Librarians' Forum

Kevin and I had our first SkillShare meeting on Thursday morning; I went to his office, at SPO.

I am hugely impressed with the orderliness of their workflow, particularly given the sheer volume of materials with which they deal. Also, I think Drupal is fantastic, and wonder if it could be used throughout the library where content creation and management are concerned.

On a more flippant note: nice office! So that's what it's like to work in a hip area of the library system.

Kevin will be visiting me this coming Thursday morning. I have been saving an especially nifty book for him -- while it is representative of the titles with which I work on a regular basis, it's got more detail than many, as far as binding and text are concerned.

So what is SPO using drupal for?

Kevin came to my place yesterday morning. I gave him a basic overview of rare-book cataloging, plus a specific illustration thereof with a book on which I was working.

The resultant record is here:
http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/F/?func=direct&doc_number=005670686&local_base=AA_PUB

SPO uses Drupal as our staff intranet. It contains internal documentation, plans for future projects, and to-do lists for some staff members.

Deb has been reacquainting me with cataloging, which I last studied in library school in 2003. In the course of our discussions and tutorials, she has reminded me of a few things I had forgotten:

* If no date of publication is given in a work, or if extra description is desired, you can record the copyright date given in a work. So, for example, "c2004" means there's a copyright date of 2004 in the chief source of information, as opposed to "ca 2004", which means it was published circa 2004.

* In addition to authority records for authors and titles, there are also name/title authority headings. Works get a title or name/title authority record depending on whether the record is entered under a personal or group author or on its own.

As a rare book cataloger, Deb is responsible for cataloging print (not manuscript) materials published before 1800. Rare books are cataloged in more detail than contemporary materials because the individual item is of greater interest (and monetary value) than conptemporary works. Deb describes the binding of the book, margin notes, stains and spots, and anything else that helps distinguish the item from other items of the same manifestation. I learned that rare book cataloging involves use of a cataloging code called DCRB, which elaborates on and overrides AACR2 on some fine points. For example, titles are transcribed as faithfully as possible in DCRB, whereas in AACR2 capitalization and punctuation are normalized.

Special Collections has a large unprocessed backlog, from which they select items for cataloging by Deb.

I learned a few fascinating things about the way cataloging works at U-M:

* Cutter numbers have been generated inconsistently over time and across collections, but currently books are not normally reclassified once shelved. So today, when new books are added to the collection, they are sometimes given the wrong Cutter number so that their location relative to the other books there makes sense.

* While the Aleph cataloging interface is used to modify existing records, our catalogers use Connexion when creating new records so that we get credit (and money) for adding records to OCLC.

* Connexion charges libraries to search its database. I recommended always searching through FirstSearch instead!

Sorry for a possibly dumb comment from a non-techy person but I still don't understand about why Drupal is so fantastic. If it's just a place where you're storing documentation, to-do lists, etc. how is it different from a web page or the files in NewShare?

It turns out Deb and I are after lots of the same books. We're both recently acquired our own copies of Understanding FRBR, and we both would like to get ahold of copies of A manual of European languages for librarians and Pause and effect: an introduction to the history of punctuation in the West. Whaddya know!

We need a Drupel workshop! After talking about inter-office communication through the ML2SIG brownbags I'm interest in seeing what SPO is doing. Kevin, what to teach?

Kevin and I met again on Wednesday morning, where we *did* actually talk about things other than books we're both chasing.

Kevin explained the design of a planned internal unified database that SPO is working on. It is to be a web-based interface with an SQL backend; the purpose is not only to unify all of the files, but to facilitate data conversion, and to allow content providers to eventually enter much of their own data.

I know only the tiniest bit about SQL; fortunately, the code, which Kevin printed out for me, is chock-full of comment lines which explain what each table will do. Once again: very cool.

I've been anticipating a request like Sue's for a while. While Deb loves our current Drupal site, most of the rest of the office finds it difficult to use and ugly to look at. I've hired a recent SI graduate as a part-time programmer this summer to upgrade to a newer version of Drupal. So I'd be willing to show off our site this fall.

Drupal is used in many library settings, including the AADL. My recollection is that it's been discussed more generally here, but migration to some type of CMS is still under discussion, e.g. in Web Svcs.