I’ve been reading through various documents on directions that cataloguing and description might take. Some of the reports are listed here.
The full reports are well worth reading. If pressed for time (and who isn’t?), the executive summary of the University of California report and Karen Calhoun’s “Blueprint for Phased Implementation” (p. 16) are useful as quick summaries of their recommendations.
So what are they saying? Well, many of the reports propose the following strategies:
Streamline cataloguing
Accept more cataloguing copy with less review and fewer local modifications. Consider using vendor records for foreign-language materials and other types of resources that would be difficult to handle.
Focus on what’s important
Consider which elements of description are the most important for access and focus in-house editing and verification on those elements.
Focus on unique resources
Put more emphasis on describing rare and unique materials, such as archives and rare books, resources developed locally, and sources for teaching and research found elsewhere on campus and in the community. Digitize more of what makes us unique to promote use of our collections.
Use other forms of description
Select the most appropriate type of description for the resource.
For books, this may be MARC and AACR2 (or RDA in a couple of years)–or it may be something else.
For digital resources, apply other types of description. We might use Dublin Core for some of our digital projects. For artwork or photographs (both digital and physical), we might look at the Visual Resource Association’s VRA Core framework. And there are others that we could use for different types of resources.
Broaden the search
Provide users with a single interface that will search the catalogue, digital library collections, and other information resources simultaneously. Search results should give users richer content, such as cover art, tables of contents, and reviews.
These strategies have appeared as common themes among the reports and proposals. Stay tuned for my next post for some of the others.
My own feeling is that there are proposals here we need to evaluate, but I want to hear what you think! Are there ideas here that we could build on? Better yet, what’s not on this list? How do we best serve our users in our digital, on-demand world?
Cheers,
Wade Wyckoff
