[DCRM-L] Progressive description Re: BYU's 1st RDA/DCRMB record

[James P. Ascher]

This conversation has cut to the core of--what seems to me to be--the  
central problem of modern librarianship. We our faced with  
increasingly tenuous budgets, a broader range of materials, changing  
patrons, an aging workforce, and administrators who may be as deeply  
concerned with the future of rare books as us, but who face millions  
of eBook records. We are a very loud, very talented, very important,  
minority.

Yet, high quality research still goes into descriptions of the  
physical artifacts held by our institutions and we all want to share  
that research. If a cataloger (curator, reference librarian, etc.)  
finds a hidden edition or identifies a previously unknown printer- I  
want that information in my library's catalog. My public service  
colleagues want that information for their reference requests. My  
administrators want it for risk management. My patrons want it to help  
speed their research. My friends at other libraries want it for their  
work, and so on. Naively, one could say that we could maintain an  
accurate inventory of items and create, say, blogs (or whatever next  
decade's technology is) sharing this information with the world, but  
the problem here becomes one of the logistics of cooperation. As  
anyone on this list might know, taking variously formatted and  
structured sources and trying to combine them into something sensible  
is a *hard* problem. Does cooperative cataloging ring a bell?

In my humble opinion, the question we should be worrying about is not  
"How do we preserve the richness of our base description?" but "How do  
we build cooperative structures to allow the experts among us to  
continue to enhance our documented history?" I'd rather see an  
inexpert librarian making a sketchy description, that doesn't pretend  
to be something it isn't, than that same librarian trying to catalog  
something with words they don't understand. Yet, for this to be a  
viable approach, we need some way for these sketchy (or even full PCC)  
records to be enhanced by the people who DO know what they are doing.

This problem seems to me to be one of education--to build a broad  
awareness of bibliography and ilk--and re-imagining workflows--so we  
can reward those who enhance bibliographic descriptions from which we  
all benefit. We need experts in bindings, collation, typography, pin- 
marks, paper, press-figures, etc. to continue to enhance our  
understanding of the past and we need to let them focus on the work  
they are good at. It's from a slightly different context, but I think  
of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

How can we re-imagine ways that we can all benefit from the  
distributed network of experts that work in our rare book collections?  
How can we allow are descriptions to be progressively enhanced as more  
research enriches our understanding of the past?

Best,
-James P. Ascher

James P. Ascher
Assistant Professor and Rare Book Cataloger
Univ. of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, 184 UCB
1720 Pleasant Street, Boulder, CO 80309-0184
Voice: (303) 492-6104   Fax: (303) 492-0494
On Aug 27, 2010, at 11:18 AM, bethwhittaker at ku.edu wrote:

> Deborah is too kind. I did not misunderstand. Rather, I took the  
> opportunity to jump up on my tiny soapbox and rant a little. And I'm  
> going to do it again!
>
> Of course we have researchers who need those kinds of details. They  
> also need better wireless in our reading rooms, more support for  
> teaching with original resources, and, if you're somewhere other  
> than the Folger, they also need a way to find examples of lesbian  
> vampire fiction in languages other than English. Or photographs of  
> African American military from the Korean War wearing civilian  
> clothes.
> I don't have a dog in this fight, thank goodness. I remain  
> conflicted about RDA while managing at the same time to keep myself  
> ignorant of its development. I just worry that we are losing sight  
> of the forest for the trees.
>
> Rant over! I'll now leave the discussion to people who still catalog  
> rare materials for a living.
>
> Beth M. Whittaker
> Head, Spencer Research Library
> University of Kansas
> 785-864-4275
>
> Sent from my mobile, so please forgive my typing.
>
> From: "Deborah J. Leslie" <DJLeslie at FOLGER.edu>
> Sender: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu
> Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:52:48 -0400
> To: DCRM Revision Group List<dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>
> ReplyTo: DCRM Revision Group List <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] BYU's 1st RDA/DCRMB record
>
> If Beth misunderstood my point, I expect others do, too. I included  
> the query to show that there are some readers whodo care about such  
> details, not that the catalog record should have been able to answer  
> her question before it was asked. The larger implicit point is that  
> although perhaps the majority of end-users don't care about how many  
> pages there are, numbered or unnumbered, but that there are some who  
> do, as well as those of us who are responsible for buying,  
> inventorying, and making collections available. If in your library,  
> you're buying only for content and it doesn't matter which edition,  
> issue, or printing you have, maybe having an accurate page-count  
> doesn't matter, either.
>
> But then I have to ask the question: if that's the situation, why  
> catalog with DCRM(B)?
>
> From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu]  
> On Behalf Of Whittaker, Beth M
> Sent: Friday, 27 August, 2010 12:30
> To: DCRM Revision Group List
> Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] BYU's 1st RDA/DCRMB record
>
> At the risk of sounding like a penny-pinching administrator, I would  
> argue that the situation Deborah outlines below is one that NO  
> amount of standardized MARC cataloging can easily explain. There  
> will ALWAYS be oddities in printed books that require direct  
> questions beyond what it is the catalog record, no matter how complex.
>
> Might catalogers’ time be better spent creating records which do not  
> *lie* about what is in the book, but do not attempt to explain every  
> possible detail? A follow up question from a researcher, perhaps  
> requesting additional clarification or to have something scanned,  
> might take less time, even if it happens every few years, than hours  
> of agonizing over how to represent the document, how to abbreviate  
> it, how to pay for the education to know how to abbreviate it, etc.
>
> Of course, in an ideal world, our records could link to some of this  
> additional information much more easily. In my lifetime, I hope!
>
> Beth

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://listserver.lib.byu.edu/pipermail/dcrm-l/attachments/20100827/acda213b/attachment.htm