Lessons from programming etiquette for cataloguers

I wrote this back in December 2021, but work’s been busy and I only found time to edit it this week. I know I’m a hermit, but I’m sending love out to everyone who’s been my friend in library metadata and systems work in the last few years.

I’m back in a software testing role at my library for now. One of the things I need to do is use an app that has an option to tweak things using JavaScript, so I’ve been studying that when I get a spare moment.

What I’ve learned is a marvellous lesson for cataloguers, who work with MARC records. I’ve tried to keep this simple so it’s accessible for newbies, and library staff who are new to MARC.

If you don’t know what MARC is, it’s a metadata standard that was designed based on the layout of card catalogues. It is still maintained to this day, but a lot of the structure and theory remains the same as it was in the late 1960s. In MARC a field is divided into subfields that are separated by punctuation.

For example:

245 01 $a This is the title : $b subtitle / $c this is the author name.

Note the : colon, / slash, and full stop at the end.

Some of this punctuation serves a practical purpose in the software that shows the catalogue records to the public. But much of it is aesthetic, and the rules are a matter of style or grammar rather than the system’s needs.

For example, whether or not a 300 field ends in a full stop depends not on the needs of the system, but whether or not that particular library sees “CM” as a symbol or as an abbreviation for the word centimetre.

JavaScript is a programming language. It’s used for a lot of things.

The standard in JavaScript when making a list of key-value pairs, is to separate each item in the list with a comma. In a lot of code, the list is spaced out with each pair on a new line, especially in tutorials.

const coffee = {
 crockery: "mug",
 bean: "Ethiopan",
 milk: "soy"
};

You are not meant to put a comma at the end of the final line. It is not necessary, because the comma is only needed to separate the items from each other.

But, lots of people do put the comma at the end of the line. In fact, when I asked developers that I know they all admitted they always use a comma. Why?

const coffee = { 
 crockery: "mug", 
 bean: "Ethiopan", 
 milk: "soy",
};

It’s simple! It’s easier to remember.

If you train yourself to add a comma at the end of each pair in a list, you begin typing it automatically. You do not need to pay attention or make a decision. You always put it there. And that means that that you add in extra commas where it doesn’t matter, but you never miss a comma when you need one.

You add commas consistently, and it’s easy to edit, change, and re-arrange code if you don’t need to worry about adding and removing commas each time you re-order something.

And if you miss a comma in the middle of a list, it does cause problems. Big ones, at times.

When I was a cataloguer many people lived and died by the full stop at the end of the 300 field. Is it an abbreviation or a full word? Different librarians have different opinions. People spend energy training in this, checking it, and correcting it to their local standard when copy-cataloguing. In a cataloguing team I worked in, if we made an error with this full stop we would fail the quality sample, and it would make our team’s performance look bad in annual reports!

Just like JavaScript commas at the end don’t matter too much, in fact, a lot of librarians apply the full stop always, or never, or kind of sort of guess at it. And most catalogue systems cope just fine with or without the full stop these days (to my knowledge, I don’t have access to most of them as a cataloguer, I’ve only seen them from the outside.)

I do recommend if your workplace is very particular about MARC punctuation, that you follow your standards. But if you’re ever in a place to influence those standards, I think it’s a great idea to question how MARC fields with conditional punctuation rules display in your catalogue, and whether making some punctuation rules consistent can improve your cataloguing quality overall. Not just because it’s easier for the cataloguer, but because it can improve accuracy and consistency in your data. And anything that is consistent becomes much easier to write scripts, automation, and templates for. Consistency makes your data easier to handle in bulk processing

There’s something else that I learned from asking a bunch of people in my team about JavaScript. Most developers are used to seeing other people’s code. Everyone has their own style, and in keeping with the most basic principle of cooperative cataloguing, if it isn’t wrong, don’t fix it. The happiest people use the same punctuation every time in their own code. But they also cope just fine when somebody else follows the standard and leaves that last comma out.

I think that as cataloguers, we’re so used to holding ourselves to very rigid standards that our stress levels rise when we come across records that are “wrong”. But in many cases the punctuation doesn’t have a negative impact on library users, and you don’t have to worry so much about what other people have done, as long as you can copy it and it will work okay in your system. In fact, if you have your own consistent local rule you could simply run a rule to correct for somebody else’s practise when you bring the records into your own system.

I always like to remind myself of cooperative cataloguing principles. They contain a similar wisdom. If it’s not wrong, don’t fix it. I don’t need to judge how other librarians have catalogued a work. All I need to do is make sure that it will be able to store properly in my database, show up in my catalogue, and get along with my other records.

I hope that thought helps to make cataloguing more relaxed for you. Even though library metadata is unique and we use it differently, we’re not alone in our data entry problems. And sometimes a reality check can refocus us on what matters the most.

Spending our energy making sure that the high quality catalogue data we record is improving access.

Author data privacy in libraries (for authors)

Disclaimer: In my day job, I work with some of the databases and services I’ve mentioned in this post. I wrote this in my own time, unpaid, using common knowledge held by any cataloguing librarian, entirely independently of any of these organisations.

As an author or a creator it’s important to make sure people can find your work and connect it with your name. It helps to build your reputation, and secure your income. But there are risks, too. I bet you’ve thought about this before yourself – all the ways you can uniquely identify yourself as different to another artist with the same name, are the ways your bank or hospital might verify your identity.

