PALINET Focuses on Cataloging

A capacity crowd of 170 catalogers, metadata librarians, archivists, library managers, and students convened at “The Future of Cataloging: A PALINET Symposium,” held in Philadelphia on May 29, 2008. Keynote speaker Karen Calhoun, OCLC WorldCat and metadata VP, invited symposium participants to dream with her of an information universe where “anywhere users go on the web, the library is there with them.”

Calhoun reported on findings from an OCLC Members Council Cataloging and Metadata Service Group survey concerning the “On the Record” report from the Library of Congress (LC) Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, issued last January. Participants were asked to name the two best/worst recommendations in the report. Ironically, two recommendations ended up as top vote-getters on both lists: plans to accept metadata from publishers and other resource providers, and calls for a metadata carrier more flexible and extensible than the current MARC format.

In response to Calhoun’s keynote, the panel “Cataloging Futures” focused on the changing role of OCLC from the sole source of library data to one of many sources and included discussions of philosophical and workflow issues related to the ownership of bibliographic databases; the need for trust in cooperative cataloging; the issue of accountability with enriched records; and the expanding roles of catalogers as project managers. The panel was presented by Beth Picknally Camden, Goldstein Director of Information Processing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Diane Hillmann, director of metadata initiatives at the Information Institute of Syracuse, NY; and Christine Schwartz, metadata librarian, Princeton Theological Seminary, NJ, and “Cataloging Futures” blogger.

“On the Record: One View of the Future,” led by Nancy Fallgren, digital access/metadata librarian, Johns Hopkins University, challenged the report as “one group’s vision.” Fallgren called for entrepreneurs and risk takers to collaborate in the process of change, inviting attendees to shake up the status quo in their own departments. “Asking a question is planting a seed for change,” she said.

Another “On the Record” recommendation to “enhance access to rare, unique, and other special hidden materials” was the focus of a presentation by Christine Di Bella, archivist and project director, Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) Consortial Survey Initiative at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Di Bella envisioned an exciting digital future for special collections and gave examples of current mass digitization projects funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to allow broader access to archives, including the Archives of Michigan and the Aldo Leopold Foundation through the University of Wisconsin.

Giving his take on near-term cataloging changes, John Mark Ockerbloom, digital library architect and planner, University of Pennsylvania, said that the debate over the future of cataloging “really comes down to issues of architecture.... The library world has developed rich information architectures like AACR2 that are not well supported by the social and systems architectures of Web 2.0.” He said that re-architecting the library catalog could potentially combine the rich structures of both worlds.

Speaker presentations and audio recordings from the symposium are available on the PALINET web site.