CILIP CIG reclassification event – 20.09.2011

Reclassification is something that often gets knocked to the bottom of a cataloguer’s to do list because it seems to be such a huge task, especially if you’ve left the problem to brew for a few years. The cost and workload implications of large reclassification projects seem daunting, so it was great to be able to hear about projects of varying scale and complexity at CILIP CIG’s one day reclassification event, held at Ridgemount Street this week.

The first speaker, Andrew Barker from the University of East Anglia, talked us through a reclassification project of epic proportions, and yet somehow managed to make it all seem completely manageable! Andrew described how UEA’s reclassification need was identified during a sustainability survey on their acquisitions process in 2006, which highlighted their bespoke classification scheme as an inefficiency in their workflow that took subject librarians away from their core duties helping users.

UEA adopted a ‘partnered’ approach throughout the project, initially to get long-serving staff on board and then during liaison with the two outsourcing companies used to carry out large parts of the reclassification work. The first step was to move to completely shelf-ready acquisitions in August 2006, with new stock coming in classified using standard Library of Congress schedules (with a local adaptation for suffixes). This made the next phase of the project more urgent as it created dual stock sequences that didn’t encourage browsing and required lots of signage to explain.

Between 2007 and 2009 UEA entered the ‘data phase’ of the project during which Backstage Library Works won the tender to upgrade UEA’s subject headings and reclassify their stock. Over the course of one year 660,000 books were relabeled and 750,000 items were physically moved, using existing space and some temporary shelving to ensure that the library was never closed to users. UEA decided against recruiting a temporary team to carry out the stock relocation and went for the option of outsourcing to Harrow Green who provided project management and with whom Andrew and the UEA team had daily update meetings during the stock move. Andrew estimated that the entire project (the data cleanup for which is still ongoing) ran into the hundreds of thousands, so although this sounds like an incredibly successful project that had little impact on the user experience it seems unlikely that in the current economic climate many universities will be able to commit that level of funding to a reclassification project.

Before lunch Stuart Hunt from the University of Warwick talked about their reclassification project. Like many institutions, Warwick has an array of different classification schemes in use across its many campuses and hopes to standardize practice to a certain extent. Stuart spoke of the “perceived advantages of local knowledge over standards” which definitely struck a chord with me and I’m certain with many of the other cataloguers in the room! The limitations placed on acquisitions workflows by multiple classification schemes was emphasized, as was the impossibility of sharing data with other institutions and using class marks to usefully analyze the content of your collection.

The University of Warwick library had hoped to secure funding from the central university but was turned down as the time taken to show a return on investment would be so long, which forced the team to look at other areas they could take money from – chiefly unspent budgets at the end of the financial year. The team at Warwick analyzed their collection to see which areas could be focused on or even ignored (is it worth reclassifying items kept in store, for example?) and considered whether, in areas with a high turnover of new editions such as law and medicine, the life cycle of the collection would mean that there was little point going to the trouble of reclassifying old stock.

Stuart suggested sending a data sample to outsourcing companies in order to get an idea of cost. Like UEA, Warwick used Backstage Library Works to reclassify their stock and supply new spine labels, with the new class marks sitting in the bibliographic records waiting to be ‘switched on’ when the time for relabeling arrives. Stuart also recommended outsourcing, suggesting that doing this work in house was not economically advantageous.

After lunch, during which the CIG AGM was held, Deborah Lee from the Courtauld Institute of Art described the principles for what she calls ‘guerrilla reclassification’ – targeting problem areas in a series of mini-projects. This approach came about due to the Courtauld’s bespoke classification scheme which had been created at the time of the Institute’s foundation and had been maintained very little since. Inconsistencies in the approach of cataloguers over the years had led to stock on the same subject being shelved in different places, effectively preventing browsing by the user.

Deborah’s team kept a spreadsheet of problem areas in their classification which highlighted the need to attack particular stock first, and Deborah described how this approach had been successful with a collection of exhibition catalogues. The ‘guerrilla’ approach sounds like a great way to achieve a lot with a limited budget and limited staffing, providing the background research into problem areas is done first.

Next, Heather Jardine from City of London libraries talked about what she called a ‘reclassification project gone wrong’, but which really sounded more like a successful ongoing (and Heculean!) task. Like the University of Warwick, the libraries in Heather’s group used a variety of different classification schemes and a project was undertaken to synchronize these as much as possible. The project has over run by six years so far, but a lot has been achieved in that time. An estimated 10-15% of cataloguing resource is put into the reclassification project, with cataloguers dealing with an average of 1500 titles per month each. The standardization was needed to keep up with metadata standards, to improve the service to the libraries’ users by improving browsability both at the shelf and online, and to streamline back office procedures.