The same is true for libraries. A lot of authors, illustrators, musicians have the same names, and that can make it difficult for readers to find the things that they want to borrow. But making your names unique to help readers, can cause problems for your personal privacy.

Back when libraries stored information in card catalogues, this information was protected by obscurity. There is a lot of effort involved in physically getting into a library and sifting through a drawer of cards. When we started sharing these records between libraries, they would be printed or typewritten and sent in the post. It was boring stuff nobody really cared about except for librarians. But since the 80s and 90s most libraries have moved to digital systems, and from there to cloud systems and shared online databases.

This has made library catalogue information about authors more exposed to the general public. Librarians have been discussing the best ways to reduce risk and improve privacy for a few years now. But I’m not sure anybody has reached out to authors or other creators. I’ve written this for creators to help you understand and navigate the weird and wonderful world of library metadata.
I’ve structured this with headings to make it easier for you to come back later and re-read the sections most useful to you.

Why do librarians collect personal information about authors?

Libraries are all about organising information to help library users access it better. Linking books, journals, art, music, and other things made by the same person can help people find what they want. These days, you’ll see it as a hyperlinked name in a catalogue record when you look at a catalogue record. Click it, and you get taken to a list of all the other things that person has been involved with.

But a lot of people have common names, so librarians have to find ways to make that difference clear to the public, and to our computer systems.

Other places face these problems, too. IMDB, Wikipedia, Academic repositories, and of course banks and health providers. Anything that keeps records about humans has this problem.

What data do librarians collect?

Libraries have a very long history of collecting and recording data. Our rules have changed over time, and this has changed what kinds of data we collect.

Most librarians try to collect the bare minimum amount of information, and often we will only record your given name and surname. The more people out there with your name or pseudonym, the more likely it is that a librarian will record more information about you to help differentiate between two people.
In Australia, this information tends to be recorded by the librarian (or library supplier) who is processing a copy of your book. If your stuff is published in the United States of America, and a copy is sent to the Library of Congress, American librarians will also record information according to their own rules (and the same goes for the UK, or other countries you are published in).

There are some Australian libraries that specifically collect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander publications. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) makes headings that are different to other databases, because their headings prioritise how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people want to refer to themselves, and this can be very different to the rules librarians must follow with other standards.

How is this data used?

We record information about authors and creators in two places.

1 – The catalogue record.

This is what people browsing a library catalogue will see. It can be plain text entered by a librarian, which is most records.

This can be as simple as Lastname, Firstname.

But if you have a common name or you are a notable author, they will link to something else too. That link is to something we call an “authority record”.
The catalogue record itself can also contain a little detail, to make sure you do not accidentally match with an existing Authority Record. This can include your middle name, life dates, or expanded initials.

Lastname, Firstname, 1965-
Psuedonym, 1920-2010
Lastname, F. M. (Firstname Middlename)
Pseudonym (Full Legal Name), 1989-

Most Australian authors will only need to worry about this information in the catalogue record.

2 – An Authority Record. These records can be made for people, organisations, government bodies, places, and ideas. This record contains detailed information to help librarians choose between two similar people or things, so they know which one to use in the catalogue record.

What goes into the authority record depends on how many other people share your name, how much information the librarian can find, and even when the record was made.

Most librarians will first use your year of birth or death, or a middle name, whichever is easiest to find. Some will call your publisher, and others will search online. Information printed in the book – think about your forewords, afterwords, and author bio – and on your author website, are the most commonly used.

Some people have very common names, and they may have their month of birth or even day of birth recorded. This has not been done a lot in the last few decades, as society as a whole has become more aware of digital privacy, but authors who have been writing before the 90s may have had their record created long before this shift.

We have cataloguing rules, and these rules have changed over time. Depending on which year the record was created – which may not be when you started writing, but when somebody with the same name as you started writing – different standards applied. Some people had records made at a time that their profession or awards were recorded. Other people came into our shared databases right after some new rules for recording gender were written, before most of us realised it was tacky to out authors as transgender for no good reason. There are a lot of options available to cataloguers, which is meant to make us more flexible in what we record, but together the options can feel more invasive than simply a middle name.

Finally, people who write under pseudonyms or collective pseudonyms might have their names directly associated with their legal names or deadnames in authority records. Normally this only happens when an author or publisher makes a direct connection between the names in a publicly visible way, but sometimes pseudonyms can be connected without the author releasing this information to the general public domain.

Where do librarians get this stuff from?

It depends on the librarian. There are a few common places we get the information from, all public and published. Fortunately, it means you will have a lot of control in the future. Unfortunately, it means that if the information is already out there there’s not much you can do to un-publish it:

Author bios and blurbs in the book itself
Letters, pamphlets, and other things sent to the library with the book
Author websites, and author bios on publisher websites
Interviews, news articles, and social media posts
ONIX files (a kind of metadata file publishers can send to bookstores and online booksellers), and other marketing material publishers share with bookstores
Direct contact with the publisher

I think it’s great practice for everyone to blacklist certain types of information from social media – your exact age and birthday, your local shops and where you live, your full legal name. Your first dog, your primary school, etc. If you are comfortable sharing this information, that’s fine, but it might show up in places you don’t expect. When in doubt, do not share anything in the public eye that could be used to pass a security question with your bank.

Sometimes when I used to do cataloguing work, we librarians would call up publishers or email them asking for information to help make authority records for authors with common names. We always asked the publisher to make sure authors had given permission for publishers to share that information with us, but I’m honestly not sure what publishers tell authors. I think that publishers trust us, because we are librarians. And we trust publishers, and… yeah.

