Rare Frontier

“How does new digital technology affect book work?” is a central question dealt with by book people of all ilk, but the naive rhetoric often puts the digital in opposition to the physical. This is a false duality. The digital environment can serve the same function as an edited edition or carefully crafted bibliography. Rather than looking as computerization as a break, it’s easy to look at it as just another technological innovation for redistributing and intermediation continuing a long tradition: manuscript, print, photography, line photogravures, screened process photolithography, microprint, microfilm, etc.  Added to this list we now have digital copies, keyed, images, databases, and more.

Recently, Andrew Gaub, Heather G. Cole, Michael Inman and I got together and prepared a talk on this subject for the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section Preconference. It was extremely well received, but sadly situated in time and space. However the glory of the internet allows us to share it in a more permanent form.

Without further ado, I present the full talk text and aide-mémoire that was distributed.

Download A Physical Stuff Aide-Mémoire for the Digital

(It is designed to be printed 2-up on 8.5×11 paper and folded, if you want a copy for your bookshelf. A special thanks to my colleagues, Andrew and Heather, who not only dealt with my pestering, but were able to convert their excellent talks into something written.)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a great deal about catalogs, description, lists, and narrative. It seems that some in rare books rooms have come to see library cataloging as somehow distinct from constructing a narrative that places objects under the public eye. Of course, many great catalogers aim to do just this, but for those who don’t understand DCRM(B) type cataloging the work necessarily seems threatening and good curators seek to create additional structures, such as web pages, which duplicate the function of the catalog. Thus, we are often in the situation of DCRM(B) type library cataloging being done once, and then library cataloging (not of the DCRM(B) type) being done again. This seems like a waste of everyone’s time to me.

To solve this, I’ve begun experimenting with methods for drawing data directly out of the MARC-based catalog and incorporating it into other documents. Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) provides a facility for doing this. Yet, the existing stylesheets could not produce exactly what I wanted.

So I wrote this new one. It gives you a Chicago style citation and provides a place for an annotation in the export. You can see an example of this working for the Book History and Bibliography research guide that we are putting together- http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/research/subjectguides/book_history_bibliography/index.html

Of course what is most important about this is not that it works, but that we now have a bridge from people who know expert cataloging and those who want to write narrative lists. My colleague, Matthew Brower, and I were able to teach a room of mixed librarians how to use the method.

So, what I wonder is whether this is a good idea. Should we be opening up expert description for reuse? I think so, but are there potential drawbacks?

The fear, and lack of understanding, of standards acts as an oppressive force for cataloging librarians. I recently had a discussion with a friend who wanted to know what makes a good cataloger it went something like this-

Friend: “What makes a cataloger good? Have they memorized more of the Dewey Decimal system?”

Me: “Well, actually not all of us know the Dewey Decimal system, since our libraries don’t use it.”

F: “Wait, so what do you use then? Do you memorize that?”

M: “No, it’s not really about memorization, although a photographic memory would help. I suppose the longer you are around, the more stuff you know since you can see standards as they develop and know the past standards that they have been based on.”

F: “So wait, a cataloger is good by virtue of how many obsolete standards they know?”

M: “Hmmm, in fact I think there is a strong correlation.”

This line of reasoning left me wondering. Why is it that senior catalogers are the ones who know all the standards? Their seniority actually makes some sense because they can better work within library databases. While a skill in writing, or analyzing the text, can be valuable, ultimately the product of cataloging is data that is reused in a bewildering array of systems. Thus, better cataloging increases the number of systems the data can move through smoothly, and so better catalogers know how to do their work to maximize the number of systems that can read the data. Some of these systems, still use obsolete standards, and thus I think that the cataloger who knows the most standards well wins.

I don’t think this is obvious from the outside, or at the beginning, of the profession, and what looks like simply agism and cronyism actually corresponds to something deeper. (although, it is sometimes still just agism and cronyism)  So, I decided that it would be good to encourage librarians to read the standards themselves. I channeled my inner George Fox and said to myself “FRBR is here to teach you in person, you don’t have to rely on the elite to translate.”

Thus, we decided to have the entire cataloging department read all of FRBR, play with strings, and work on developing a collective sense of what that document means. I’m VERY pleased with the results. I believe we might be the only substantial cataloging department where everyone (staff, faculty, everyone) has read FRBR and formed an opinion.

Of course, I still have my issues with FRBR, and would much rather see a bibliographically oriented version that incorporates edition, state, issue, impression, etc. (these sit uneasily within the hireachy, if they sit there at all) but that’s a future project.

You can see the report of the event here: http://cucataloging.blogspot.com/2010/05/brushing-up-on-frbr.html

The blog lives here: http://rarefrontier.org/ucbfrbrdiscussion/

We’re hoping to do the same thing for FRAD, so any thoughts would be welcome and appreciated.

While I love the free service provided by wordpress.com, I decided it was time to move to my own hosting. I’ve officially moved my blog to http://rarefrontier.org/ . This is a moment of reflection for me. I had started the wordpress.com blog as an outlet for some of my ideas that were not fully fledged into research, and since that time I’ve been working more and more aggressively on doing research that is publishable. This focus has caused the enormous hiatus I’ve been on lately. I plan on continuing to write, but I need to find my voice again.

Having participated in a fantastic online conference at APPOSITIONS, I wonder if having my own private server for research is necessarily a good idea. Connecting and sharing research with other academics seems like a much better approach than shouting from my own platform. Thus, online conferences, and shared blogs are more interesting approaches. Perhaps I should just point to articles online? But then, isn’t this just a live CV?

I suppose one solution is to return to the reason for writing, the sheer pleasure of it. So please join my at my new location at-

http://rarefrontier.org/

Rare book cataloging is a queer chimera. On one hand, the cataloger must be conversant with bibliography, the history of the book, and cultural studies in general, so that they can place the artifact in its proper milieu; on the other hand, their scholarship often goes unobserved because it is concealed under the cloak of unostentatious librarianship. Unlike a full descriptive bibliography, rare book cataloging does not conjure determined research project, but provides links and anchors to other projects, which itself is a sort of meta-bibliographical project.

How, then, can the work of the cataloger ever be complete? Or for that matter to be useful to scholars who need current information?

I argue that progressing towards bibliography resolves these issues by recognizing the nature of the chimera and its limitations. I discuss this idea in more depth in my recent article

“Progressing Toward Bibliography, or, Organic Growth in the Bibliographic Record,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 10, 2 (Fall, 2009): 95-110.

I welcome any comments, criticism, additions, or counter-points. What do you think is the interface between bibliography and cataloging? Is there one?

(Also, I’d love to put this up on a CommentPress instance, but I don’t have one installed right now. Do any of my lovely readers have such a thing they’d like to volunteer?)