What would you classify this as? A video? A website? Music? In all honesty, I’m not sure any of these terms capture the breadth of the medium. As a side note, props to Google for using this to promote Chrome. Shameless, but effective.
Edit: This is seriously pushing me to learn more JavaScript.
A colleague e-mailed me the other day about my ROI numbers. Being a Cataloger, he pointed out that my technical services figures seem to be low, and as such I’d like to clarify a few things. This means presenting an updated figure. When I provided my time estimates they did not include weeding, sorting, shelving, or similar expenditures. I should make that clear.
Now, anyone who’s worked as a Cataloger knows that these “duties” can add a lot of time to processing. Additionally, it’s been pointed out that the Library of Congress identified an average cost per full record ($100 an item) several years ago. This is, more or less, backed up by references in the user community and a recently finished “Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace.”
To revise my figures let’s do two things:
Based on these two changes, the ultimate revised number comes to $3,855 (assuming that 985 x 10 = 164.2 hours and 164.2 x $18.00 = $2955.00… plus 90 x $100.00 = $900.00).
The figure isin’t perfect, but it offers a larger number for those who think I lowballed my last set of calculations.
My new job has begun in earnest and I have a dilemma. I won’t have to deal with it for a while, but eventually one of my bosses is going to ask me to complete revamp an old publication repository. So… friends, bloggers, tech-geeks lend me your ideas.
The MoDOT Innovation Library is an on-line list of all transportation publications created by the Missouri Department of Transportation. And, to be honest, it’s not so much a library as it is a static webpage. All files are saved and provided in PDF format. Moreover, previous cataloging records point directly to these files via their traditional URLs. I need to find a way to organize these files – hopefully in a way that is full-text searchable – and eventually provide access to them. I also have to do it without deleting the originals. Bottom line? I need to create something with tons of capabilities and to maintain what is already there. What are my options?
I could go with ContentDM and have the State Library help. My little library already does this with Connexion and Millennium.
I could use an open source piece of software like Omeka.
I could create a more organized and dynamic webpage.
I could leave the files on the server and simply revamp the main page.
To be honest I want to scrap the whole page, create a separate container for in-house publications, and create a library page in it’s pace. We don’t currently have one, but I’m not so sure if that will be allowed. Anyway, any suggestions out there?
I was doing some sleuthing on Twitter the other day and a friend posted an excellent article from the Guardian. Basically, the article raises the question, “why can’t you use a search engine to find if a local library has a book?” The answer has to do with OCLC’s protectionist policies and quotes:
What really caught my attention was:
It should be pretty obvious as to what my opinion is (look at the name of this blog), but I’m curious… what does everyone else think? Is OCLC protecting us? Or should the walls come tumbling down? On one hand all 125 million of OCLC’s records are community contributed. On the other, however there’s the fact that Google could clean our clock if we didn’t band together.
A year and a half ago – without any librarians seeming to notice – the MARC cataloging standard officially became obsolete. For years now librarians have noted that MARC is great for describing books but not other media types. The problem lies largely in the fact that MARC and AACR2 are geared to describing single, owned, and published material (i.e. monographs). Moreover, most libraries still focus almost exclusively on 
purchasing books. But the internet, the abundance of multimedia formats, and their meteoric expansion have slowly eaten away at our old-steady reading partner.
It comes as no surprise that there are millions of resources online that are valuable to patrons. The deal is that most libraries don’t catalog them because: a) they don’t control their management b) they might go down at any second and c) they aren’t published. Up until this point these reasons have remained valid. Obviously, if you don’t own a resource it doesn’t make sense to treat it like like you paid good money for it. It’s equally stupid to waste time and energy listing something that isn’t authoritative or might disappear at the whim of some Cheeto eating webmaster.
Enter Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.”
The British rock band released it’s seventh album straight to the internet via digital download in 2007. Interesting, no? Despite the fact that the band eventually released the album on CD it’s worth asking a question, “what if Radiohead had decided to ignore their record company? What if they never sold “In Rainbows” on CD-Rom?” Interestingly enough, to this day OCLC, the largest unified catalog on the planet does not have an obvious MARC cataloging record available. Libraries have taken the cheap way out and cataloged the CD that they bought! Considering that the album received very positive reviews this constitutes a gaping hole in our collective methodologies. It is quite possible that next time libraries are going to be left out. Worse yet, it could mean that our patrons aren’t going get what they want.
I’m not saying that it will be easy to fix this problem. Providing access to a digital resource requires specific tools and specific technological skills. Fixing or replacing MARC is even more problematic! Nonetheless, librarians don’t have a much of a choice about what to do. Digital resources aren’t going anywhere soon and the good old days are gone for sure. An airbag may have saved Thom Yorke’s life once but he’s shown that unless libraries get their act together we all may be dead.