You should totally be able to ask your publishers and agents to refuse to share this information if you’re not comfortable with that. If your publisher doesn’t know, or doesn’t know how to protect your privacy, I think that is a conversation worth starting with them.

Which authors are affected?

Authors who have names in common with other authors are the most likely to have more information recorded. But it really does depend on the library and the librarian, as well as when you started writing. Some librarians used to make a lot of authority records, and they made fewer and fewer over time. These days, the places I have worked are more cautious as digital privacy issues emerge.
Sometimes, the book distributors who feed automatic or pre-publication data into library systems, can take information you enter into your account and pass it on, unintentionally revealing identities.

There are also smaller changes to our rules, that made it possible to record information on gender, that could traumatically out somebody. Sometimes there’s a few records that were created before librarians realised a new option was potentially harmful. It’s hard to predict who is affected, because it is bad luck. Most of the time librarians fix the records they know about.

I have noticed that authors who write under known pseudonyms, and authors who transition while continuing to publish, also tend to have authority records created to link their different names. Some librarians think it’s really important to link everything together as much as possible. I personally think it’s unnecessary to link deadnames and pseudonyms together unless the author or publisher makes it clear to me that this is what they want. I’m talking, unless an author calls up and asks me to do it, I will not link these records. But these practices vary depending on the country, culture, and values each library operates in.

All authors will have their name recorded in a catalogue record as it appears on the book, too. It looks like this:
Lastname, Firstname, 1988-
My first book : a novel / Nickname A. Lastneam

In other words, if there’s a typo in the book cover, there’s going to be a typo somewhere in the catalogue record to match it.

So all authors are affected, but some authors are more affected than others. Yeah, it’s confusing and weird. But I hope that helps you look at library data and see how it affects you.

How can I find out what is stored about me?

There’s a lot of libraries to check. I’ve got some tips to help you find the data in shared online public databases, but you will have to check individual libraries.
In Australia, Trove lets you search records contributed by the vast majority of Australian libraries. You can search for catalogue records and see which libraries have copies of your books and other things by clicking into each search result and looking for the “borrow” or “read” tabs. You may need to look in a few categories, but most authors will be in the books and libraries, or diaries and letters categories.

The database behind Trove also sends data to WorldCat. WorldCat will have Australian records, and records from other countries too! The lists of libraries will be much longer, especially if you are published in the United States.

For the authority records that link to the catalogue records, you can search most Australian records in Trove – there’s a “People” category . Though do be aware, that’s got records from a bunch of other databases, it’s not just library data. For the records made in the United States, check out the Library of Congress Authorities search .

If your books are published in Europe, Japan, China, or other areas you will need to look into how those countries organise their library data. Some areas share records based on language of the books, or geographic regions, or other things. Your publisher or the national library of the countries you are published in should be able to get you started.

Can I change it or take it down?

Yes and no. It depends.

When you get in touch with a library to ask for changes, it is useful to say that you do not want your middle name or year of birth recorded, and ask if they have other alternatives to help differentiate you. You don’t need to have a plan for what you want changed until you speak with the librarian. In fact, all you need to do is tell them what you don’t want recorded, and ask them what they can do to help you.

But what they can do to help you will depend on how their library is run, where their records come from, and how much capacity they have to take on this work. I’ve said a bit more on this further down.

Now let’s talk about how changes are made.
The shared databases Trove and WorldCat (and other ones around the world) get their records from individual libraries. Normally, records flow upwards to the shared databases when they are created in a library, but they only come down from a shared database when a librarian manually brings them down. So information can get added quickly, but removing it means a lot of individual points of contact.

If your books are in 2-3 libraries it’s a quick process to contact each library and ask them to change the data. It might take longer for the changes to be uploaded to the shared databases. If your books are in 10+ libraries, that work gets harder.

My recommendation is to start with the biggest or best funded library you can find for each of your books. A lot of smaller public and university libraries have had budget cuts in the last year, so they might be slower to reply to you. If you can get the record in Trove or WorldCat updated, it’s a lot easier for librarians at smaller libraries to copy the fixed version. But even with bigger libraries, it can take months for librarians to work through the list of requested changes. Ask any librarian how long it takes us to get the Library of Congress to update one of their subject records… yeah. On the plus side, if you’re polite and patient librarians will do their best to help you.

If the information you want to change appears in the book itself, the librarian cannot change the catalogue record. This is because we need to be able to match the books to the records, and a reader might write down that information to try and find it again. I’ve had a few heart-rending requests to remove ex-lovers from catalogue records, and I feel awful when I have to tell them that I can’t change it because it’s on the book cover and my record must represent the book that was published.

If the information is in an authority record, you can change more things but the process can be much slower. Normally authority records specify where their information came from. I wanted to take a screenshot, but honestly I felt uncomfortable copying and pasting that information in a blog. Please search and see for yourself, instead.

The source of information can include from the publisher, or from websites or newspapers. So although it changing a Library of Congress record is slow, while you wait you can use the record to follow up and ask the listed sources to take down any information you do not want shared, too. You’ll find it to the right of the number “670” – all the data fields have numeric codes.

If you’re published in the United States, find an American library that holds your books and ask them for advice about the Library of Congress authority records. They can hopefully help you navigate things.

