Backstage Blues

Right now I'm mulling over the original basefile reports we received back from our vendor, BSLW. To their credit, they have greatly helped clean up the catalog and improve our records, both bibs and authorities. However, there are limitations to what their automated processes could achieve, and I am currently juggling the error reports of things that were unable to be changed via automation but will require human scrutiny. I'm a little surprised at the limits, to be honest, and though they did take care of the lion's share of work, what we have left over isn't exactly kittens either.

We've also had 3 quarterly updates since the original basefile was run back in February as well. The procrastination is entirely my fault, not least for my not fully understanding what we needed to do; and even when I did understand it seemed so overwhelming that I dithered for a long time, not sure where to even begin. I mistakenly dove into the most recent quarterly reports, only to be gently corrected by my boss that we needed to attend to the original basefile reports first, that everything we did there would impact the later quarterly error-reporting updates.

I'm focusing for now on umatched headings...subjects (LCSH) in the 6XX fields and Names (with emphasis on Personal Names, MARC fields 100/700 in particular). There's some jaw droppingly bad cataloging fudges to be found from past ages, too. Yet more evidence of what can happen when your library administration thinks they can coast by without hiring a full time Catalog librarian for years on end.

We've also initiated a major cleanup effort to fix records that were making improper use of the 246 alternate title tag. It had been pressed into service as a hot-link to unite local special collections. I was actually sympathetic to our special collections personnel, trying to think of ways to both please my director and accommodate their needs (earning me the ire of my immediate superiors in the process). But ultimately we had to toe the line and come down on the side of scrupulously correct cataloging and relegate the local collection information to a 590 MARC tag (local note), with special formatting, findable via keyword searching in quotation marks. We fixed most of these today---We, as in, with the help of our E-resources librarian and resident Technology expert; for some reason MARCedit and some related tools aren't working on my machine right now, which makes me even more dependent on my E-resources colleague. There's still a few major collections yet to fix, especially the Women Airforce Service Pilots archive collection, which has more than one "creative use" of the 246 tag (e.g. they are all wrongly used) that will have to be regularized.

There's also quite a lot to do as a result of the 440 field becoming obsolete, and the fact that our E-vendors keep coding their records wrong by making use of this field instead of the more appropriate 810 field for series corporate names (like Ebsco, JSTOR, Project Muse, et. al.). These keep showing up in the quarterly reports.

We're also facing down a severe budget crunch for the remainder of this calendar year until at least February of 2010. Our newly approved library fee kicks in for Spring 2010, but we won't see any benefit from it until the Spring semester is well underway. Because our acquisitions budget has dropped to nearly zero, in a way, it's the best time to be taking on all these authority control projects since we otherwise would not have the time to devote to them full time in the way that we currently do.

We also finally hired a new Systems Librarian and I am so glad to have him on board. I have to cut my employer some slack on this one, though, since the last Systems person was on extended leave, dying slowly of a terminal illness, and the position could not be filled until she passed on. Even when she did pass, our director really had to negotiate long and hard with the university administration that despite the fiscal crunch this position was essential to library operations and needed to be filled ASAP; We are so very fortunate the Chancellor agreed and approved the position. Maybe now we can seriously begin addressing shortcomings of the OPAC and resolving some mysteries around searching and recall, especially in the "advanced search" features. It's an evaluation that's long overdue. But it will probably be an easier task to tackle once we've done the BSLW authorities cleanup first, I suspect. We also need to resolve and understand why there are so many duplicate authority records and what we can do to delete the duplicates so that only one record exists in the catalog. This will entail me learning the ins and outs of MARCedit, I have no doubt.

I am growing as a Cataloger, but not without a lot of angsty growing pains along the way, days where I feel completely overwhelmed and feel like I have no idea what I'm doing or what I should do next. I sometimes welcome days where I get to train other staff or handle the occasional odd reference query pertaining to Cataloging or Metadata. I feel less self-conscious doing those things, actually.

We're also retraining one of our acquisitions staff to become a copy-cataloger, something she will probably end up doing almost full time once our current Senior Cataloging Assistant retires at the end of this Academic Year. She seems to be catching on fast and has a lot of experience dealing with Bibliographic records in MARC21 format(plus prior experience in ILL). It's doubtful the library will allow us to hire a replacement for the retiring employee, so we will all have to shift around and retrain a bit to compensate for the reduction in force via retirement. Some of the other acquisitions clerks may have to pick up the slack as the more experienced one transitions over to Cataloging from Acquisitions.

Side note, completely random--it seems my machine is the only staff PC where one can read international fonts correctly on the staff side of the ILS. I must have more international fonts than anyone else, etc. It's strange. The OPAC displays these characters correctly on a browser, but on the staff side only my machine does.
Which by default means I get to handle all the "weird" cataloging.

We will also soon be scrambling to do our self-evaluations, to prove how we met our goals or at least tried really hard to meet our goals and perhaps met other goals not originally specified but no less important, blah, blah, blah. Not only do I have to wear my manager hat as a librarian, I also have to get on my own butt to churn out MY paperwork for MY boss. It's going to be pretty stressful around here until all that paperwork is done and signed in triplicate, etc, then we can all go home for Thanksgiving with a clear conscience and relax for half a week.

I really don't have time to blog actively right now, as you can well imagine, but writing this post has at least given me a little much needed clarity and resolve.