Heather discussed whether it is really worth worrying about classification at all, given that most users (and some librarians!) don’t really understand how powerful a tool it can be for subject grouping and searching. This probably depends on your institution in my opinion; I currently work in a multi-site university with centralized acquisitions which could potentially save a lot of money and time by synchronizing our various classification schemes but I can appreciate that a small, single-site library may not see such benefits.

Heather’s tips for reclassification were to agree levels of specificity and terminology within your team before you start and to avoid giving subject areas to staff members with a specialist interest in them to avoid them getting over-detailed with their classification. She recommended thinking ahead to possible areas in which your collection is likely to expand, and (rather pleasingly) suggested working on the easier numbers in the middle of each subject area first which makes slotting the other stock in around them much simpler. Heather’s presentation was really useful to me –a mixture of practical tips, cautionary advice and sensible consideration of the reasons for reclassification.

Finally, Caroline Kent from the British Library gave a brief overview of WebDewey and the OCLC cataloguing pages, suggesting that if we were considering reclassifying to the new DDC23 standard we should begin by looking at the relocations and discontinuations spreadsheet provided on the OCLC site (which are also available on WebDewey – a subscription only service). Interestingly, WebDewey now contains DDC editions 22 and 23 which means that my institution is now considering purchasing a subscription to the online service rather than buying print copies which should save a few trees!

I can’t stress how valuable this session has been for my own policy development in the area of reclassification. Hearing other people share their experiences has been a great way to get a handle on where to begin thinking about a potential project that really needs attention here (and I’m sure at many other libraries as well.)

Library Day in the Life 7 – Thursday & Friday

I decided to merge my last two entries into one – chiefly because what I did on both days was much the same, just in different libraries.

I spent Thursday out at our Wimbledon campus. The smallest of the colleges, Wimbledon’s cataloguing is a challenge chiefly because they still use Dewey edition 16 for their classification (I know, I know!) Apart from that though it is all very straightforward, with lots of the stock being additional copies of things held at Chelsea and Camberwell campuses.

The journey to Wimbledon campus takes me two hours (and two hours back) and that’s the only reason I won’t miss going out there so much. The library staff are all lovely though and I will miss them. I’ll miss the library itself too, because it reminds me of the first ever library I worked in at Maidstone which was similarly small and arty.

Today I went out to Camberwell College of Arts for my last day as a peripatetic cataloguer. Due to building works I’ve been unable to visit this campus for weeks, and so a relatively large backlog has built up. I managed to whizz through all but 1.5 shelves of it though, which was very satisfying. Hopefully their Collection Development Librarian will be pleased when he sees how little there is to pack up and send to my new department next week.

I’m not sure whether to be sad or not about the end of my peripatetic life today. I’m starting to feel very tired as a result of all the travel, but visiting  all the sites has enabled me to make lots more contacts than I would have done otherwise and has given me much broader cataloguing experience. I am really looking forward to working in our new centralised department next week though. Onwards and upwards!

Library Day in the Life 7 – Wednesday

As I mentioned at the end of yesterday’s post, today was my last day working at the London College of Fashion. Of all the colleges of the University I have spent the most time at LCF over the last two years and have got to know some of the staff there well. At the moment the library is closed to undergo remodelling required for the installation of RFID next month, so today the office was full of library staff with cabin fever

First thing I had a chat with the new Assistant Manager of the library, who isn’t technically in post yet but is doing the odd day here and there to get into the swing of how things work at LCF. I’ve been working with her before at the Wimbledon college and I’m pleased I got to see her before my job changes and I’m not out in the colleges any more.

Up until lunch I raced through as much of the book cataloguing as I could so that it could stay at LCF for processing rather than being shipped over to my new office and then sent back once it was shelf ready. I also sent a pestering email to the subject librarians asking them to clear their shelves of any uncatalogued stock so that I could pack it up ready for delivery to my new office next week.

I had lunch with colleagues in the staff room which enabled us to have a good old natter for one last time After lunch I went back to my desk upstairs and began packing up all the uncatalogued stock I could find. This involved taking some of the staff to their shelves and going through the stock there to see what they wanted to keep and what could actually be binned. Some donations had been sitting around for years, so I think there will be some relief that they have been disposed of now. In spite of my bullying tactics a couple of the subject librarians still have uncatalogued stock on their shelves which they will have to box up themselves and send over to me using our inter-site courier service. Pleasingly, all this only resulted in four boxes of stock to be sent to my new department, although three of those boxes contained DVD box sets which will need some considerable patience (and tea!) to get catalogued.