But the library website has a privacy policy

These policies are normally for library users – people who sign up to use the library catalogue or online booking services. Catalogue records and authority records are covered by the library’s internal polices. These might be called “Collection Development Policy” or “Collection management guidelines”. Some libraries will have separate policies for authority records and books, and other libraries will purchase catalogue and authority records as a bundle from a library supplier and will treat the whole lot as part of their library collection.

The best way to find out what privacy rules a library is applying to your name in catalogue records, is to ask them in an email. You might get lucky and find some information on their website, but most libraries have a team working on the website who is focused very specifically on helping borrowers and visitors to the library. They usually don’t know the details of the catalogue records or the policies that govern how the records are managed.

Help, this is overwhelming!

Yeah. It’s frustrating and overwhelming for librarians, and it’s got to be much harder looking in from the outside. It is a lot of work.

Most Australian authors like you are going to search in Trove and WorldCat, and discover that everything is okay. It will be a fun exercise to see who has copies of your books.

But if you’ve been writing for a long time, or have a common name, or included more information than you realised in your author bios, it might feel very stressful. It’s a lot of work to chase this stuff up, especially when you have to learn about library data.

Take your time. Remember that this information is generally out there in the public, and what you are doing is a mindful way of controlling your public exposure.

Remember that librarians are discussing author privacy, and all the risks of our legacy data from the past. We don’t have an answer right now but people are working hard to improve things. In the meantime, you can have more control and feel more confident about what libraries store about you.

A librarian’s top tips for authors

• If you haven’t published yet, decide whether you would like to use a pseudonym or use initials instead of your full name. Use that name on all your books, your website, and social media. Or choose one thing to obfuscate – the year of your birth, or a middle name – so you can use your real name for publishing but you protect the personal details that you use for online banking.
  
• Never ever ever ever use information in a catalogue record or your author bio for a “secret question” or answer in your security settings. That includes your fictional characters names, pets, and favourite foods.
  
• Talk to your publisher, agent, and anyone else you work with when you publish your books. Advocate in your own industry for better personal data privacy, and this will improve the privacy of the data that is fed into library records.
  
• Seeing your personal information in a catalogue record can come as an unpleasant shock. Before you do anything, take care of yourself. This is not your fault, or the library’s fault. It’s a systemic problem affecting multiple industries as our society moves into a more digitally connected future. You might feel unsafe, scared, angry, or sick. It’s going to be okay. Librarians care about your privacy and we’re doing our best to try and make it better.
  
• If you do find library records that you want to change, break it down into smaller steps and tasks that can fit around your writing schedule and life. Librarians are going to take ages to get back to you, so there’s no rush to do this all at once.
  
• If it is too overwhelming, or uncomfortable, get a trusted friend to do the legwork and help you work through the process of finding your records and asking libraries to change them for you. It’s really repetitive and there’s no reason you have to do this all by yourself. A lot of people who are doxxed or exposed rely on their friends to do very similar things on social media. That support makes a huge difference.
  
• You won’t be the first or last author to ask us to change your details. Some libraries might not have the capacity to change everything right away, but it is reasonable to ask for private personal information to be removed from your records, and all libraries get questions about their catalogue records. It is always okay to ask us questions.
  
• When you ask people to change things, make sure you ask them for help getting the changes updated in Trove and WorldCat too. That way the next librarian who copies that record, gets the updated version.

Can I use this or share this with other authors?

YES please do!
I make most things I write about libraries Creative Commons.
I care a lot about online privacy a lot. I would love for this to reach as many authors in Australia as possible.
Please credit me or cite me as a source. You are welcome to copy this in full, or re-use parts of it. Please adapt it to suit yourself or your community.

I know that the Australian writing community often depends on workshops and consulting to break even. It is okay to use this commercially in any way that is useful to you, but please make sure you let people know it is also available freely online here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Welcome to Library Work handout

The Aus GLAM Blog Club theme for this month is “Secrets”. I’m very excited because I have been thinking about secrets and industry knowledge this year.

When I was working as an IT professional on projects for libraries, I found that I kept giving IT contractors very basic introductions to what libraries are. Not the big things that we’d normally think are important for newbies to learn, but the basics. Our assumed knowledge. Things that we take for granted, but that sound SUPER WEIRD if people hear you talking about it without any context. In other words, things that are secrets because we think that everyone knows about them.

If we omit – forget to share – some of this basic knowledge then we can end up with misunderstandings and huge projects that fail or run over time and budget. It really pays to make sure everyone is on the same page when we start working together across different disciplines.

This draft is still a bit raw, but I wanted to share something I’ve been working on over the last couple of months. I had about ten pages that I slowly edited down to 4 (around 6 without the table formatting).

For now I have uploaded some different versions. I’m not an expert at formatting for screen readers, so I’ve made longer versions without tables, and shorter versions with tables. There’s a .odt open document and a .pdf version of both, and they’re all Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) so that you can use them any way you like. I made this all in my off-work hours, so that I own all the intellectual rights and I can share it with others outside of my workplace. If you want to share it too, I recommend checking with your boss to see what your work contract says.

Library-handout-basic pdf

Library-handout-basic odt

Library-handout-tables pdf

Library-handout-tables odt

If you like this and make another version, let me know! I’d love to link to other versions, and learn from what you find useful.

To make the CC license super clear, I am an enemy of the unpaid extra labour that librarians do in the name of professional development. I am giving this away for free because I can afford to, and I think it’s worth sharing with everyone. If you put hours of work into adapting this or customising it, and you want to charge money for that work, I am 100% supportive of you.

