American Library Association



Autumn:

I’m Autumn Faulkner. I work at Michigan State University. I am very pleased to be here; I think this is a totally fascinating topic and one I’ve been thinking about myself since I began cataloging, right out of library school. So I hope whatever I can share is going to be useful to noobs like me, but also the people who are involved in teaching and training and planning education. I wanted to give you just a little bit of background about where I’m coming from. I actually…I don’t know why I decided to go to library school, honestly. I was an English major in college, I started working in student services after I graduated. I enjoyed helping people. I have always loved libraries, I have always loved books, right? I mean, that’s the main thing that we all say when people ask us this stuff.

And then I took one class at the University of Alabama, which is where I got my degree, and I loved it, and I continued with the program. I actually had to move to a different city before I could complete the program, so I moved into their online delivery. I would work full time during the day, and then go home and put on my PJs and my socks and sign into class and discuss stuff with my professor and my classmates. I did not have a library job, like many of my peers and my classmates. A lot of the folks that I went to class with were working in libraries, and had decided, you know, they had maybe wound up there as a teenager, or during college, and they liked the environment and they wanted to pursue a degree and continue their career in library school. I had very little background. I did work briefly as a student worker in my college library, but it wasn’t significant. And I promise these aren’t just fun facts about Autumn; this does have bearing. In my program, cataloging and metadata courses were not actually required, and what were offered were basic courses that were nothing advanced.

I was hired…I guess we’re coming up on two years now. It does not feel like that long at all. I graduated in December 2011 and started at MSU in March 2012. I have been working mainly on monographs, but I have moved into music, and now I’m working on cataloging posters and a few other formats. That gives you kind of an idea of what I’ve been up to. This is me on my first day (laughter) when I realized how very little I knew. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t learned a lot in my courses; there is just so much to teach, and so much to learn. So what I’m going to give you is just a summary of my experience as a new cataloger. This is far more observation than it is opinion. And of course, even my experience isn’t like a standard guideline; things differ from program to program and library to library, but I hope what I can share will give some awareness of what it’s like to exit a library school program and enter a cataloging job.

Okay, so first I want to talk about some of the things that I did actually feel pretty solid about, and I do want to say that I had excellent teachers at the University of Alabama. Big shout out to Dr. Stephen McCall and Professor Buzz Haughton, who taught me my metadata and cataloging courses. They were great. But even in the best course, with those time limitations you can only cover so much. So I had a cursory understanding of some things, which were: basic classification stuff, although I’m going to be honest, I still feel like I’m learning some parts of LC, some of the wonkier schedules. It totally depends on what I’m cataloging, and you know, suddenly I’m in the P’s, and I’m cataloging a translation of literature, and I’m just…holy cow. And I did feel pretty solid on the MARC fields, though as catalogers in the audience can attest, it takes a few months of looking at records over and over again for the records to really start to have meaning. You know, it’s kind of like learning a language; you get what my supervisor called cataloger’s eye, and you learn to pick out stuff from the record. But I felt pretty solid about that. I did have a pretty good understanding of indexing, the relationship between what you put in the MARC record and what shows up in the public interface for the patron, how things are indexed, author, title, subject.

And then I did have what I thought was a pretty good awareness of other content and coding standards, and there’s a lot of them out there, a multitude. And, you know, in my 2011 cataloging class we were discussing differences between RDA and AACR2, although we spent a majority of our time on AACR2. We knew RDA was on the horizon, but there was really no time to actually teach it. But my professor was great, he said, “Look, this is coming, here are some differences, read about it here, and start thinking about that. It’s coming down the pike. And I think, too, I had a pretty good foundation in the theory of cataloging, and this shows you kind of where my understanding was couple of years ago, FRBR had been discussed in a number of different classes I took, actually, and I would say I had a moderate grasp of the concepts. RDA we had discussed in my cataloging course, and we had discussed—there were some vague rumors of the post-MARC environment coming as well. And RDA was such a big change, I think a lot of people were anticipating, you know, we’ve changed the content standard and now it’s time to look at MARC. And so there were going to be some changes there too.

And in my metadata course we had discussed the semantic web. It was easy for me to kind of connect all of these ideas, you know, the fact that data was kind of becoming more linked, and we’re moving towards this sort of open data environment on the web, a semantic understanding, machine readable language. And I think that helped me when I was learning the more practical aspects of cataloging to kind of understand the kind of overarching purpose. This, I think, is a great representation of cataloging theory that I have borrowed from one of my colleagues. We did discuss RDF triples just a tiny bit in one of my metadata courses, actually, but the idea that it’s RDF, FRBR, underlining the content standard of RDA and our movement towards or bitframe. This picture of the bibliographic universe was helpful for me, and I appreciate having learned that in my classes.