I said my goodbyes and left at 4pm so that I had plenty of time to get to CILIP HQ and hand in my Chartership portfolio. I am so pleased I’ve got this done now and even though I am not totally convinced that it will get through first time I am at least relieved that I can put it out of my mind until the assessors get back to me with the result. As this blog was originally begun to help me through the Chartership process I am going to have to consider what to do with it now. I’ve not been a terribly regular blogger but I do find the process useful so perhaps it will become a way for me to keep up my reflective practice now that my portfolio has been submitted.

This evening I will try to get some of my house buying paperwork filled in before having an early night, because tomorrow I will be travelling out to Wimbledon so will have an early start!

Library Day in the life 7 – Tuesday

Aww! Aren’t art students nice? This little bit of stencil work is on the pavement outside the entrance to the London College of Communciation at the moment and it makes me smile every time I walk over it.

Following on from yesterday’s office-based day, today I was cataloguing at LCC – the largest college in the University. Being the largest college, LCC also traditionally has the largest cataloguing backlog (7 metres at the start of play today) and at the moment a lot of that backlog is made up of DVDs.

I like cataloguing DVDs normally, but the items I was adding today felt like real end-of-year-spend purchases – the sort of thing you can get from Amazon for a couple of quid, definitely not great cinema or interesting documentaries. The obscure nature of some of the films means that cataloguing them is as much about authority control as anything else, because we give added entries to the director and the main cast (only two or three names) our authority file is huge and unwieldy. To plough through the 35 DVDs above took me right up until lunch, by which point I’d almost lost the will completely.

During the morning I also recieved an email from CILIP about a new executive briefing on Dewey classification and linked data. I really think this is something we could benefit from as an institution, given that we currently use a different version of DDC at each of the six colleges there are obvious time and money savings that could be made here if everyone were to adopt the same, more standard version. However, at a shade over £250 per delegate I already know there is little chance of me going due to our non-existent training budget. Despite this, I forwarded the email on to my line manager and her manager, just in case…

I popped across the road to the Elephant & Castle shopping centre at lunch time, which was about as lovely as you probably imagine it to be. Of all our campuses LCC suffers the most from its location in my opinion – there is very little in the surrounding area of interest and to get decent cake you have to walk up to the Imperial War Museum!

To cheer myself up in the afternoon I moved onto cataloguing monographs which are much simpler, although everything required classification which is unusual at LCC as the subject librarians often pre-classify their stock at the point of order. The afternoon went quite quickly and on my way out I popped in to have a chat with our new Subscriptions and Licensing Librarian, who is lovely and who I’m looking forward to working with from next week.

So all in all a bit of a slow day, made slightly more interesting by virtue of the fact that it was my last day scheduled for cataloguing at that college. Tomorrow will be my last day working at the London College of Fashion – hopefully it will be a bit more dynamic than today was!

Library day in the life 7 – Monday

I enjoyed taking part in the last round of the Library Day in the Life project and so have returned to recount further tales of my peripatetic working life. This time though it will be slightly sad because this is the last week of my peripatetic role before our new departmental workflows begin next Monday, which will see me staying in one office all the time with the stock travelling around instead. I’m really looking forward to the new department – I think what we’ll be doing can improve our service to our users through reduced order to shelf times and more consistent cataloguing, but I will definitely miss some of my colleagues out in the college libraries.

Monday 25th July

Mondays traditionally mean that I am working in the department’s office at Elephant & Castle and today is no exception, except that our office is currently being rebuilt in preparation for the launch of the new Acquisitions & Metadata department next week. This means that the whole of Resources & Systems has been relocated to a presentation room within the library of the London College of Communication downstairs. Hopefully by next Monday we’ll have at least a finished room to sit in, even if we don’t have any chairs to sit on yet!