I’m a little shy about posting this now, but I hope that as rough as they are, my drafts are useful, especially to smaller libraries who can’t always afford ongoing IT staff or the time to train them.

Finding pleasure in my local public library

I chickened out of posting this in May for the Aus GLAM Blog Club prompt, “Pleasure”. But it sent my mind to interesting places, and I think it was fun enough that it’s worth sharing. I began wondering how easy – or difficult – it is to find erotica in a public library. So if sex or adult content isn’t suitable for you or where you are reading right now, please stop reading now. I will try to focus on what it’s like to search for these topics in a library, so it is about metadata and user experiences, but depending on your workplace it may still be a bit risky as I will use explicit terminology. I’ve put the rest behind a cut for that reason.

Endless diagrams

December’s Aus GLAM Blog Club topic is “End”. I’ve been working on system relationship diagrams and training documents this month, so the word “end” makes me cringe. I’ll try and explain with my relaxed, holiday brain… I think I switched off the moment that I left work for the year.

The “end” of a library system is theoretically the outside edges of all the little systems that we use. If you imagine your catalogue database as a flowchart with shapes representing each system, there will be systems with fewer connections to other systems towards the edges… and some sides of the shapes that don’t have any connections going outwards.

(I apologise for my messy sketches. The colours mean nothing, I just like my coloured pens. Also, this isn’t my current library, it’s an imaginary library, hopefully generic enough to be similar to yours.)

To say that we’ve found our edge there is being a bit dishonest, because most libraries have relationships between their systems – or staff – and external systems. Libraries Australia, WorldCat, or library vendors and journal publishers send in metadata to be incorporated into our libraries’ systems… those are the obvious ones. Think deeper. SurveyMonkey or other sites that somebody in one team at your library has done some user engagement through. Google Docs or DropBox being used by your staff even if it’s against your content storage policy.

Now, think of the “ends” of those systems, especially cloud ones. The end is an ever-shifting gradient rather than a nice, clean line. The more you understand the different risks and dependencies of all these systems and how your library uses them, formally and informally, in their workflows, the more impossible it becomes to explain. It’s often easier to pretend that the systems we don’t own (or pay licensing fees for) fall outside of our overall library “system”. It is also easier to pretend that the on-site hosted software in our server rooms marks the end of our ability to control our data – and thus our responsibility.

It’s awful when I’m working as a test analyst in my library, because it means that “End to End” testing can never realistically reach all potential end points. There’s too many other libraries who are part of this huge and glorious mess.

I say mess as a test analyst, but as a librarian I love it. We are one of the few professions where we both act as, and serve, users of a wide range of systems. From analogue microfilm readers through to e-resources, we work hard collaborating silently and invisibly with librarians all over the world… at least, those who speak, write, and read English… but that’s a topic for another blog.

Every time I talk to people at my library about system relationships, and frame the systems in relation to that person’s daily work, they look at me with awe and horror… but I built my knowledge by drawing shapes in a graphics tool – you could just as easily use PowerPoint or Paint or coloured pens like I did today – and draw lines to represent all the connections.

I think every librarian should have a mental or digital mud-map of their systems and how they relate to external systems. You don’t need to be perfect, it will always be incomplete, because it will always be changing and because sometimes you won’t be able to know what everyone in your library is using. But the more you understand all the connections that are outside of your library’s control, the better placed you are to advocate for your readers needs and to demonstrate the value your services add to the world.

Personally I have found that the better informed my coworkers are about the ways the systems that they work with relate to other ones, the easier they find it to use them. A lot of people get anxious when they don’t know why something is broken, or how often to re-try exporting data to a different system, or who to ask for help when two systems that should be connecting just… aren’t. Knowing those points of connections and how everything fits into a grander scheme of library work and metadata can be really reassuring.

Though to be honest, I think that it can also just be fun to play around and do this, so I use every chance I get to do it!

On reflection, the “end” to your library system is probably the relationships between all the systems that your readers might need to help them use your collection, whether you own them or rent them or simply link to them. And sometimes you can’t imagine how deep that might go until you begin exploring and mapping them out.

Appetite for change

I drafted this for Aus Glam Blog Club’s November topic, “Change”. And then I chickened out of posting it, because my thoughts were this looping ramble and I wasn’t sure if they were worth sharing with the wider world.

Today at work there was a discussion about expertise versus efficiency of scale; of hand-crafted bibliographic metadata and the hidden unpaid labour of crowdsourced text corrections for digital content… about the opportunities and risks that come from open source and commercial machine learning databases that automate a deeper level of content than has ever been available for full text search before.

I feel like these are bubbles of feelings inside me, and they are still growing and building up pressure. One day they will pop and I’ll be able to look back and make sense of them all. But for now I’ll gather my courage and post what I wrote, and maybe people will disagree with everything I say and get mad and write their own thoughts down, and we’ll get more discussions going in the GLAM sector.

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November’s Aus Glam Blog Club topic was Change. As a cataloguer there’s one topic that I’ve changed my mind on a lot. If you ask me in the morning I’ll have one opinion, in the afternoon I will have another. I just can’t pin down what I think or feel about automated subject analysis.

I’m not sure if this is an interesting format for a blog, but here’s the arguments I have with myself as I change my mind back and forth.

