Category: Cataloguing and Classification

FLASHback: Reimagining the Australian Extension to LCSH

Posted on by Alissa

Australian library catalogues speak American English. This has pissed me off for as long as I can remember (long before I started working in libraries). I want to do something about it.

Pink and grey Polaroid camera

Thing is, Australian librarians have wanted to do—and have done—something about this for decades. The venerable John Metcalfe thundered about the increasing use of American language, by way of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, in Australian libraries in the late 1960s (‘I have a rooted objection to consulting foreign language catalogues; my language is Australian English’)1. Successive groups of cataloguers and other interested librarians edited and produced two editions of the List of Australian Subject Headings, intended to supplement LCSH, in the 1980s (First Edition of the List of Australian Subject Headings, or FLASH) and early 1990s (Second Edition, or SLASH). Sadly, the ANBD Standards Committee resolved to move away from most of this work in 1998 with the impending move to Kinetica2; Ross Harvey lamented the decline of Australian subject access the following year3.

These days it’s fair to say the Americanisation of our public and academic library catalogues is not a priority for library managers. School libraries, of course, largely use the in-house SCIS thesaurus, designed by Australians for Australians, and certain special libraries such as AIATSIS, ACER and the federal Parliamentary Library maintain their own thesauri. But the publics and academics, where the vast majority of cataloguing is outsourced, cling to LCSH as their primary subject controlled vocabulary. I suspect it’s more out of apathy than loyalty.

Today the Australian extension to LCSH sits on a forgotten corner of the Trove website, quietly gathering dust, the content copy-pasted from the former Libraries Australia website. It has looked like this for at least a decade. Development policy? What development policy?! From experience, the only parts of the extension still in common use are the compound ethnic descriptors (Vietnamese Australians, Italian Australians, etc) and the ability to subdivide geographically directly by state (eg Ducks—Victoria—Geelong, rather than Ducks—Australia—Victoria—Geelong). These local terms are coded as LCSH (ie, 650 #0) even though they’re not.

I couldn’t understand why this crucial aspect of Australian bibliographic culture was (is) being completely ignored. I thought a lot last year about what a solution could look like. I was deeply torn between doing free work for the Americans—that is, pushing for an Australian SACO funnel, which would make contributing to LCSH easier and more accessible for Australian libraries4—and building local vocabulary infrastructure here at home to enable libraries to describe resources for Australian users in Australian English. Neither option is perfect, and each would require a fair bit of work and maintenance.

What swayed me towards the latter was remembering that an Australian SACO funnel wouldn’t actually solve the core issue as I see it: LCSH will always use American spellings and American words as preferred subject headings. It might include alternate spellings or words as ‘use for’ or non-preferred terms, but ultimately it will always call things ‘Railroads’ and ‘Airplanes’ and ‘Automobiles’ and ‘Turnpikes’. It will always be compiled for the primary benefit of the US Library of Congress. The status of LCSH as the de facto standard subject vocabulary for Anglophone libraries worldwide is a secondary consideration.

So I thought—what if we brought the FLASH back? What could a revived Australian extension to LCSH look like? I wanted to know where we got up to in the 1990s, how many uniquely Australian terms might be used today, whether it would be worth re-compiling these into a new supplementary vocabulary, and how to encode, host, maintain and govern such a vocabulary for maximum benefit and impact.

One week, fifty-one dollars and 177 scanned pages later, I had a PDF copy of the unpublished second edition of the List of Australian Subject Headings (SLASH) from 1993, thanks to the State Library of New South Wales (the only holding library) and a tip from ALIA. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the early nineties, a time I am too young to remember, with thesaurus terms reflecting Australian society, culture, politics, and bibliographic anxiety about particular Americanisms.

Analysing this document will be quite a task. I am fortunate to have institutional access to NVivo, a ‘qualitative data analysis computer software package’ (thanks Wikipedia) that researchers use for things like literature reviews and analysing interviews. I am not an academic, but I suppose I am now a researcher.