My journey to work was uneventful and I got in at 9 and had a chat with my new line manager. She isn’t technically in post yet, but will be from Monday so has been working in the departmental office on Mondays to get into the swing of things in R&S. Once my PC had booted up and let me log in (an award-winning 22 minutes from pressing the on button to seeing my inbox today) I replied to the JISC email questionnaire on consortium e-book purchasing on behalf of the University. This was trickier than it should have been because our e-book budget isn’t top-sliced, meaning that I can’t give any idea of our budget at all – it is literally whatever the librarians choose to spend from their print book budgets each year. I am responsible for all the ordering and cataloguing of e-books across the University though, so I’m most likely to be able to give some indication of spend based on previous years. The idea of consortium purchasing across all formats really interests me, but particularly for electronic resources. Our take up has been slower than most universities, possibly because academics are reluctant to believe that looking at an image from an e-book can compare to looking at a printed image. Anything that will help increase the availability of high quality information and images to our users must be a bonus though, so hopefully  the JISC project will come through.

Next I had a look at a new online information resource that my colleague @dramalibrarian and I have been putting together in order to provide a single point of call for the college library staff when they need to know what we do and how we do it. It is hoped that the website will house workflow information, details of our new RFID machines, cataloguing procedures and so on, although at the moment it is mainly dominated by our cataloguing documentation. Although we were tasked with setting up a wiki, it soon became obvious that what we really needed wasn’t wiki in the truest sense of the word and following a lot of research and testing we plumped for a good old WordPress blog instead, planning to use it more as a website than an actual blog. I added some help sheets for e-book troubleshooting to the new website and then had a lovely cup of tea.

At 10am Andy Soanes and Heather Sherman from Dawson came to talk my new manager and me through the setting up of our new centralised ordering system, using their Dawsonenter platform. Currently orders are placed by college staff (using various workflows) directly onto our Voyager LMS and are sent via EDI to Dawson each evening. In the new workflow the college subject librarians will use Dawsonenter to place order proposals which will be checked by the Acquisition & Metadata team before sending direct to Dawson, who will supply and process the items before shipping them to our new office at Elephant & Castle. We will then catalogue them if necessary and send them on to our college libraries. Much less tiring than me schlepping around London to catalogue I’m sure you’ll agree! The meeting with Andy and Heather was very useful and provided me with my main task for the rest of the day – setting up logins for every member of staff that will be placing orders, identifying the location and fund codes they are allowed access to and then linking all that information together. This is easier said than done, given that some sites have over 50 locations and some staff work across multiple sites. Until the restructuring of academic support is complete though we won’t have access to all the fund code information, so for now everyone has a login and access to the appropriate stock locations.

Just before lunch I nipped down to the LCC reprographics department to collect my newly printed Chartership portfolios, which I hope to submit this week. I’ve no idea whether I’ll be admitted to the register, but at least I’m pleased with how they look. Chartership has been quite enjoyable for me actually and I hope to prove wrong the notion that cataloguers can’t Charter. I’ve decided I’d like to become a mentor if I pass because the whole experience has been very valuable for me professionally and I’d like to help other people achieve that too.

Lunch was very quick and dull (salad – boo!) and then I spent the rest of the afternoon working on the Dawsonenter set ups for the college librarians. I may also have snuck upstairs to see how our new office is looking (Bright! Shiny! Empty!) but apart from that it was mostly data entry until home time. A good day Tomorrow holds another trip to Elephant & Castle, but this time to the college library to catalogue.

Latest developments in RDA and DDC

Yesterday I attended an evening session at CILIP HQ run jointly by the UC&R and CIG groups. Having been unable to attend the CILIP briefing on RDA because of the cost I was really pleased to be able to find out a little bit more about RDA for free. The section on DDC23 was initially little more than an added bonus for me, but following Caroline Kent’s presentation has become something I think my department really needs to think about a bit more. It was good to see how well attended the session was too – clearly people’s thirst for cataloguing knowledge is high!

RDA

Alan Danskin of the British Library gave an excellent overview of how the BL is preparing for the possible implementation of RDA. Although he was unable to give a definite idea of whether the BL would adopt the new standard it does seem that the amount of work being put into testing and training could imply that the decision is perhaps a foregone conclusion (just my opinion of course). Alan was also unable to give a timescale for the potential implementation, but pointed to the results of the American testing committee report (PDF here) which recommended implementation no sooner than 2013 after a list of conditions had been met.

The cost of access to RDA was mentioned and mooted as a potential barrier to adoption. Working at a medium-sized academic library I can imagine that £235 for a site license plus c£40 for each concurrent user would not only have an impact on our budget but also on our workflows. In our new structure (which goes live in two weeks) we have a central cataloguing team with some staff in the colleges adding the odd item here and there. Buying RDA Toolkit licenses for them as well is just another extra cost that we could do without and could lead to either another change in workflow or, and potentially more problematic, cataloguers across the University applying two different standards to our bibliographic records.

