[DCRM-L] Link for my article "Ten Commandments …"

[Dooley,Jackie]

First, this post doesn't address institution records (IRs) at all. As a staff member in OCLC Research, it's not appropriate for me to comment at this juncture on what is a products/services issue. I hope to be able to be part of discussions at ALA in June, however.

Should anyone else be interested in having a look, here's the URL on the RBM website to my article that Richard Noble quoted: http://rbm.acrl.org/content/10/1/51.full.pdf+html?sid=24a3b8f0-891f-4aae-a9f4-c80a7a4bbe58

And here's the full section from which Richard was quoting:

V. Make your work economically sustainable.

When Donald Waters of the Mellon Foundation was working with CLIR to formulate the “hidden collections” initiative (launched in 2008), he noted that he had been feeling “nickel-and-dimed to death” by boutique digitization projects. I noted earlier that boutique is dead; long live economical large-scale projects. Grants agencies, including Mellon, CLIR, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and others, place a high value on innovative, cost-effective processing and cataloging methodologies.

Karen Calhoun noted the need to “get over item-level description” and get more serious about streamlining cataloging. Our generalist colleagues in libraries have made massive strides in this regard over the past decade or more. Isn’t it time we do the same? Archivists generally let go of item-level description at least 25 years ago and have now widely embraced the Greene/Meissner mandate for “more product, less process.”

Rare book catalogers have inched toward less-full descriptions by including minimal-level record guidelines in Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials, but does the rather conservative approach that they have articulated to date go far enough?

Digital library systems are beginning to enable collective metadata for digital objects. The Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art, for example, has developed software that enables folder-level descriptions linked to digital images of the items in that folder, smoothly implemented in the course of digitization. We will see more and more such systems, and they will come quickly. This is very good news.

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There's soooo much to be said about these issues. IMHO it's important that rare book catalogers engage constructively as a community with the tough issues involved in continuing to create very time-consuming catalog records in today's library climate of needing to conserve resources. Don't assume I'm asserting that such records should not be made: far from it. But nuanced discussion that goes beyond assumptions that OCLC and your library managers are unfeeling and don't value the work you do (I'm paraphrasing what I've sensed is the overall thrust of the IR thread on this list) would, I feel, be of great value to this community—of which I've been a card-carrying member for 30+ years now. The work you all do is incredibly important to the scholars and other users who need accurate, detailed rare book records; I just wonder whether you're taking the most productive approach to discussing the issues.

One small point: one person opined that MPLP may not have had significant uptake in the archival community. It has in fact had both huge uptake and catalytic impact. Not universal, but deep and wide. My 2010 survey of special collections in research libraries in the US/Canada indicates that at that time 75% used it either sometimes or always.

I'll try to duck when the rotten tomatoes start flying. :)

Best wishes to all, Jackie

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Jackie Dooley
Program Officer, OCLC Research


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