[DCRM-L] OCLC's IR webinar (May 13)

[Rouse, Lenore]

Will et al.,

We ARE users but many of the people making decisions about our work are 
not. I see two similar trends which nobody has mentioned yet, which do 
or will obscure or obliterate bibliographical difference as badly as 
ditching those IRs. One is a tendency in large libraries or consortia to 
merge bib records for "the same" title. In the case of certain 
consortia, this will mean dispatching all local notes to the holdings 
record while merging all the stuff that belongs in the bib record. The 
devil will be in distinguishing the local from the general note. You all 
know it's not always possible to determine whether the cancel or other 
feature in your copy is present in every copy.  Even if you can separate 
out the local info from the general (including 655s, 7xxs who is going 
to want to look at local notes for multiple holding institutions when 
they are parked in the holding record and not near related info in the 
bib record? Not my idea of user-friendly. How will the important 
information in the local notes even be searched if it is no longer part 
of the bib record? That should theoretically be possible, though it's 
not clear to me that the makers of the feudal business model are 
concerned with such minutiae.  Some of them seem to believe fewer 
records are cheaper than more records; it's rumored to be a great 
cost-savings to copy catalogers.

Another aspect of this merge mentality just came to my notice last week. 
I discovered that WorldCat may stealthily merge all editions of a title 
without letting the user know. Example: my search was for _Loss and 
gain_ by J. H. Newman, ed. by Sheridan Gilley. The search retrieved 
quite a slew of hits, including a local one I was not aware of. But next 
to the results is a disclaimer "Show libraries holding _just_ this 
edition or narrow results by format" A click on this reduced my results 
to one library: the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (!).  So, if I SEARCHED 
for _just_ this edition, why is WorldCat's default presenting me with 4 
screens of irrelevant nonsense?

Instead of "are we not users" maybe the question should be to the 
managers making these bizarre decisions "are you not librarians?"

Lenore

-- 
Lenore M. Rouse
Curator, Rare Books and Special Collections
The Catholic University of America
Room 214, Mullen Library
620 Michigan Avenue N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20064

PHONE: 202 319-5090
E-MAIL: rouse at cua.edu
RBSC BLOG: http://ascendonica.blogspot.com/




On 5/14/2015 11:02 AM, Will Evans wrote:
> Are we not users?
>
> I am vexed by OCLC's attitude and more than a little disheartened. 
> Given our small numbers, data driven decisions hold little promise for 
> accommodating present and future concerns of the rare materials 
> community.
>
> While we are not an IR library, we frequently use the information 
> within those records to aid in identification, when navigating a sea 
> of inferior records.
>
> How did a feudal business model, where we create the product but have 
> no voice in how that product is maintained or delivered, survive into 
> the 21st century?
>
>
> *Will Evans*
>
> *Chief Rare Materials Catalog Librarian*
>
> *Library of the Boston Athenaeum*
>
> *10 1/2 Beacon Street*
>
> *Boston, MA   02108*
>
> **
>
> *Tel: 617-227-0270 ext. 224*
>
> *Fax: 617-227-5266 *
>
> *www.bostonathenaeum.org <http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/>*
>
> **
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Lapka, Francis 
> <francis.lapka at yale.edu <mailto:francis.lapka at yale.edu>> wrote:
>
>     Yesterday’s webinar on the demise of Institutions Records and the
>     transition to Local Bibliographic Data was primarily a Q-and-A.
>     Compared to the discussion that Yale catalogers had with an OCLC
>     rep in April, there seemed much less ambiguity that OCLC has no
>     plans to provide access to the local data of any institution other
>     than your own, no matter how much we say that this is important to
>     us. Moderators held firm to the talking point: OCLC data suggests
>     that its users don’t care about IRs.
>
>     It’s tempting to think that the OCLC data is somehow wrong, but
>     I’m inclined to accept their conclusion at face value: users who
>     care about copy-specific descriptions generally don’t see OCLC as
>     a useful discovery tool. So is there much point in investing
>     energy trying to make OCLC fulfill a role for which it is
>     ill-suited? If we want a mechanism that enables searching of
>     copy-specific data across institutions, we should probably look
>     elsewhere.
>
>     Francis
>
>     Francis Lapka  ·  Catalog Librarian
>
>     Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts
>
>     Yale Center for British Art
>
>     203.432.9672 <tel:203.432.9672> · francis.lapka at yale.edu
>     <mailto:francis.lapka at yale.edu>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
>



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