Okay, so, the things that I had had a little bit of experience with I would say, I knew these things, and I could do them, but I did not necessarily have a full understanding of the whys and the wherefores. I do need to say a big thank you to Ruth Elder at Troy University, a cataloger who let me look over her should my first semester, and get a feel for the day-to-day work so I could see that in practice. That was very helpful for me. Okay, so, this is one of my cataloging class assignments: my professor started us out at the ground level with ISBD. We moved on to working with AACR2. From there we went into Workform and Connexion, and familiarized ourselves with MARC. He started us out on straightforward formats and moved us into some more complex stuff. This was a great assignment structure for me. I felt like we mastered one concept before moving on to the next. I got a lot of practice (_____) records. (9:03) I also took a metadata course, which was great. And I was also able to complete an internship at an archive, so those things kind of coincided. It was nice how they synchronized, because I was describing some digitized images for the archives. I developed a local controlled vocabulary based on some authoritative works about architecture, because the series of photos were of houses in a certain community.

So I got a foundation in the ideas of authority control, standardized description, practiced a little bit with Dublin Core also in a course project for my metadata class. And then, actually, I took a technology course. One of the assignments was to build my own website, which introduced me to html, CSS, and that kind of opened the door to things like JavaScript, jQuery, even Python. I can’t say that I could actually accomplish anything in those kinds of languages, but I can recognize them and kind of be conversant. I think it’s always helpful for catalogers to have some knowledge of the cataloging world, especially given the connection between cataloging and metadata. So those are all things that I had gotten my feet a little bit wet in.

Okay, so, this is the stuff I found the most challenging when I first started out. So, when I say standards, I mean all the numerous content and encoding and description schemas and guidelines and best practices that tell us how to construct and display bibliographic data. So if you are working in cataloging or metadata, you have to have at least a little familiarity with these. You’re going to hear them mentioned, you’re going to go to a conference and somebody’s going to be talking about RDF triples. And you have to know what that is, and you have to know what kind of bearing it has on your day-to-day work, and the fact that, really soon, it might be part of your workflow, whether you know it or not. Interfaces still have to be developed, but the philosophy is there, and depending on the nature of your work, you’re going to need a very thorough knowledge of a lot of these. Not just familiarity, but a really good understanding. And this just takes time. To me this is not…I’m not sure this can be taught in class. It took me six months to sort of start getting a handle on all these things, and understand the relationships between them, and when to consult them and why to consult them, and what different areas they govern.

Okay. So we have standards, and then for me the next big hurdle was understanding the system that I worked in. For instance, there are a lot of systems out there, and a lot of interfaces, and getting to know the culture of the industry, that took some time for me. Because especially if you’re a student like me, with no job in the library and no library background, and you haven’t worked with a system before, it’s basically kind of a mystery until you get your hands in there and start playing around. Different interfaces I learned on Connexion in cataloging class, but MSU is actually a SkyRiver library, so that was a different interface for me. And the interaction of records in the system, that was actually kind of a weird thing for me, I had to learn more and understand more about that before I got it straight in my head. Like, “what is an order record? What is an item record? How do these interact with bib records? How do bib records and authority records interact with each other in this system? What happens if I do this, or change this field?” And the problem here, too, is there are so many local tweaks and options and workflows in every library, there’s going to be a learning curve even if you manage to pick up some of this in maybe an internship, or a job that you’re working on, as soon as you move to a new library it might be a whole new ballgame.

And then for me, too, the history of cataloging. There’s a lot of history. In my particular library and kind of in the field in general, the evolution of national practice has left its mark on the catalog, and the first time I saw an AACR1 record I was totally weirded out. And you know, legacy records, we’re going to see a lot of that in the coming years now that we’ve changed to RDA. AACR2 records are going to be around forever. And students learning RDA now are not going to be as familiar with AACR2. They’re not maybe going to understand why decisions were made the way they were in the past, why certain records look the way they do, and that in turn will play into how we choose to convert our data, or update it. And I mentioned the culture of the industry, something else that has to be kind of gradually acquired in the culture of the profession. And I think that’s a big part of cataloging. Not only practice but kind of the reasons behind the practice. And that applies to the colleagues you’re working with every day, but also the decisions that have been made about national standards over the years.

This is another thing: local practice can be very individual to your own library, and I had to learn my way around gift notes, and series notes, and things that are specific to my own library, and things that I didn’t even know existed before I started working in cataloging. Things that you can do to manipulate your particular collection, and your particular OPAC.

Special formats. For me that was another big step. I got a very brief intro to a couple of special formats in my cataloging course, but those of you who catalog know that special formats have endless quirks, and their own particular set of best practices. Music videos, maps, I have a little experience with posters. A couple of months into my new job I began to catalog music, and it was completely disorienting at first coming from monographs. And it was like I was learning cataloging all over again. And I have a little bit of a background in music, and I still felt pretty lost at first. So that was a lot of extra training and practice that I needed, honestly, to be a competent music cataloger. You can teach four or five classes on that alone.