I’m currently tagging (what NVivo adorably calls ‘coding’) thesaurus entries by theme, where there is some overlap:

  • First Nations people and culture
  • Australian plants and animals
  • Australian English re-spellings of LCSH terms
  • Uniquely Australian terms and concepts not found in LCSH
  • Outdated or offensive terms
  • Interesting terms for further discussion (this category won’t be included in the final analysis)

First Nations terms would these days be drawn from the AIATSIS thesauri and AUSTLANG. Many terms for Australian nature and culture (such as ‘Mateship’) have since made their way into LCSH proper, and many offensive terms have recently been, or will shortly be, addressed by LC. I want to know what’s left over: how many terms, in which thematic areas, whether it’s worth exploring further. It’s entirely possible that after I’ve narrowed down the list to Australian concepts not yet in LCSH, and Australian spellings that will never be in LCSH, it might not be worth doing anything. I don’t know yet, and I’ve decided I’d like to find out.

So far I’ve only finished coding the As, but it’s a fascinating exercise. Some choices made in SLASH are still ahead of where LCSH is today, such as the reclamation of ‘Indians’ to refer to people from India5 (the SLASH term for Native Americans has, uh, not aged well). Other choices reflect divergences between Australian and American English that I suspect have since narrowed, such as preferring ‘Flats’ over ‘Apartments’.

Over the next few weeks or so I’ll hopefully code the rest of the SLASH headings and assemble a corpus of data to guide my next moves. I’d love to hear from anyone who likes the idea of a revived Australian extension to LCSH, even if they might not be so sure how their library could practically implement it. Catalogue and vocabulary maintenance is a lot easier now than it used to be (depending on your ILS—some exclusions apply!!) and I’m reasonably confident that we could make something cool happen. We’ll see what the data says…

  1. Metcalfe, J. (1969). Notes of a contribution by Mr. J. Metcalfe on LC Subject Cataloguing as Central Cataloguing Used in Australian Libraries. Seminar on the Use of Library of Congress Cataloguing in Australian Libraries, Adelaide. Cited in McKinlay, J. (1982). Australia, LCSH and FLASH. Library Resources & Technical Services, 26(2), 100–109. ↩
  2. Trainor, J. (1998). The future direction for Australian subject access. 45th Meeting of the ANBD Standards Committee. Retrieved January 12, 2023. ↩
  3. Harvey, R. (1999). Hens or chooks? Internationalisation of a distinctive Australian bibliographic organisation practice. Cataloguing Australia, 25(1/4), 244–260. ↩
  4. You don’t have to be a member of SACO to propose new or changed LCSH, but I understand that it helps—the form for non-SACO members is missing some crucial detail, such as the correct email address to send it to, and proposers are often not notified about the progress of their submissions. ↩
  5. For more on this heading, see Biswas, P. (2018). Rooted in the Past: Use of “East Indians” in Library of Congress Subject Headings. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 56(1), 1–18. ↩

Reimagining Australian descriptive workflows: where should we start?

Posted on by Alissa

Landscape shot of country New South Wales

I spent my Easter weekend reading the new OCLC report ‘Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: A Community-informed Agenda for Reparative and Inclusive Descriptive Practice’, a clarion call for systemic change in library cataloguing and metadata practices, informed by Black and Indigenous librarians from around the world, including Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. About bloody time! Great to see Big Library embracing the metadata renaissance. Reassuringly for me, the report largely reflected what I already knew to be necessary, even if I had to read between the lines a little. The companion Shift Collective report on the gatherings they facilitated for OCLC was notably sharper in tone, prepared to say the quiet parts out loud.

