Call for Papers for Spring Meeting

Spelunking or Serendipity : Discovery in the Catalog

Friday, April 25, 2008
The Leadership Center
Aurora, NE

Call for Papers Form

The theme reflects the uncertainty regarding the present and future direction of the library catalog in the midst of Google and mass digitization projects. Long regarded as the source for information from the world’s experts, the library catalog was once the near-exclusive source for users. The rise of Google and its objective of “organizing the world’s knowledge” have led to the conditioning of user expectations by the Web. Now is the time for libraries to enrich and share content for the millions of items in their collection.

Leading the day’s presentations will be keynote speaker Jeffrey Beall, Metadata Librarian at the Auraria Library, University of Colorado Health Sciences, Denver. His topic of “Metadata: Principles and Promise” will discuss the use of rich metadata to aggregate resources, and how structured retrieval displays will again be recognized for the value they add to information retrieval.

Jeffrey Beall is an author and a well-known authority on metadata, and the editor of The Journal of Library Metadata.

Topics for this meeting might include discussions of how your library has changed its approach in searching the catalog; innovative ways in which you are presenting materials in your catalog, or how your library is meeting the challenges of Web 2.0. The length of each breakout session will be 50 minutes; please allow 5-10 minutes for questions.

Please return the form by March 1, 2008 to:
Sheryl Williams
Chair, TSRT
McGoogan Library of Medicine
swilliam@unmc.edu

Report on Workshop: Assigning Library of Congress Subject Headings

I attended Charity Martin's workshop on Assigning Library of Congress Subject Headings on January 9 at the Nebraska Library Commission. It was a very good, informative experience. I had the good fortune of attending at the same time as Mary Tilley from UNL, who is so incredibly knowledgeable that it was like having two teachers.

In addition to covering the basic differences between topical, geographic, title, personal name, corporate name, and conference name subject headings, along with all the various types of subfields, we got a lot of practical, hands-on experience. Throughout the morning, we did a series of mini-exercises, where we had to find the correct form for one of each of the types of subject headings, using subjects of our own choosing. In the afternoon, we were each given a book from a collection of diverse topics and asked to do a subject analysis of the book. Then we shared our completed subject headings with everyone else in turn, so we could see the ways each person approached their book. I thought it was interesting to learn about "technical reading," the art of examining a title page, contents, reviews, and other matter to determine the subject content of a book without having to actually read the whole book.

The only depressing thing is the rule with geographic subject headings that requires the latest name of a jurisdiction to be used in subdivisions. This leads to headings like World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Russia (Federation), which is legitimate and correct according to the rules, even though Russia (Federation) is a post-1991 political entity. World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Soviet Union would make more historical sense. But that's hardly Charity's fault. We can blame the Library of Congress for that sort of thing. However, we'll follow the standards--even when they seem weird--because of the need for metadata interoperability.

Charity's class was a great introduction to one of the more complex aspects of cataloging, and she provided us with the tools to continue learning on our own. And it counts toward the Nebraska Library Commission Cataloging Certificate Program. All in all, time well spent.