Okay, and authority work, too. This is something we briefly covered in my cataloging class, but I knew how to locate an authority record, and I knew what a correct heading should look like. I did not know how to create an authority record, and of course that’s part of (____) training (17:07), and things that I learned at MSU when I was there. And it’s more than just knowing how to create an authority record, though, it’s really important to understand the whole purpose of authority work, kind of the grand scheme, and again, thinking about the user, and the OPAC, and what you do behind the scenes, how does that affect searching, and retrieval on the front end? And again, that’s not something that you can spend a ton of time on in cataloging class. If you’re trying to teach students how to create records for a sound recording in AACR2, it comes down to a choice of, how much time are you going to spend on this, how much time are you going to spend on what you know possible employers are going to ask them about in the job interview.

Okay, so, to sum up, I feel like I don’t wan to say I was underprepared, because that’s not true. I had great professors, I felt like my classes were very rigorous and very robust in the instruction, but like I said, it’s an immense field, and there’s no way you can cover that kind of material in a class or two. The best way to learn, honestly is to get your hands dirty, which I didn’t have much of an opportunity to do. I feel like I did lack some implicit contextual understanding that a lot of my classmates and peers already had, and there’s really no explicit training for that kind of stuff. And if you haven’t work in tech services then you likely have no idea what it truly involves. Which is not actually true of public services. I mean I think we all kind of know about public services even on our first day of library school. It’s the side of libraries we’re familiar with as users, and it’s probably the side of libraries most of us are initially attracted to when we decide we want to work in a library. It’s the traditional library role, right, helping people face to face. And I think very few people start out thinking, “I want to be an acquisitions librarian, or an ILL librarian, or a cataloger.” And I didn’t know that I wanted to be a cataloger until my cataloging class in my last semester. So what this means is, if students don’t realize early on that they want to do something tech services-related, cataloging, metadata, then it’s not really in the interest of library school to offer those kinds of courses. And so what that means is tech services is really kind of the great unknown, and a lot of learning that happens is done on the job.

So, like I said, this is more observation than opinion. I do have a few ideas. I think Daniel was right about a sort of survey of cataloging and metadata for all students, but specialized courses for people who know that they want to do this kind of stuff. I think advocating earlier for cataloging and metadata, saying to students, “Consider taking this course on metadata or cataloging,” giving people time to discover that they enjoy that, which I think a lot of people would do, and really hitting hard on the idea of experience. Because I think that the tension between theory and practice is a very real concern. Learning theory in class is important, but figuring out how the (___) interface works (21:08), and learning how to catalog maybe a CD, or a microfiche while you’re sitting at a desk in a library is also important. And I think library programs could do both of those things in a more proactive way, I guess. I think an across the board newbie program would be ideal. But I say very quickly that that would involve an awful lot of work and cooperation among libraries. But some kind of introductory, “Hey! You’re a new cataloger here. Here are some concepts that you should probably hit in your first couple of weeks, and let’s talk about this, and here are some questions you may have.” And I would say, too, I think at conferences, a lot of cataloging practice and policy arises out of the discussion of our cataloging communities. I did not really have time or resources to attend conferences as a student. I was working full time and then going to class. But I think if someone had maybe encouraged me a little more and maybe said, “Consider joining (____) and getting on the listserv,” (22:19) I would have had some more of that contextual understanding that I missed out on early on.

I think I’ve covered everything. Just in general, I’d like to see a lot of advocating for the behind-the-scenes work that a lot of us do, that we know is so important. Does anyone have any questions?

Question 1:

Autumn, thank you so much for that engaging presentation. It was really well done. I have a question. How do you feel your lack of practical experience impacted your job search?

Autumn:

You know, I was actually hired half-time to start with, and not as a tenure-track academic librarian, but just in a support staff position. And that turned out to be really advantageous for me, because I was able to focus just purely on cataloging every day, all day. Becoming an academic, tenure-track librarian actually comes with its own set of distractions and responsibilities, and I feel like it would have taken me even longer to learn what I did. But I was exceedingly lucky to get an interview with Michigan State right after graduation, and for them to have this half-time spot that they needed to fill, and for me to be in the area. But I didn’t feel totally confident about my skills. I knew I wanted to be a cataloger, I had a mentor in cataloging, I had an internship in archives, but beyond that I did not have extensive experience. I can talk knowledgeably about the theoretical stuff, which I think was also helpful. Because you can always learn what the 590 field is for, but if you don’t understand the point of cataloging, the theory behind it, then I think maybe an employer might be more hesitant to think about hiring you.

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