hangingtogether.org

It’s always sad to say goodbye, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do. I want to alert you that the MissingMaterials.org experiment will close at the end of 2012. The blog is now read-only.

OCLC Research developed MissingMaterials.org with the guidance of the rare book and law enforcement community, in order to provide a long-desired venue for transparency about theft and loss in libraries and archives. However, the service never achieved the broad usage and adoption we all hoped for: only 10 institutions registered WorldCat Lists and few items were tagged. And although there were 188 posts to the blog, it is not clear if MissingMaterials.org contributed to recovery of any materials.

While the decision to close MissingMaterials.org is disappointing, there have been many positive outcomes from this project. The Working Group has ensured that the community paid greater attention to transparency about theft and loss, and the project promoted collaboration with booksellers and law enforcement. For example, the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of American (ABAA) has adopted social media to broadcast news of thefts.

This project also did much to promote ideas about how to manage loss in a transparent manner. We held two webinars and published an article in Archival Outlook about the outcomes of the Working Group. I also spoke about MissingMaterials.org at a panel at ALA with an attorney, an FBI agent and Mark Dimunation from the Library of Congress.

In addition, the concept of using a light touch to alert the community has resonated in many quarters. Development of the free Missing Materials procedure helped OCLC Research staff learn to build services quickly and inexpensively, to meet functional requirements scoped by the Working Group and to repurpose “good-enough” low-overhead components, such as blog software. This has helped to inspire other experimental systems that made greater use of off-the-shelf software, such as the new ArchiveGrid and Website for Small Libraries.

I’m very proud of our efforts — we were approached by the rare book community to “do something” about the shared problem of stolen materials. We showed up, put forward our best foot, put creative thought into a difficult problem. So despite the fact that MissingMaterials.org is closing, we’d like to thank and congratulate everyone who participated in this great experiment!

One of the blogs I read with great pleasure is David Ferriero’s AOTUS: Collector in Chief. A recent posting on how to prepare the next generation (or what I would argue is the “now” generation) of information professionals caught my attention. The blog posting summarizes a keynote presentation David gave at a recent Association of Library and Information School Education (ALISE) meeting. He also includes a link to the full text of his talk.

I was struck by David’s list of desired qualities: tolerance for ambiguity, technical savvy, customer driven attitude all make the short list. Below the fold, in the text of his address are more skills for the nextGen/nowGen information professional: the ability to deliver results, to communicate with impact, to influence others, project management. Here’s my favorite:

The ability to demonstrate business savvy. Applying business principles, methods, and processes (e.g., ROI, cost-benefit analysis) to solve problems. Driving business results by planning and prioritizing activities consistent with organizational goals, using data and evaluating the costs, benefits, and impact on others when making business decisions.

I think David is (as usual) onto something, and I particularly appreciate him calling out the need to take a business-like approach. In the not so distant past people went out of their way to avoid using the “b” word, and I’m glad to see this shifting. I’m also struck by how different David’s list looks from ACRL’s Competencies for Special Collections Professionals which were written 5 years ago.

I do not read David’s list as a call out to the young to save us, because I believe many of us already have these skills, or are in a position to refocus. This is not rocket science, after all. I believe we can all become nowGen information professionals.

The results of the 1998 Special Collections in ARL Libraries and the follow-up 2009 OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives revealed that “hidden collections” are a challenge for archives and special collections. Usually, the term hidden collections brings to mind unprocessed and undescribed collections. But what about collections that are processed and described, but the collection descriptions are unavailable online? These off-line collection descriptions represent a special type of hidden collection, and also a special opportunity; the difficult intellectual work of arranging and describing collections is done and in theory, this is a last-mile problem which can be tackled with a small suite of tools and technology.

OCLC Research is in the early stages of a small scale experiment that will explore the effectiveness of tools and techniques for bringing offline descriptions to the open Web using the Beta version of ArchiveGrid. We’re calling this project “rough and ready” finding aids, because the collection descriptions are rough — and although you may not be willing to call them perfect, you may be ready to make them accessible.

Do you have typescript finding aids? Are you interested in experimenting with us? If so, drop me a note. If you’d like to contribute electronic finding aids to ArchiveGrid, we’d love to hear from you as well!

Thanks to those of you who responded to previous blog posts and inquiries — you have helped us to shape this project!

I seem to have acquired an obsession. This obsession manifests itself in various ways, but one clear way is that I can’t seem to stop thinking about some of the findings from my colleague’s work that resulted in the publication Implications of MARC Tag Usage on Library Metadata Practices. Chief among them, in my view, is just how few metadata elements are actually used on a consistent basis in library cataloging.

I’m so intrigued and obsessed with this, that a chart Karen Smith-Yoshimura produced probably two years ago still graces my cube wall today (see picture, and click on it to see the chart up close). One of the things the chart illustrates, is that out of the then 200 million or so WorldCat records, only about five elements appear in more than half of the records. They are:

• Identifiers (OCLC number, LCCN, ISBN, cataloging source, etc.)
• Title Statement (245)
• Publication Statement (260)
• Physical Description (300)
• Personal Name (100)

From there, the use of various fields falls off the proverbial cliff, with only fields like 500, 650, and 700 even making it above the one-quarter level. The vast majority of fields and subfields congregate, on the chart, along the very bottom, somewhere in the 0-5% range.

I stare at the chart, trying to translate its deeper hieroglyphic meaning. Is pure usage enough evidence to identify the fewest elements required to describe bibliographic objects? Has the profession really invested untold dollars and sweat into describing a few things very, very well and the vast majority hardly at all? What does this mean? What lessons can we take forward into a new bibliographic future?

I stare at it some more, as if pure observation can reveal a hidden truth.

Prompted by the little story in Grant McCracken’s Harvard Business Review blog post about Innovating the Library Way I offer below what the stuffed animals in our San Mateo office are up to.

Wombats attempting a daring cubicle escape captured by Ricky Erway

Wombats playing low-IQ cubicle hide and seek captured by Ricky Erway

Wombats leave their cubicles to watch the rain captured by Bruce Washburn

Sorted by size and walking cubicle edges captured by Merrilee Proffitt

A while ago I blogged about Sarah M. Pritchard’s talk at the RBMS preconference. I’m still quite taken with her talk about aligning collections and services with mission, and now it’s available online. Go listen to it (she’s the first speaker in the session). You won’t be sorry.

Other presentations from the preconference are also available for consumption.

I saw my colleague, Betsy Wilson, from the University of Washington Libraries at an OCLC Board meeting today and she shared with me a terrific YouTube clip. A local Seattle band, Pickwick, walked into the main library reading room and did an a cappella version of one of their songs. They didn’t ask, they just did it. Some of the readers didn’t lift their heads from their work (presumably they were plugged into their own music). But by the end everybody was paying attention. And well they should. This fellow is channeling Sam Cooke via Dion through Seattle and it’s moving. And as one of the YouTube comments says “Props to the absent librarian”. Their album comes out soon.