Alan then ran through a brief side-by-side comparison of AAC2 and RDA records to highlight the most obvious differences and then moved on to consider the difficulties of mapping between the two standards, concluding that changes to MARC may be needed to fully benefit from RDA/FRBR, and pointed to the Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative recently begun by the LoC.

One of the main issues facing cataloguers at the moment is what happens with RDA and shared data? Using OCLC via Z39.50 I have already encountered several RDA records, but we currently have no policy on what to do with them. Should we edit them to become AACR2 records, or should we leave them – accepting that we will be working in a hybrid environment and that we may potentially adopt RDA ourselves anyway? Providing our LMS (Voyager) can accept the records then I think I’m in the latter camp, although with concerns about what RDA will do to our authority control.

The issue of training staff in preparation for RDA was covered too. At the BL they have a team made up of staff in various roles who are working on RDA and I think this idea would be a good opportunity for our new centralised cataloguing team to keep up links with the colleges – going out and explaining how RDA will affect us as an institution. Of particular interest to the audience was that the BL cataloguers now have dual-screen workstations so that they can have their cataloguing page open on one side and the RDA toolkit/WebDewey open on the other. I am jealous of this simply because people with two screens look somehow Much More Important than other staff. However, as a reason for purchasing an extra screen for me I can see that it probably wouldn’t cut much ice with my manager…

DDC23

When DDC23 was released in May of this year my then line manager and I tried (and failed) to attend the webinar outlining the changes. Since then, no real thought has been given to DDC23 in my department, which didn’t bother me until I attended Caroline Kent’s presentation last night.

Effectively Caroline’s message seemed to be that there were no massive changes but that the introduction had been rewritten in plainer, more up-to-date English and some terminology has also been changed for this reason (goodbye “Kinds of persons”, hello “Groups of people”). Users of WebDewey will already have been using the new numbers, the publication of DDC23 in print will just bring those new numbers to offline users.Caroline was keen to stress that implementation of DDC23 wouldn’t require lots of extra training for staff as although some of the numbers have been altered the method of applying them remains the same.

However, Caroline did give a brief outline of the main number changes. Apologies if I have missed any, I was mainly scribbling notes for the numbers most relevant to my institution. Anyway:

004-6: Obviously lots of change needed here to keep pace with computing developments, including a number for Cloud computing. There is a good summary at the DDC blog.

100: Some revisions to philosophy numbers.

200: Updates to coverage of the Eastern church and to Islam.

300: Changes here to do with changes in how to deal with groups of people.

600: New areas for nutrition and therapy.

690: Changed from “Buildings” to “Construction of buildings” for clarity.

700s: Lots of changes here (the area we use most at my Institution). 710 has changed from “Civic Art” to “Area planning and landscape architecture”, 721 has become “Architectural materials”, lots of changes and movements between the 740s and 760s  (graphic and decorative arts, including prints and printmaking – enormous areas for us), and a new number for cinematography at 777 to allow expansion of the subject.

Pleasingly for me there is a new number for Electronica at 781.648, so I can reclassify all our Gary Numan A spreadsheet of relocations can be found on the OCLC site.

Caroline also mentioned that WebDewey will no longer be accessed via OCLC Connexion but will be on a standalone site. The OCLC pages will remain for the time being, but will only show DDC22, so if you want 23 you’ll need to use the new interface.

So now I need to go back to my new manager and suggest possible revisions to our schedules. As we currently use a different version of DDC at each of our six colleges this could be an opportunity to achieve some standardisation at least in a few areas (this may be hopeless optimism though…)

23 things for professional development

Week 1: Thing 1

I’m really looking forward to taking part in CPD 23 things. Just by having encouraged me to write this the programme has fulfilled one of my reasons for joining in – I already have a blog but seldom get around to posting on it and I need to rectify that, especially as I am meant to be a CILIP blogger!

The weeks looking at marketing yourself online, getting involved in professional organisations and reflective writing are going to be brilliant help for my ongoing Chartership preparation, and I am also excited to be finding out about web tools that I don’t currently use such as Pushnote and Prezi (okay, I’ll admit to having a go at making a Prezi but then getting the hump and deleting the whole thing!)

I’ve been suggesting 23 things to some of my colleagues in the University’s Chartership support group, so I’m hoping to stumble across some of their blogs whilst working on Thing 2 – my blogroll.