iii (either a stub or just a bad record).  It took a bit of explaining to fix the mess I made by mistakenly uploading multiple copies of a record.  I think this was the biggest mistake I had made so far at UW…and to be honest in the scope of things, it’s not really that big.  

My brain on cataloging.

It feels good to look back in hindsight and realize this and now I can pretty confidently say that I will probably not make that mistake again.   So…two big lessons learned this week. Two more pieces of the puzzle to try and wrap my brain around.  Next week I get to sit in on a big departmental meeting about some major restructuring that will be happening in UW Acquisitions and eventually, Cataloging, departments.  I will also be interviewing the Assistant Acquisitions librarian to get a sense of what that position entails.  Stay tuned….  

Just when I thought I was "getting it"...

Week 4

Defendants from the Nuremberg trials

So this week, things were shaken up a bit with the addition of nonfiction films. I felt that I had a good grip on fiction films so figured it was time to take the next logical step.  It would be one thing if I went to a fiction film to a somewhat recent, feature length nonfiction film but I had to choose two tricky VHS tapes to catalog.  The first was called “War Crimes” and was more of a collection of newsreels from the WWII era about the Nuremberg trials.  After the newsreels came a short documentary called “Trial at Nuremberg”.  I’m not sure if documentary would be the right word for it, seeing that it was so full of speculation and dramatic narrative but then, Michael Moore’s movies are called documentaries, aren’t they?

The biggest challenge of this record was where to enter the specific information about each piece of this film.  Does it all get thrown into a 520 field?  The record I was augmenting had it set up this way.  Cate explained that it would be easier to trace and add detail to each part of the film (such as the narrator and length of each clip) if instead, each piece became its own 505 note.  This, I could understand but then it got even trickier with the addition of having to remember which delimiters to use and how to format the sub-fields.

…then came time for subject and genre headings.  There were some great one’s already in the files.  I added “propaganda films” as a genre heading and am pretty curious to see how Cate responds to this. It was a risk but I feel that I can back it with the information found in the authority file. (Excuse me while I pat myself on the back for realizing that despite some struggles, I have learned a lot in the last few weeks).

Next I cataloged a copy of the "Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute" aka "Freedomfest" concert from 1988. This brought back many a memory, since I think I was glued to the set when it first aired in order to see George Michael, who I though was a pop god at the time. As far as genre heading are concerned I now know the difference between “Filmed television concert” , “Concert films” and “Filmed performances”.

George Michael at "Freedomfest", 1988

Yes, there is a difference.  Concert films are feature length films of concerts that were taped for the reason of being released on video. “Filmed performance” is a live performance from start to finish, without editing.  I would think this may be use more frequently for plays and whatnot.  The Mandela concert was a “Filmed television concert” It was filmed specifically to be televised and was then edited and released as a VHS.  Got that?  Good because there’s a lot more where that came from.