Cataloging Competencies for the 21st Century

Editor's Notes

• #2 We’ll have some conversation about cataloging core competencies and how they have changed over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries. When I began outlining this talk, I realized that it's far more interesting to talk about competencies within a specific context. The context I’ve applied to this talk is technology. How have technological developments shaped and shifted the work of catalogers? What, if any, affect did technological change have upon the competencies expected of catalogers? My ultimate goal for this talk: is to offer an alternative way for thinking about and communicating what it is that catalogers bring to an organization. It’s my hope that this way of thinking about cataloging work will help us map a way toward supporting metadata services in the future.
• #3 Before I launch into my talk, I’d like to gauge who is with us today— Catalogers? People who manage catalogers? Public services people here (or folks who work in both worlds)? Which kind of library do you work in (or hope to work in one day)? School, public, state/academic/research, archives/special? I purposely kept my talk to a little under 30 minutes, in order to leave plenty of time for discussion. I'm eager to hear about what kinds of challenges you’re working to address at your institution and whether you think that any of what I'm about to talk about will help inform how you might solve those problems.
• #4 Why do librarians talk about competencies?
• #5 Education—and not just library school—also includes continuing education and professional development Recruitment—designing a position and writing the job ad; vetting applicants Assessment—evaluating work performance; more broadly, evaluating your metadata services Strategic planning—scanning horizon in order to anticipate new needs Advocacy—communicating the unique strengths that catalogers bring to an organization I’ll talk about competencies for catalogers and metadata creators in a bit. First, I’d like to take a closer look at the tools catalogers have used to complete their work during the 20th century.
• #6 In this presentation, I’m defining … Technology as the collection of techniques, skills, and methods used in metadata creation. Standards are all of those acronyms and initialisms you see listed in job ads for catalogers. Workflows are the procedures we set in place in order to get our work done. In real life, none of these tools stand alone—they influence one another. Next we’ll walk through the technologies that catalogers use to organize information and then consider the competencies that were relevant at that time.
• #7 I chose to start our tour through the library technology timeline with the card catalog. Card catalogs collocated titles, authors, and subjects. They’re brilliant—I have yet to find a better way of illustrating to students the adverse affects that poor metadata has on indexing. I guess the physical card catalog is easier to envision than relational databases?
• #8 This is the point at which the program becomes interactive  What competencies did catalogers need to work in a card catalog environment?
• #9 In this table, I’ve mapped metadata standards that we commonly use to a brief list of cataloging competencies. Notice that the tools we use to do our work (technology, metadata standards, etc.) are NOT the same things as competencies. When competencies are written well, they tend not to mention specific technologies or standards that will become dated relatively quickly. So to unpack this idea a bit more…
• #10 Facility with AACR2 might be considered a performance indicator; that is, the successful use of AACR2 would indicate that a person possesses the ability to consistently formulate data that is suitable for searching and indexing. It’s really important not to confuse the tools we use—be those tools standards, workflows, or technologies—with core competencies.
• #11 Fast forward in the library technology timeline to the mid-1970s: Jimmy Carter is president, Stephen King just published The Stand, and networked catalog terminals are beginning to appear in large libraries. The terminal pictured here is Model 105 made by Beehive Medical Electronics, Inc. The first of the “Beehive” terminals came off the production line in March 1978 and they cost $3,700 each (adjusted for inflation, that would be over $13,000 today). This particular technological shift, for those who could afford it, had a significant impact on workflows. At Indiana University, instead of having librarians catalog using forms and then paying typists to create cards, librarians began to create catalog records directly in OCLC’s On-Line database using the MARC standard, which was a little more than a decade old, at that point.
• #12 Keeping in mind that competencies are more expansive than the tools we use to complete our work, how did cataloging core competencies change in the terminal catalog environment?
• #13 In this table, I’ve replicated the competencies relevant to cataloging in a card catalog environment and added a column to track whether these competencies were relevant in the networked terminal environment. How do competencies compare in the card catalog environment versus the networked terminal? Are any competencies missing?
• #14 Here’s the table I came up with. Note the addition of “Encodes machine-actionable data” to accommodated for catalogers needing to structure data for machines to read. We could play out the transition to the online public access catalog (OPAC) but *spoiler alert* you’ll probably find that cataloging core don’t change that much.
• #15 The next technological shift on the horizon will be converting flat MARC data to linked library data. BIBFRAME is being developed as a way for our data to not merely be ON the web, but as a way for our data to be OF the web. Will new competencies be added? Even though there still lots of unknowns, we can certainly take a crack at expanding our table…
• #16 Publishing linked library data to the semantic web may not be enough. We know that users aren’t likely to visit library catalogs when they want information. This behavior isn’t likely to change so the challenge is figuring out use cases for linked library data in places where libraries traditionally don’t have a presence. I like to travel. And I’m a recovering literature major. I enjoy visiting places of literary significance. Is there an app for that? Imagine the City of Indianapolis building a “Visit Indianapolis” app—how to use public transit or easily find and pay for parking. How cool would it be if this City app pinged your library’s API and pulled relevant bibliographic and authority data back that tells me who was writing in the area I'm standing. Here, in Lockerbie Square, James Whitcomb Riley wrote When the Frost is on the Punkin.
• #17 Here, I’ve added a column for linked library data. I added the last competency, not because it wasn’t around since the card catalog (it was!) but because by the time we get to linked library data, the idea of disambiguation and coding attribution of works has changed radically.
• #18 The competencies I’ve highlighted today are certainly not the only competencies that catalogers must possess! For example, if all job candidates are equal, then I’m likely to be paying very close attention to soft skills.
• #19 Competencies are important because this is the way that we communicate the worth of cataloging to others. Studies have shown a link between the way that you talk about a thing, through attitude and language, affects the way that thing is perceived; perceived not just by others, but by you too. Thinking about our work more expansively will help us see where our expertise might help someone else solve a problem.