Dear colleagues,
I've made some changes to the draft based on your very thoughtful comments
and suggestions.
Before this kind of letter can be sent, the AJL Council would need to agree
with its contents and sign off on it. Considering that we're in the midst
of Shavuot, and many AJL members are not checking their email at the
moment, I'm not sure how quickly that can happen.
In any event, I wanted to share with you what I've got at this point.
Daniel
Deanna Marcum
Associate Librarian for Library Services
Library of Congress
101 Independence Avenue SE, Room 642
Washington DC 20540
Dear Dr. Marcum,
We are deeply concerned by the decision of the Library of Congress (LC) to
discontinue creation of series authority records (SARs) effective June 1,
2006.
We believe that excessive editing and redundant record creation is the
main cause of high cataloging costs, and that by cutting back on authority
control, those costs will rise further still. The greatest gains in
efficiency will come from strengthened - not weakened - compliance with
standards. By adhering to professional norms and best practices,
cataloging output is optimized for interoperability. This, in turn, means
that multiple agencies can trade and repurpose records without special
editing, re-keying, or other costly human intervention.
Indiscriminate discontinuation of SARs seems counter-productive because,
in the long run, such records save all of us time by disambiguating
similar titles, keeping track of cataloger research (so as to avoid
duplicated efforts), and recording complicated series treatment decisions.
If present trends continue, 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 staffing cutbacks at LC and elsewhere, the recycling of
substandard records is likely to increase throughout the shared cataloging
system and cause a degradation of service to all our patrons.
We believe the new LC policy will have a profound effect on
cataloging-on-receipt and shelf-ready initiatives across the country as
costs are shifted to individual libraries. This will possibly save LC some
money in the short term, but cost the larger library community a great
deal in the future.
While we appreciate LC's willingness to push the action date back from
April 20th -- in order to give affected libraries time to develop
contingency plans -- we urge LC to revisit the original decision, and to
consider whether a more nuanced approach to series authority control would
be preferable. Perhaps being more selective about when to establish series
title headings (e.g., prioritizing university press publications) would
help reduce costs. In any event, we believe that greater consultation with
other libraries -- including postponing implementation until after the ALA
2006 annual meeting -- would have helped avoid the current atmosphere of
mistrust.
AJL sympathizes with recent statements from the ALA Executive Board, the
Library of Congress Professional Guild, the Africana Librarians Council,
the Music Library Association, the ALCTS Board of Directors, and other
concerned groups, and finds that the indiscriminate discontinuation 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 the new
policy will increase costs to all libraries, including, quite possibly,
the Library of Congress itself. We also know from daily experience that
our users greatly appreciate being able to search by series title, and to
have such titles normalized and collocated within our catalogs.
We support ALCTS' request for LC to share the rationale behind its new
policy, "including as many aspects of the decision-making process as
possible, in hopes that other libraries outside LC could carefully examine
their own series practices in a thoughtful manner." In particular, we
would be interested in any empirical data that suggest series authority
control is no longer cost-effective or desired by our patrons. In your
2004 address to the EBSCO Leadership Seminar you stated that, if certain
other work could be moved to non-professional staff, catalogers could
spend more time on "authority control, subject analysis, resource
identification, and evaluation, and collaboration with information
technology units on automated applications and digitization projects." We
are confused, therefore, as to why series authority control has suddenly
been singled out for elimination.
We are concerned that this latest decision is the beginning of a long-term
retrenchment in LC's commitment to bibliographic control and access. LC
still has considerable influence among libraries and other cultural memory
institutions around the world. For instance, LC Subject Headings, LC
Classification, and MARC21 are used in many countries and have been
translated into multiple languages. With digital collections and metadata
initiatives such as MODS and METS, LC has extended its influence into the
digital realm as well. The decision to end SARs, however, and the process
that led up to it, risks undercutting the tremendous good will and
influence that LC has built up over the past many years. Is this is risk
LC really wants to take?
We were similarly concerned by LC having signed a contract with the
Italian book vendor Casalini Libri to catalog thousands of titles a year,
none of which is to be shared with other OCLC or RLG libraries. (OCLC, to
its credit, has since made its own arrangements for wider distribution of
these records). Again, there may be compelling reasons to have taken this
route, but the lack of consultation with other stakeholders seems to have
set a troubling precedent.
In summary, we are deeply appreciative of the leadership role LC has
played -- and for the most part continues to play -- in all aspects of the
library profession. We hope you will reconsider your decision on series
authority control, and we look forward to many future years of fruitful
collaborative efforts.
Thank you for your consideration.