The problem is not only our controlled vocabularies, our content standards, our data exchange formats, our classification systems. The problem is cataloguing culture itself. Culturally we do not treat information maintenance as a practice of care, but rather as a series of one-off tasks to be done as quickly and ‘efficiently’ as possible, exactly the same way as everyone else does them. Our misguided notions of ‘quality’ lead us to slavishly follow the peculiar and specialised practices of a library serving the United States Congress, with all the biases and value judgements this entails. Cataloguers have minimal agency over the standards and practices that have traditionally guided this work. Library users have even less.

The challenge for me, in Australia, is figuring out where to start. I know I am far from the only person doing the work here, but truthfully it often feels like I’m blogging into the void. Where are my like-minded peers? How can I find you? How can we work together? I want to build community around reparative description and critical cataloguing, both as a well-meaning white lady and as a professional cataloguer. The first thing to do is to start conversations. Let’s meet. Let’s listen. Let’s talk.

Specifically, let’s talk about power. Clearly there is a power vacuum at the heart of resource description in Australian libraries. The National Library is no longer resourced to care about this work and has excused itself from taking a leadership role in Australian cataloguing. Libraries of all kinds have cut their cataloguing staff to the bone, or done away with them altogether, in the interests of ‘efficiency’ and ‘customer service’. Shelf-ready vendors will do exactly what their customers (libraries) pay them to do, but is the tail wagging the dog? And how often do we liaise with our users and communities on these topics? It feels like nobody really knows what to do, or wants to pay for it. Who among us has the power to enact change?

The answer is: all of us. All of us library workers, all of us library users, all of us who care enough to make things happen.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what I’ve been up to, as a metadata team leader at an academic library. I’m in the process of evicting the notorious ‘Illegal aliens’ LCSH from my catalogue (as soon as I get our authority record load tables fixed, because unlike most libraries we still have an authority file worth maintaining). I’m writing up a project plan for our Indigenous knowledges institute to catalogue their library, putting into practice everything I know and believe in. I’m investigating where best in the Dewey 200s to move the Dreaming stories we currently classify as ‘fairy tales’. I can do all this because my workplace understands the importance and impact of metadata. I’ve been wanting to do this stuff for a long time and am using every inch of positional power I have to advance the work that matters.

So what do I want to see? What could Australian reparative description look like? I have a few suggestions:

  • Guidance for all libraries, and indeed all GLAMs, to undertake metadata audits: identify outdated and harmful subject headings, colonial names and deadnames, presence of harmful descriptive metadata, absence of necessary cultural advice / appropriate language codes / accessibility metadata etc, with suggestions and support for reparative work—we have to identify our problematic metadata before we can fix it
  • Implementation and maintenance of AUSTLANG Indigenous language codes and AIATSIS Indigenous subject headings in all public and academic libraries, supporting vendors and shelf-ready suppliers to provide this data, and ensuring library systems can process and display it—help make our catalogues culturally safer spaces
  • Cultural guidance for non-Indigenous cataloguers to respectfully describe and contextualise Indigenous materials, including the application of AIATSIS subject headings (which I could really use at the moment!)—help make our cataloguers culturally safer people
  • Resurrection, maintenance and ongoing use of LASH, the Australian extension to LCSH, for Australian terms and concepts beyond the scope of the AIATSIS subject headings (formerly maintained by the NLA, currently gathering dust)1—describe Australian concepts in Australian English
  • Establishing Australian NACO and SACO funnels to enable library workers to directly add new name headings to the LC Name Authority File, and more efficiently suggest new and revised LC subject headings2—if we can’t beat them, join them
  • Encouraging libraries to maintain descriptive metadata and subject headings a) for non-English-language material in that language and/or b) for all material in languages widely spoken in the community they serve—make catalogues more accessible to multilingual and multicultural communities
  • Use of additional specialist vocabularies to support community needs and preferences, such as Homosaurus for LGBTQI+ material and/or the Anchor Archive Zine Thesaurus for zines and other radical literature—embrace multiplicity and complexity in subject cataloguing
  • Displaying the source of subject headings used in the catalogue, as is done at the State Library of New South Wales (highlighted in the OCLC report) and in libraries using WorldCat Discovery, like Library and Archives NT3—establish our data provenance and publicly own our descriptive choices
  • Supporting libraries to actively solicit user and community feedback on their catalogue data and classification / shelf arrangement schemes—catalogue with our communities, not solely for our communities
  • Building a community of practice for Australian reparative description, embodying an intersectional approach, and actively advocating for the resourcing and institutional respect that this work deserves