It’s a great idea, right? A machine learning algorithm could be fed a small batch of good records for academic journals and fiction and recipe books, and the ebooks or scanned pages of the content. The machine could learn that particular categories of subject headings in a thesaurus relate to specific types of text or content layout and begin to identify patterns of grammar, vocabulary, and unique keywords or frequencies of keywords that identify the differences between the publications. It would be error-prone at first, but with corrected data and more data being added over time, the algorithm could learn how to apply subject headings consistently (and update them).
This algorithm could keep up with changes in terminology or new ideas in specialist fields, in ways that cataloguers cannot in their day to day work. It could help us avoid problems like LCSH and “illegal immigrants”, where different political groups use different vocabularies and the Library of Congress becomes more vulnerable to political bias.

But it’s a terrible idea! I’ve changed my mind. An algorithm would learn all of the awful patterns of racism, sexism, and oppression that we work so hard to keep out of our collections. We’d be more likely to start the machine learning off with our public domain full-text digitised content which is more likely to contain outdated and offensive language, and have catalogue records with outdated terms. We couldn’t begin from a neutral place since the thesauri we currently use to describe our books all have inherent cultural and political and racial biases in them.
In other words, garbage in… garbage out.

That said, perhaps machine learning could free us from the need to curate and maintain thesauri. Even if it would still be based on content that could have inherent bias, an algorithm could use grammar, syntax, and other patterns to differentiate between pejorative uses of terms and neutral ones. It could be deliberately biased to trust (weight) terminology used by reliable publishers or types of publications… which couldn’t be worse than thousands of distributed human beings with their own political ideologies trying to work with a piecemeal patchwork of subject headings that reflect more about the time they were established, than the topics they relate to.

Although… we’re now in the territory of proxies. We’d be saying that this type of publisher is a proxy for an ideal librarian who can see through her own biases to the keywords that will help the reader find the information that they need. This could work really well for tried and true disciplines like law, cooking, and even tabletop role-playing games. But this won’t work so well for interdisciplinary studies that may display a hybrid of patterns from two disciplines. And if it can’t work well for them, would we see a negative effect of cross-pollution where environmental science and newspapers get grouped together a lot because they share a lot of text about the weather and our climate. When we allow an automatic association between two patterns to stand in for the real and unattainable “aboutness” of a text, we can become very vulnerable to those associations frustrating a lot of users and hiding information in weird places in our databases.

Plus, not all quotations are indented or in quotation marks, so that could get very weird.

Another thought I often have is that for open-access shelf libraries like public, school, and university libraries, it can be really difficult to locate useful related texts together. It often comes down to the call of the cataloguer who processes the book, and in Dewey Decimal there’s a few different ways you can order and build the numbers. Maybe we aren’t ready for machine learning to assign subject headings, but we could use machine learning based on topics and subject headings to shelve books so that more people can find them and libraries can optimise shelf space.

The worst idea of course, the one that I can’t get past, is that the real power of machine learning with subject description or shelf classification is that of changeability. It has the most value if it can adapt and respond as the content of a library changes. But that could mean regular “global” changes for subject headings for nearly all the records in the database, and an equivalent amount of exporting and importing changed data from our shared national databases. I’m not sure that our hugely distributed and global shared catalogue database could cope with that. Remember you can run, but you can’t hide, from WorldCat… I mean, the Blob!
It would take a lot of hardware just to process all of that data. It would take a lot of electricity.

While we could use it as a more static one-off kind of deal, trying to replace the time that a cataloguer spends determining the right subject heading and entering it in the catalogue record, that almost feels like we’re giving up on the quality of our catalogue records and how transformational it could be to improve access for everything. The new records we create are a barely visible speck of iceberg bobbing above the water, while there is a huge width and breadth of records that have come before us.

Even if we only brought the records to life in one library’s local system in this way, I think it would be too expensive in terms of resources.

Then again, this is all just thoughts and feelings. I don’t know anything for sure. It would be worth trying, thinking, planning, to see where machine learning could really take library catalogue databases on an individual library level, and globally. Having bad ideas, getting angry and arguing about them, and trying some of the things that will give us the information that we need to learn how to argue about targeting automated library work to make things better and not simply more or faster.

Carrying our beginnings with us

This is my first blog post in a while, and it’s my first post for the GLAM blog network. It’s oddly fitting that the topic for this month is “Beginning”.

The first thing that came to mind for me was something that I learned way back in 2014 when I took an online Library Advocacy MOOC (which is great, check it out!) It turns out that the views that most adults have about libraries and librarians were formed by their first experience visiting a library (one of our readings was some great market segmentation research from OCLC). People who were more likely to support libraries remembered a positive, personal and friendly experience.

I think that this power of beginning, that first experience, is just as powerful in software. We speak a lot in libraries and IT of “change management” and fear of change, especially in older staff, but people are most comfortable with the software that they learn to master first. It’s why a lot of my older colleagues are actually highly confident with MARC21, text-entry, Boolean searching, and email. I can’t beat them even though I’ve got a reputation for knowing my stuff. I was a teenager when MSN Messenger was still around and even though I adapt to emails at work, I use the office instant messaging system for a lot of my communication with people who are my own age. I am less comfortable with Tumblr, because I started out with LiveJournal and WordPress.
It’s so easy to pass this off as age-related difficulties or a reluctance to learn, but it makes so much sense. Our emotional experiences in our first operating systems define how we react to everything that comes after. It makes me so curious about what comes next, and whether or not it will make me uncomfortable. But it also gives me so much empathy for the people I am designing new software for. I don’t know where they’re coming from; whether they’ve been a Mac or a PC person, or if they’ve only ever used their phones and they don’t know what a mouse is.

