Trade offs: are we always providing the services needed?

Citation

Boese, K.C. (2006), "Trade offs: are we always providing the services needed?", The Bottom Line, Vol. 19 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2006.17019caf.001

Trade offs: are we always providing the services needed?

Between the lines

Trade offs: are we always providing the services needed?

On April 20, 2006, the Library of Congress (LC) announced that, beginning May 1, 2006, it would no longer be providing controlled series access in bibliographic records created by its catalogers. The full announcement can be found at www.loc.gov/catdir/series.html This announcement cause an uproar among catalogers, who immediately responded by circulating a petition to request that LC change this decision. The petition can be found at www.PetitionOnline.com/MARC830/ As of this writing, LC has postponed the implementation of this policy to July 1, but is all this fuss really necessary?

It strikes me that whenever a major change occurs, there is often a knee jerk reaction to condemn it rather than evaluate it or think about the possibilities that a change might create. Being someone who has created series authority records (SARs), I speak from experience when I say they can be incredibly time consuming and problematic, especially for older materials. What LC has done, and what I would encourage every library to do, is evaluate its process, considered the costs and benefits, and decided that the effort was not worth the expense in order to serve its users … and after all, isn’t everything a library does ultimately supposed to be for the benefit of people using our services? I truly hope that librarians do not adhere to strict standards, creating authority records, controlled vocabularies, and classification schemes because we are control freaks, but rather that these activities help information seekers find what they are looking for.

Furthermore, the information libraries provide access to has increasingly changed, as have the methods used to retrieve and access it. We no longer have print only collections and card catalogs, and have not done for some time. So why is it surprising that LC, with its role as the national leader, would revisit older processes and make sure they are still relevant.

Let’s look at the raw numbers from LC’s announcment. In 2004, 344,362 new records were added to the LC catalog. Of those, 82,447 contained series statements. In that year, 8,770 new series authority records were created by LC catalogers, and 9,453 by non-LC catalogers, for a total of 18,223 new series records. What we do not know from the report is how many of the new items with series were already supported by existing SARs. What we can see from these numbers, however, is that neither LC nor other libraries are able to keep up with the total number of new items needing series support. Similarly, catalogers have been spending a lot of time – and salary – creating records for the most urgent cases. In short, we have been bailing water like mad in an attempt to keep the Titanic afloat. Librarians collaboratively have only created slightly more than 22 percent new SARs in support of the material needing them, which is not a rate that many would consider successful.

When one takes into consideration the power of keyword searching in today’s technology, that new series are somewhat more stable than they were in the past, that user’s seeking an item by series statement is often debatable, and that new issues demand our attention, this seems a reasonable business response.

Rather than putting blinders on to stop what we see as a degradation of our library catalogs, we should be asking ourselves if they are providing the information our user’s need. One issue that I think is going to impact libraries tremendously is our ability to provide information to Spanish speakers. No matter what one’s personal opinion happens to be, the reality is that there is a large, and growing, population of Spanish speakers in the USA, and libraries have met their information needs with varying degrees of success. We purchase Spanish language materials, but are we providing any relevant access to them? Anyone in doubt of this national trend, or any future need to serve this population, need only remember the debate caused by the Spanish-language version of the Star-spangled Banner (CBS News, 2006).

I was pleased to find that some libraries have already identified this need and are working to meet it. The Oakland Public Library (OPL) has been assigning Spanish language equivalents to Library of Congress Subject Headings in its Spanish language bibliographic records since the early 1980s. A list of terms used by OPL and the San Francisco Public Library can be found at www.bibliotecasparalagente.org/sujetos.html I am sure there are other libraries that have done the same. Here again, this is an area where we need to be collaborating so that the controlled vocabulary is consistent among all libraries needing this, not merely stable within each library. It would also defray costs among us, rather than have each library recreate the wheel.

It is true that there does not need to be a national standard that requires the inclusion of Spanish subject terms the way that the National Library of Canada provides equal access in English and French, but this needs to be an option. I imagine there are many university and corporate libraries that would not need to exercise this option. Many public libraries, on the other hand, probably would. Surprising to me, when I started to scratch the surface at my library, which primarily serves lawyers and has locations across the country including California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida, I discovered that Spanish was a lot more important than many realized.

When speaking to a colleague in Miami about this, I was told that when she started working in that office, having moved from DC, she underwent a culture shock due to the prevalence of Spanish in the office. Supporting this observation, a quick search of the library catalog identified no fewer than 23 distinct Spanish-English dictionaries, being both general and topically devoted to law and accounting. This does not even represent how many copies of each title we own. In a university setting, foreign language dictionaries are standard reference tools, but in a corporate setting, anything beyond two or three indicates a need.

What I think is most important for any library to do is to always keep who we are serving in mind. While it is important to maintain standards and follow Library of Congress Rule Interpretations, if the result is a beautiful catalog that no one uses, we have failed. It is dangerous, I think, to steadfastly live and operate in the ideal world. My experience has taught me that my world is more often than not a shade of gray, rather than black or white.

Edited by Kent C. BoeseGreenberg Taurig, Washington, DC, USA