This is far from an exhaustive list. Some things will require more resourcing than others. But we all have a collective responsibility to do this work properly. Libraries and everything in them are colonial imports; many libraries, including the one I work for, are strategically prioritising Indigenous knowledges and lifeways, acknowledging that the Western way is not the only way. The state of Victoria, where I live, is launching the first formal truth-telling commission of its kind in Australia, the Yoorrook Justice Commission. It ‘will establish an official record of the impact of colonisation on First Peoples in Victoria, as well as make recommendations for practical actions and reform needed in Victoria to acknowledge historical injustices and address ongoing injustices.’

Currently we lack a clear galvanising moment of change in this country, a collective boot up the arse to shame us all into action. In Canada, it was the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on the genocidal policy of removing First Nations, Métis and Inuit children from their homes and ‘educating’ them in residential schools (sound familiar?)4. In the United States, it was the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police (which is what prompted OCLC’s Reimagine Descriptive Workflows project in the first place). Perhaps the Yoorrook Justice Commission’s draft report, due next year, will be this moment. But I see no reason to wait.

I keep thinking about the ‘Acknowledged tensions and contradictions’ listed on page 8 of the OCLC report (page 15 of the PDF). I often find myself saying ‘Lots of things are true at the same time’ as a way of recognising and being present with complexity. To me, the below statements are not contradictory. They are not dichotomous. Rather, they are representative of the different scales at which this work is done. As with any systemic change, this work happens at both the micro and macro level, at different points in space and time. One does not cancel out the other. What matters is that the work happens, at the level we’re at, in the knowledge that it will be seen from, and impact, other levels in turn.

  • This work requires community consultation / This work should be done in a non-extractive fashion and requires that everyone take responsibility
  • This work is urgent / This work takes time
  • This work is important for our general collections, shared and used by everyone / This work is important for special and unique collections
  • This work needs to be understood at a local community level / This work has broad and even global implications
  • Change is best accomplished at the local level / Change is best accomplished through networks
  • Language must be precise to demonstrate respect and inclusivity / In a diverse world, there will never be full agreement on the same words

‘You all need to do something. You’ll fuck it up, and get it wrong, and need to fix things. But the worst thing you can do is to do nothing.’ I can’t remember where I heard Kirsten Thorpe say this—possibly relayed second-hand from someone else. But I think about it a lot. My well-meaning efforts might be misguided, I’ve undoubtedly made mistakes already, and I definitely don’t have all the answers, but at least I can stand up and say that I’m doing something. What will you do?

  1. Some terms in Australian English, like ‘Primary schools’ and ‘Roundabouts’ will never become preferred terms in LCSH, an American English vocabulary. They make more sense to Australian audiences than ‘Elementary schools’ and ‘Traffic circles’. Public libraries in particular should feel empowered to use whatever language suits their communities best—but we ought to be honest about our data provenance, and stop encoding these terms as valid LCSH when they’re not. ↩
  2. This might seem like an odd suggestion to foreign audiences, and truthfully it’s not my first preference, but currently Australian library workers have practically no say in the composition of our most commonly-used name and subject authority files. If Australian libraries are gonna be using LCSH for the foreseeable future, we may as well give ourselves a seat at that table. ↩
  3. Wouldn’t it be great if WorldCat Discovery libraries could reorder those subject headings, so that the most culturally relevant thesauri appear first…! ↩
  4. For an outline of post-TRC reparative efforts in Canadian public libraries, see Rathi, D., & Wiebe, R. (2020). ‘Decolonization Efforts by Canadian Public Libraries.’ Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes Du congrès Annuel De l’ACSI; for academic libraries, see Edwards, A. (2019). ‘Unsettling the Future by Uncovering the Past: Decolonizing Academic Libraries and Librarianship’. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 14(1). ↩

A metadata renaissance?