When I studied Archaeology I learned something similar, though this was about the dead that we were researching instead of how the world in general perceives archaeology. I was taught that my personal understanding of gender, sexuality, health, and race were all things that I was unconsciously projecting onto the evidence that I was studying. My teachers exposed me to evidence highlighting that things that we think are concrete divisions, are more like fading and speckled transitions. As an example, let’s say that there’s a female-looking skeleton that has been buried with a sword and also a spindle. Was she a warrior? Or are these just gifts from her family members? Did she identify as a man or a woman during her life? Are we looking for other information; do the burial items appear to be used, or are they new and decorative for the burial? Is the grave the same size as others nearby, or is this maybe a double sized burial for two people, one who never came home? There’s no answer to these questions but there’s always a lot of excitement about burials that show unusual gender expressions, and the discussions often reveal way more about our modern ideas of gender and sexuality than the culture we’re trying to study.

I also think, as silly as this sounds, that’s okay. It’s important to accept that we’ll all have these weird beginnings as we set out to try and use something new or find new information. I used to get very angry when I copied a catalogue record and the subject headings reflected a strong personal bias. My strongest reaction was to an American book on domestic violence that had been classified as “infanticide” because it had a chapter on miscarriages and abortion, where it was obvious that the cataloguer had such strong personal feelings on the topic that they wanted to include it. I made some changes to keep it accessible but to remove that personal political bias. At the time I was furious, because it was only one chapter and it’s not appropriate to add subject headings for parts, only the whole, of a book. That’s what contents note fields are for!

But over time, I’ve become far more accepting. That cataloguer has a different beginning to me in their career, and their social context is different. We were both doing the best we could to make that information accessible. Their records will always carry some bias. So will mine. The real trick to becoming a better librarian is looking at yourself as a person and understanding how your knowledge about a topic began. Where you come from. Who you are. And how every single person who walks in through your library’s doors has their own and different beginning.

Libraries are actually very weird places to walk into for the first time. There’s a lot of secret and unspoken rules that are never written down on the signs or in the terms of service. But there’s always new people entering our communities who have zero experience in a library… or zero experience searching in a library… or their experiences are from a different type of library and everything they think they know about libraries is wrong in our building, which can be a really traumatic experience.

I try to keep my beginning and other people’s beginnings in mind all the time whether I’m cataloguing a book, designing a new library system, or teaching somebody how to search for information. It makes me a better librarian, especially when I can set aside my own personal assumptions, approach this new situation with open curiosity, and help somebody find something that they care about.

Comparing apples and oranges

It’s been a few years since I moved from archaeology to information systems and libraries, but my head was so full of all the new things, I didn’t have much time to reflect.

Now, I have.

Here’s a few things I’ve noticed, about the difference between the two professions.

1. Professions have genders.

At parties, when I say “I’m an archaeologist,” people say “Wow, like Indiana Jones!”

CC BY 2.0 Capture The Uncapturable, 2011

And when I say “I’m a librarian,” people say “Ooh, sexy librarian!”

Seriously. Librarians don’t even get a character name. When a woman moves from being an archaeologist to being a librarian, she moves from being identifiable with exciting male action heroes, to being a sexual object. There’s all kinds of cool discussions on gender in librarianship, but I was most interested to discover that I hadn’t realised how my field of study was giving me the kind of social capital usually reserved for men.

2. Everything costs more, and there is way more of it.

I don’t know if this is because a lot of mining companies employ archaeologists, or because there are just fewer archaeologists than librarians, or if it’s just a cultural expectation in the different fields of work. But I had some serious shock and horror when I saw the cost of entry to library professional associations, conferences and events.

Are there secret millionaire librarians out there? Do we just book nicer hotels for speakers at library events? I have a lot of difficulty understanding how a profession that generally earns LESS has all these events that cost MORE.

But, I’m going to a conference in July, so I’ll be comparing things in person, from the quality of the morning tea biscuits, to the venue and attendance numbers.

I am guessing it’s a matter of basic maths. More people, more conferences, more packets of biscuits to buy, the sponsorship money gets spread more thinly. It’s also possible that likely library event sponsors (library systems vendors, publishers, library suppliers) have less money to throw around compared to archaeology event sponsors.

3. Para-troopers.

I… don’t get it. This person can do exactly the same thing I can. But they… don’t? Because I got a degree.

Nope, still don’t get it. My degree means I’ll have a better chance at getting hired, promoted, and published academically.

In archaeology, everyone and their dog can do pretty much everything, with experience and informal training. In the field, you use the hands you have.

So coming from that experience, to librarianship, it is very surreal. I don’t understand why everyone can’t just do the work. It’s not like somebody without a degree is going to white-out my name on my academic transcript, and waltz off with my qualifications and my social capital and my professional networks just because they did a job that needed doing.

It’s not even based on what we’re paid. I’m earning the same as some of these people, so in theory we’re all equals at the same level. I still can’t get my head around the professional/para-professional divide. Maybe it’s just one of those traditions that linger in different industries, like judges wearing wigs and barbers advertising with those twisty striped poles.

4. Long and the short of it.

The joke in archaeology is that honours students pad out their theses, so that their very long and very specific titles can fit on the spines.

