I'm rocking the cataloging! :) I know, it sounds silly. Who knew?

I got my results for my second paper in this class, the one on subject headings, and I did far better than I ever expected (an HD). I had no idea how I'd do, but it was actually rather fun, and not frustratingly challenging. Am I a cataloger in the making? I suppose it depends on how I do on this next task, actually assigning Dewey Decimal numbers.

Even though I've done well in this class so far, I have to say, I still question how necessary it is for a school librarian to have to know all of these skills. After having interviewed several librarians during my study visits, no one emphasized any need to use cataloging skills. They all said it was fully or mostly automated. When it wasn't automated, they had to look the information in a database and then just copied it over. I haven't met any librarians who actually assign subject headings or Dewey Decimal numbers themselves. Sure, I suppose it is good to have those skills when you run into a situation where you have a rare resource. I also suppose that it is good to have these skills so you can manipulate your catalog to make improvements, clean up the data, or cater the catalog to serve your own library's purposes. However, this is not a big part of being a librarian is it? Was it really necessary to put all of this energy and thought into developing this skill? Besides, I'm afraid this skill will go rusty if not regularly used. I'm sure that by the time I actually do need to catalog something or write a subject heading, I'll have forgotten how to do it!

I just completed the second assignment for ETL505. This module was quite hefty. While the tasks were interesting and honestly, a little fun, one can second guess their work an endless number of times. We had to look at five hypothetical resources and assign SCIS subject headings to them. I thought some of the tasks were easy, actually. However, so many people asked questions on the forum, that it caused me to doubt my decisions. I didn't change much of my work based on what I read in the modules, as I felt I could justify my decisions with clauses from the SCISSHL Guidelines or SCISSHL. However, part of me is just not sure I did it all right. This was meant to be a practical exercise, not a research paper. In a way, that makes this so much easier... but yet it didn't! I suppose the bright side is that I did better than I expected on assignment 1, which leaves me a lot of flexibility on these next two assignments.

I still wonder, however, how practical having cataloging skills is. I've interviewed several librarians for my study visits in ETL507, and none of them seem to require the skills of creating subject headings. It seems the systems they order their books from automatically come with cataloging details pre-loaded (e.g. Follett provides the data with the resources). The only reason I can really think of, is that it is good to understand how cataloging and standards within them work.

I recently noticed some discrepancy in the catalog at my local library. Some of the subject headings clearly were based on SCIS (they were coded scisshl), while others must be based on the Library of Congress (I'm not familiar with it, but it is probably the case). I saw magnets and magnetism both in the catalog, but they didn't refer to each other. I think they were both in the system because some resources were probably purchased from a US institution which provided LOC headings, while others were purchased from an Australian institution which supplied SCIS data. I suppose if I were looking to "clean up" the catalog, knowing about these standards would reveal the problems in the catalog, and the solution would clearly be to adhere to one standard (and include references to other relevant terms)--likely a problem of international libraries that purchase their resources from all over the world, but not so much a problem for domestic ones. But of course, only library nerds (or maybe tech nerds) would ever pick up on such problems.

Uh oh. I think that learning about the concept of metadata is making my head spin in a strange way. I can't seem to stop thinking about it!

So far in this module, I've been reading about what metadata is, why it's important, and why standardization is necessary. I seem to have a pretty good general understanding of it these days, but I can't stop thinking about how metadata is incorporated to what we do with information on a daily basis. As I type this blog, I'm even thinking about what metadata I will assign to the entry (what keywords or categories will I assign to this entry? I have to make sure that I use consistent vocabulary so as not to accidentally create a new category...).

Anyway, I was thinking about iTunes or iPhoto. One of my big challenges is to use the metadata fields that are given to us in order to catalog our data appropriately. For example, in iTunes, there is a field for genre or artist. When I enter this metadata myself, I might enter "The Arcade Fire" or "Arcade Fire" for the artist name. At the same time, I might enter "indie" as the music genre, or if it auto populates, it might enter "alternative" or "rock". This has become a big problem when I go to search for a song, and can't find it because when you alphabetically sort the artist or genre, they are not where you expect them to be (e.g. with or without the THE). There is no standardization. I like how sometimes the metadata autopopulates because it will use standardized vocabulary (and saves me time). However, it seems to classify all of my music as rock, whereas I tend to differentiate the types of sub-rock genres to give me more descriptive information.

This also makes me think of why I can never seem to effectively tag my websites appropriately in Delicious. I love using Delicious, but I can never remember the terms I used to tag web pages. I constantly end up with extra tag words that are sort of alone out there, being assigned to only one website. It would be so much more effective if these terms were standardized. However, the more standardized the terms are, the less personalized they are. I'm not sure what the answer is.

I may be going off on a tangent here, but it's making sense to me.

A lot of this thought process sparked from reading the following article:
Milstead, J., & Feldman, S. (1999). Metadata: Cataloging by Any Other Name. Online, 23(1),         24-26,28-31. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.