Areas of
common practice at LAMs are numerous and ever expanding – especially concerning
technology. After all, in her article, New
Technologies and the Convergence of Libraries, Archives, and Museums,
Deborah Wythe states that LAMs all, “embrace new technologies as a means of
providing access to our collections,”[1]
and for her, it is the only area of substantial convergence between the three.
This paper will focus on the affects of technology on cataloging at LAMs both in house, and
with an institution’s larger audience.
Wyeth also
states that library and archives professionals share some skill sets.[2] If
one of these shared sets of skills revolves mostly around cataloging, it can be
argued that museum professionals also have some training in common with librarians and archivists. How a
museum’s Registrar would go about cataloging a new acquisition may vary greatly
from how a Librarian would complete the same task, yet the concept behind what both
professionals strive for remains the same: to create means to find, evaluate,
and access an item. Yet as Baca and O’Keefe discuss, getting professionals from
both realms to agree on a single collections management system (CMS) at a
shared institution, let alone a shared set of standards to guide its usage proved immensely
challenging.[3] At
the Morgan Library, this process took time, but provides a model that other
institutions can learn from; especially in terms of how librarians and curators
were able to work together, find compromise, and actually begin using a new
system.
Some of
this compromise can be found in the form of the collaborative nature of
creating the actual catalog records. Curators at the Morgan were accustomed to
having multiple people work on individual item records over time, as new
details about attribution and works’ creation dates became available.[4]
Through open dialogue, both librarians and curators were able to agree about
how to continue this practice within the new CMS. If laborious at times, this open
communication and willingness to compromise seem key to the successful
implementation of a new system.[5]
Enabling
multiple contributors to a single record also became a form of “expert
tagging.”[6] In
the case of the Morgan, the experts were all in-house, curators and others
trained as art historians with years of knowledge to inform their cataloging
decisions. While this may vary from a traditional library cataloging model, it
is an example of technology enabling more thorough scholarship in the LAM
setting – technology that was allowed to work through human compromise about
the role it would play. The ability to share a catalog within, and even
outside, of a single institution is now taken for granted, but one of the next
challenges faced by LAMs is to figure out how to encourage and sustain valuable engagement with online
collections from those outside of the insular setting of a single institution.
Opening
some aspects of cataloging up to the entire population has not yet taken hold
throughout the LAM community, but there have been a few projects that have used
crowdsourcing to successfully enhance their collections’ records. In his blog
post, Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage:
The Objectives Are Upside Down, author Trevor Owens describes this new
phenomenon, “At its best,
crowdsourcing is not about getting someone to do work for you, it is about
offering your users the opportunity to participate in public memory.”[7]
Valuable.
At
its best.
Suspicion remains about whole heartedly opening up the cataloging process – even portions of it – to the
masses. Small bouts of tagging may encourage users to access collections for a
short period of time, and to make contributions that may or may not provide
useful data. Owens also discusses the fact that gimmicks do not promote long
term, meaningful engagement with collections.[8]
Further, does this type of superficial tagging truly benefit a collection? How
does the data entered by the general population – popular tagging – compare to
that entered by staff at the Morgan – expert tagging? In recent years, some
LAMs have chosen to forgo popular tagging, and offer their audiences a more engaging option. Owens discusses
a project in which online visitors are given the opportunity to transcribe
journals from the Civil War and finds this project was successful in both
establishing long-term connections between the public and the collection, as well as by generating useful data. Here, even if the user generated transcriptions are not
entirely accurate, they do create text that is far more accurate and human
readable than what would be generated through running an OCR program on the
diary scans.[9]
Valuable
user generated collections content is still a new concept across LAMs. However,
there are definite possibilities for professionals from LAMs to build on the
successes of the fledgling programs that have had an impact elsewhere, in order
to enhance other collections as well as and institution's visitor base. In her article, Records and Access, Esther Bierbaum
mentions that a stark difference between libraries and museums is that,
“libraries tend to emphasize the technologies associated with language, and
museums tend to collect and offer non-linguistic sources of communication.”[10]
If professionals working at LAMs are able to work through this distinction, it
is likely that they will be able to find traction for new types of projects
that utilize new technology in enabling their visitors to make meaningful
contributions to collections as they become increasingly attached to them.
[1]
Deborah Wythe, “New Technologies and the Convergence of Libraries, Archives,
and Museums,” RBM: A Journal of Rare
Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 8, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 52-3.
[2]
Wythe, “New Technologies,” 52.
[3]
Murtha Baca and Elizabeth O’Keefe, “Sharing Standards and Expertise in the
Early 21st Century: Moving Toward a Collaborative, “Cross-community”
Model for Metadata Creation,” International
Cataloging Bibliography Control 38 no. 4 (October/December 2009): 61-2.
[4]
Ibid., 64.
[5]
Ibid., 63.
[6] Ibid.,
60.
[7]
Trevor Owens, “Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: The Objectives Are Upside Down,”
User Centered Digital History, March
10, 2012, accessed October 14, 2013, http://www.trevorowens.org/2012/03/crowdsourcing-cultural-heritage-the-objectives-are-upside-down. Emphasis mine.
[8]
Ibid.
[9]
Clearly I'm excited about the possibilities with this type of project! I love
the example of the transcriber who enlisted the assistance of his friend who is
a military historian in order to better fact check his work! I think there are
a lot of possibilities here.
[10]
Esther Green Bierbaum, “Records and Access,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 9, no. 1 (1988): 97. I
have quite a few problems with this blanket statement, but a related longer
discussion is not within the scope of this paper. In short, I don’t think that
it’s possible to simplify a distinction between “language” and “non-linguistic”
– the two are intertwined with the essence of communication. Within the
scenario of her statement, problems arise quickly: what about scanners in
libraries, or artworks by Barbara Kruger or Johanna Drucker?
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