That’s not true! We just don’t like wasting space.

The joke in librarianship is that FRBR was supposed to supplant AACR2, and RDA is okay but when we’re still using MARC21 and LoCSHM and DDC23…

Yeah. I have moved from possibly the MOST verbose profession next door to philosophy (okay, fine, they were upstairs from us because we liked basement labs and they needed to see SOME sunlight, right?)

… and into one with more contractions than possibly even IT, because we add library-specific acronyms and standards on top of the everyday IT ones. When we can’t make an acronym, we truncate the words.

5. Biscuits.

I obsess over this. Every field trip, every training session, every group event: Arnott’s family assortment. Archaeology is really just a series of intervals between the race for the nice biscuits.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/16210667@N02/11358577293/

CC BY-ND 2.0 Craig Sunter, 2013

 In libraries, somehow, there are always Monte Carlos, and the orange creams. I don’t know how, I don’t know why. But I eat them, and oh it is good. Once, there were even Tim Tams and Fantales. And a coffee machine, instead of an urn and a big tin pot of Nescafe.

Morning tea is serious business in libraries, in my experience. Yum.

Gearing up again

I’ve tried a couple of times to get back into blogging, but studying and then working was full on. I’ve been cataloguing for two and a half years, and I’ve learned so much about books and libraries, but also so much about the world. In cataloguing, you need to give every single book an equal level of neutral description, to provide the best access possible.

I learned in my first month on the job, as well read as I thought I was, I was still living in a heavily curated and selective world. My own bookshelves are an echo chamber of sorts, especially compared to the huge range of perspectives in a library.

As a professional, I’ve come to feel that it’s that representation of differences in library collections that matters most. As you can imagine, I’ve read a lot and I’ve skimmed a lot, and I haven’t written much at all about it.

I don’t plan on reviewing as many books as I used to, and I won’t be accepting any advance reader copies or review copies of books anymore, but I look forward to reconnecting with you all and talking about books, material culture, Australia, and libraries!

‘Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes’ by Melissa Katsoulis

This is a great book in many ways.  It’s easy to read in small chunks, its table of contents is useful and provides a good idea of what you will encounter in each chapter.  It addresses the reactions of diverse minority groups when their cultural identities were appropriated as part of hoaxes.  It has a great cover, though arguably a real hoax cover would not be so sloppy or honest about its derivative nature.  But!  I could not finish reading it, for reasons I will explain in a little bit.

Melissa Katsoulis is perhaps the opposite of me.  A legitimate literary journalist, an officially married person, someone who has a job and an income.  Perhaps that’s part of why I find it hard at times to resonate with this book.  I’m a reader and dabbler in fiction, and I’ve focused more on academic analysis of things in my education than in journalism.  She’s come into this book as a journalist and writer from a very different culture and perspective.  There was bound to be some dissonance between her words and the way my brain reads them.

‘… it does suggest that the Antipodean creative scene allows things to happen that other countries might not.  One important reason is that racism and far-right politics is less taboo there than it is in other parts of the English-speaking world…’ (p.11)

While I’d be the first to bemoan some of the xenophobic attitudes some Australians hold, I can’t help but feel that this section in the introduction is odd.  Why single out Australia, when there have been throughout history equally xenophobic and racist views in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America (and literary hoaxes with racist and political motives are cited from these places within Telling Tales)?  Racism and race tensions are just as bad in London and Los Angeles as they are in Sydney!  She comments one hundred pages later that all the Australian hoaxes she mentions involve race somehow, though by ‘race’ she means ‘non-white’, and in at least one of the instances mentioned involve a Jordanian-born woman writing a hoax involving Jordanian women’s stories.  Katsoulis can’t have missed the logical gap between ‘all Australian hoaxes in my book involve non-whites’ and ‘most racist hoaxes are Australian’, yet she makes precisely that statement several times.  Maybe this is my academic background speaking, but I would have issues using deliberately misleading language like that.  The statements themselves come across as racist without context at times, and I can imagine a lot of readers being put off before they get to the relevant sections.

Perhaps this is simply my personal experiences here, but in the last couple of years I’ve heard from a few friends undertaking postgraduate studies in the US and UK who’ve encountered (especially in England) people that see Australia as some sort of cultural backwater full of cockneys, rednecks and the cast of Neighbours.  There’s more strange and old-school Colonialist perspectives still around out there than I had believed possible.  I can’t help but feel that Katsoulis wrote those words not from any actual investigation into Australian attitudes towards racism, but from preconceptions she’s inherited from her own culture and media soundbytes.  I hate to tell you, Melissa, but Australian racism is an imported chain franchise; we’ve got all kinds of racial tensions and racist attitudes, but the majority of our cultural heritage comes from good old Mother England.

Though I really enjoyed reading about the hoaxes, a lot of them were not new to me, and I felt often the style of writing was very journalistic; more about the scandal and punchlines and spin than the facts of interest. Perhaps I’m still sore that Australia seems singled out as racist amongst all the other global racist, sexist and bigoted examples in the book.   Still, it’s certainly worth reading, and is a good quick background in historical literary incidences of cultural appropriation.  I would recommend, if you want to write on the topic of any of these hoaxes, that you conduct your own research rather than relying on this alone.

In the end, I had no luck searching for other blogger reviews.  I shall try again later, because I want to know how other readers received it.  For the moment, there is a convenient collection of newspaper reviews on Katsoulis’ website for the curious.