> It's unsustainable because the rate of information production is much higher
> than it was 100 years ago when the library practices were developed. Many
> times higher, I would say. Although book sales are down, the number of book
> titles being published has risen greatly in recent decades. [1] In addition,
> libraries need to incorporate music, films, and even web sites into their
> collections. At the same time, cataloging departments are being down-sized
> because library budgets aren't keeping up with the rate of inflation, much
> less the increased rate of document production and pricing.
Fair enough. I suspect that, at least as regards books, however, we'll
look back on this in 20 years and wish we had those problems. Perhaps
digital books will keep up the pace, but I think more and more will
just move onto the web itself. And librarians have never really tried
to catalog the web.
> Before the use of machine-readable cataloging, libraries had huge "back
> logs" of uncataloged published materials. One mid-western librarian boasted
> that his back log was the second largest library in his state. We got rid of
> the backlog through online cataloging, which greatly sped up the production
> of catalog data. That caused many libraries to think that the problem had
> been solved, and they shifted their personnel from cataloging to ... well,
> it's not clear, although if you look at the ARL statistics, spending is up
> for systems and technology, and generally down for staff (proportionally).
> It used to be that staff was 85% of a library's budget, now it's around 65%
> in some cases. That was then... before computers made it possible for more
> people to produce more documents.
How many hours do you think are applied to every title these days? I'm
guessing that it's *way* more than needs to be--that a lot of work is
done again and again.
Take the book numbers and imagine work is really only done once. If
each title took a full hour to catalog, at 40-hours-52-weeks you'd
need only 72 librarians to catalog all 150,000 books produced last
year. How many catalogers are there in the United States anyway? If
every book took ten hours, you'd only need 720. I'm guessing there are
more than 720 too.
Anyway, forget the catalogers. There are apparently 158,000
*librarians* in the United States, most of whom took a cataloging
class, right? Give them each ONE book to catalog every year and you'd
have 8,000 over.
Something besides numbers and finances are the problem here.
> Clearly what needs to happen is that metadata production has to be even more
> shared that it is today, and that means shared with publishers and
> information creators. But the arcanity (is that a word?) of library
> cataloging practices make it nearly impossible for anyone not deeply steeped
> in library practices to participate in creating library data. We need to
> give up the arcane practices so that we can popularize the practice of
> metadata creation, or at least move some of it outside of libraries.
Right. Give every LibraryThing member 3 books to catalog every year.
I'll do four! ;)
Received on Fri Feb 27 2009 - 22:47:13 EST