***Please excuse cross-posting***

The ALCTS CaMMS Cataloging Norms Interest Group is pleased to announce its program at the ALA Annual conference held in Washington, DC, at the Marriott Marquis Washington, DC, 10:30-11:30 am, Saturday, June 22, 2019.

There will be three presentations that are relevant to what catalogers are dealing with today. The presentations will be 15 minutes long, and there will be time for Q&A at the end of the session.

Cataloging the Living

Joshua Barton (Michigan State University) and Violet Fox (Dewey Decimal Classification)

While the general calling of the librarian may be to make information available and known, library collections can include sensitive materials with creators and subjects who may not expect or even wish to have the exposure of public discoverability in a library or in a library’s catalog data disseminated on the web. Or at least they may wish to be under the radar for a certain period of time. Others may hope to spread their message while preserving their anonymity. Activist communities within marginalized populations, for example, can have a keen desire to publicize a message, but might fear being identified due to personal risks. It seems reasonable for libraries to collect these kinds of materials for contemporary use and for posterity, but doing so requires that we acknowledge the tension between certain professional assumptions – especially in cataloging – and the needs and desires of communities implicated in such collections. This presentation will sketch (but by no means solve) some of the messy quandaries of cataloging materials produced by active, marginalized communities.

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Homegrown Outsourcing: A Cooperative Cataloging Pilot Between Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Denise Soufi (UNC Chapel Hill), Nanako Thomas (Duke University), and Natalie Sommerville (Duke University)

In 2017, the Triangle Research Library Network Collections Council approved the proposal for a pilot project that would examine the logistics, workflows, efficiency, cost, and benefits of in-network cooperative cataloging for non-Roman script resources compared to vendor outsourcing. In January 2018, the project managers created a project charter and logistical plan whereby 100 Arabic language titles from Duke would be cataloged at UNC and 100 Japanese language titles from UNC would be cataloged at Duke. The project managers tracked their time spent cataloging as well as time spent selecting and preparing books for shipment, receiving cataloged books, and importing records into each institution’s ILS. When the project was completed at the end of June, this data was compared with outsourcing data previously collected by Duke to ascertain the cost and benefits of the project. The pilot demonstrated that on a cost-per-title basis, in-network cataloging is a more cost-effective solution than vendor outsourcing when in-house language specialists are not available, with the added bonus of higher quality cataloging. We hope that our project will inspire other library consortia to find in-network solutions for cataloging resources requiring specialized expertise.

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Coding for Catalogers: A Practical Approach to Programming

Carolyn Hansen (Stony Brook University)

Although many catalogers find the idea of programming intimidating, learning how to automate can be empowering, effective, and even fun! In this presentation, Carolyn Hansen, Head of Cataloging & Metadata Services at Stony Brook University, will demonstrate how programming can make your life as a cataloger easier. Using real-life examples, the presentation will describe common and accessible languages like Python and Ruby as well as shell scripts and other automation tools like XSLT and regular expressions. Popular tools and software such as GitHub, MarcEdit, and Atom will also be covered as well as training resources and strategies.

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Thank you and we look forward to seeing you in the session!

ALCTS CaMMS Cataloging Norms Interest Group (CNIG)

Rachel Turner (turnerr@binghamton.edu) and Paul Heyde (pch36@case.edu), Co-Chairs

Keiko Suzuki (suzukik@newschool.edu) and Liz Bodian (lizbodian@brandeis.edu), Co-Vice Chairs

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