Dear Daniel and Colleagues, Thank you for sharing this carefully crafted draft letter. As part of LC management (although not involved with the final decision on series), I am in an awkward position with regard to participating in this response to LC. Nevertheless, as an AJL colleague, I would like to share with you a couple of thoughts and suggestions.
I feel that it is unlikely (especially now that June 1 has arrived) that another postponement of the new policy will be considered; however, I also believe that the call for further analysis of the long-term effects and for pursuit of a more nuanced approach is reasonable and worth stating. I will also share that LC policy and decision makers did consider extensively a whole range of such nuanced approaches before arriving at the announced decision, but unfortunately these deliberations were not shared widely. A broader discussion of the varied approaches within the library community could have yielded important input which might have affected the final decision, or at the very least, would have softened the blow of the public announcement. The letter acknowledges appreciation for the postponement of the implementation date. This postponement did allow for some further consultation with the PCC, OCLC, and others, which resulted in a number of important modifications to the policy, which might be worth noting in the letter. Also, an explanation of the lack of broader consultation within the library community was offered. Still, with the ALA annual convention (and our own AJL convention) just around the corner, one might question why LC did not postpone the implementation date a little longer to provide an opportunity to benefit from additional feedback from the library community. The letter notes the issue of cost. Statements regarding LC's new series policy note that the decision is not to be viewed strictly as a cost-cutting measure, but rather as one of addressing the changing role of the library research catalog and of shifting limited resources to efforts that benefit end users most. It might be useful if the letter acknowledged this approach, and in the same vein, one might question where is the evidence that the resources devoted to series control are not well spent in supporting the catalog's end users (which includes collection development specialists and reference librarians, as well as researchers). I would advise against shifting the focus away from the matter of LC's series policy by mentioning the Calhoun report, whose proposals LC has only just begun to study. Instead one might wish to suggest that as LC approaches other policy options, broader consultation within the library community will yield greater understanding, cooperation, and "buy-in" among the range of affected stakeholders and enable us as a community to establish standards we can all maintain and which will be conducive to our collaborative efforts. Also, please note that while LC lost a significant number of staff members (though not 130 cataloging staff) due to retirements this year, and while the institution faces challenges as a result of the departure of many experts at once, it is not accurate to say that there were cutbacks or that positions were eliminated. I hope that this comments will be helpful. Lenore >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/31/06 1:47 PM >>> Dear Safranim, I realize there may not be concensus on this issue (I read, e.g., Sara Spiegel's thoughtful email this morning, and just now saw the ARL statement in support of LC's decision), but I'd still like to propose sending a letter of concern from AJL (at least the Cataloging Committee?) to Beacher Wiggins along the lines of the African Librarians Council letter. I'm sharing it with you to see if you agree with me, but also to ask for suggestions about improving the language. If you disagree, that's fine too. I'm waiting to get a list of email addresses for the AJL council, but once I do, I'll share the draft with them as well. Possible AJL Position Letter: Beacher J.E. Wiggins Director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Library of Congress Washington, DC 20540-4300 Dear Director Wiggins, We are deeply concerned by the decision of the Library of Congress (LC) to discontinue creation of series authority records (SARs) effective April 20th (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/series.html). The AJL represents professional librarians with special expertise in, and responsibility for, acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, and reference, relating to Judaic Studies, Hebrew language and literature, and related materials in all types of libraries and educational institutions. While we appreciate the decision to push the new policy action date from April 20th back to June 1st (as per http://www.loc.gov/catdir/delay.html), we urge LC to consider postponing the new policy indefinitely so that the long-term effects can be more fully analyzed by the larger cataloging community. It is our sincere hope that LC administrators will revisit their decision, and agree that a more nuanced approach to series authority control is warranted. Perhaps simply being more selective about when to establish series title headings (e.g., prioritizing university press publications) would help reduce costs. AJL sympathizes with recent statements from the ALA Executive Board, the Library of Congress Professional Guild, the Africana Librarians Council, and the Music Library Association, and agrees that the wholesale abandonment of series authority records, combined with the lack of consultation with other stakeholders, compromises LC?s professed commitment to uniform bibliographic standards and cooperative cataloging. We believe it will increase costs to all libraries, including, quite possibly, the Library of Congress itself. We also know from daily experience how much our users appreciate being able to search by series titles, and how useful it is to have such titles normalized and collocated within our catalogs. Moreover, we are concerned that this latest decision is just the beginning of a long-term retrenchment of LC?s commitment to bibliographic control. In a report recently commissioned by the Library of Congress, Karen Calhoun has proposed reducing the number of data elements included in bibliographic records and eliminating Library of Congress Subject Headings. If present trends continue, and LC further abdicates its leadership role, the pool of shared cataloging which has done so much to reduce costs and nourish American libraries over the past 30 years will either dry up from neglect or become brackish with inferior content. With cutbacks in expert staff (130 LC cataloging positions eliminated in 2005 alone (?), let alone staff reductions in virtually all other American libraries), the same substandard records are increasingly being recycled throughout the system. We believe the new LC policy will have a profound effect on cataloging-on-receipt and shelf-ready book activities across the country as costs are shifted to individual libraries, perhaps saving the LC some money now, but costing the larger U.S. library community a great deal in the future. The greatest gains in efficiency will come from heightened rather than lowered compliance with standards. By adhering to international agreements and best practices, cataloging output is optimized for interoperability, which means that multiple agencies can trade and repurpose records without special editing, re-keying, or other human intervention. Indeed, it is precisely through excessive and repetitive editing and redundant record creation that the cataloging costs are driven upwards, and is precisely by cutting back on standards that we undermine data integrity and interoperability for our libraries and patrons. We thank you for your consideration.
