Tim Spalding wrote:
>
> 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.
>
There are books produced in other countries, too. That's what keeps
catalogers busy in academic libraries, and in some public libraries. LC
mainly takes care of books published in the US, but when you consider
that OCLC has 85 million books records and LC's "books all" (all
languages) file has 8 million records, you can see that there is a huge
gap. (BTW, LC has about 400 catalogers, I was told. They used to have
600.) Cataloging isn't just writing down stuff from the book, it's
creating the authority records -- which takes something like 40% of the
cataloger's time because they have to actually determine who the author
is -- and doing classification and subject cataloging.
One of the stories told at the meeting at LC for the future of
bibliographic control stuff was of a public librarian who had one branch
in an area with a large Chinese population, and they liked to read
Chinese romance novels. So she bought hundreds of them, but didn't have
anyone who could catalog them. This to me seems to be a perfect
situation for user input. Obviously the readers knew what the books said.
The sad thing is that most 'cataloging' isn't really cataloging. It's
what is called 'copy cataloging' which means that you find the nearest
record on OCLC, then you make changes for your library. Those changes in
most cases are things like adding your location, your barcode, your call
number. And that's because everyone is keeping their own catalog. This,
to me, is where the waste is. We got beyond everyone doing their own
original cataloging in the mid-20th century. This century should be the
one where we get beyond everyone keeping their own catalog.
And BTW, that's an area where linked data could help us out quite a bit.
Put catalog data on the web, make the data elements linkable/ mix and
matchable, and let people re-use what they want how they want.
kc
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Sat Feb 28 2009 - 09:40:19 EST