Posted on by Alissa

Lately I find myself donating many hours of my time to the ALIA Professional Pathways project, a multi-year effort to overhaul the education and accreditation of Australia’s library workers. I made a public submission to the initial stages of the project last year, commented privately on a draft version of the Frameworks Project Technical Report earlier this year (all 300+ pages of it!), attended a focus group a couple of weeks ago. The final version of the Technical Report was released this week, and includes this comment, attributed to me:

Concerns have long been expressed that the technical skills for cataloguers and metadata librarians are downplayed or even ignored by library educators and library managers (A. McCulloch, personal communication, January 16, 2022). [pages 32-33]

That paragraph includes assorted citations of competencies and skills frameworks for cataloguers and metadata librarians (contributed by yours truly), before going on to state that the rest of the Technical Report would discuss ‘selected frameworks pertaining to public libraries, academic and research libraries, health, legal and government library and information services’ as well as ‘staff working in school libraries, archives and records management’. So, not metadata librarians as a speciality, whose work often takes us across sectors.

I didn’t realise the report would cite me by name, and I worried about whether I had been too sharp in my feedback. But the last few weeks have demonstrated to me that I’m not wrong.

There is a huge disconnect between the core library skills and competencies outlined in reports like these—presumably informed by what library managers and educators say they want—and the skills and competencies that said managers are prepared to pay for and said educators are willing to teach. Sure, the Technical Report mentions metadata a fair few times, but largely in the context of related areas like research data management and digital humanities, rather than on-the-ground metadata work in libraries. Cataloguing was included in several core competencies lists for librarianship, but almost from muscle memory: a reflection of what libraries are ‘supposed’ to do, rather than what actually happens.

One of the people in my Professional Pathways focus group relayed a story about a pair of new graduates in their library service who had admitted that they didn’t know what metadata was and didn’t know how to catalogue. I think I responded with a surprise emoji, but truthfully it’s not that surprising. Elsewhere I had already anecdotally heard of many public library workers who have wound up with cataloguing duties but have chronically low levels of catalogue literacy. They don’t know enough about MARC to know what to do—and they know they don’t know—so they’re too scared to touch anything, and their data decays.

I know there’s only so much a university or TAFE institution can squeeze into a library course, and that our degree offerings are necessarily generalist owing to the small size of our sector, but these and other anecdata suggest that our current cataloguing education is insufficient. The Technical Report discusses the new BSB50520 Diploma of Library and Information Services training package, noting that ‘a group of detailed units relating to cataloguing activities have also been removed from the training package’ (page 210). It was hard to tell from the training.gov.au website what exactly had been removed; I could see only one unit of competency expressly relating to cataloguing in the new package, rather than two in the old. Either way, whittling down the level of data and catalogue literacy required of new library technicians will only worsen these problems.

The standard course offerings at all three remaining Australian LIS schools (Curtin, CSU, UniSA) include an entry-level metadata subject and a specialist cataloguing subject. By comparison, the University of Washington lists no fewer than six metadata-related courses in its handbook (admittedly they’re a much bigger school). Other library schools have more expansive metadata curricula: University College London makes a point of including ‘radical cataloguing’ in its syllabus, while Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand’s only graduate library school, teaches its specialist cataloguing students how to apply Ngā Ūpoko Tukutuku, Māori Subject Headings.

I’m not sure new library graduates in Australia would commonly know what MarcEdit is, or understand the principles of how an ILS handles MARC records, or appreciate how to appropriately use AIATSIS subject headings. I taught myself everything I know about critical cataloguing (and have taught many others in turn). Our education still focuses on traditional cataloguing at the record level, but critical appraisal and batch remediation of metadata are increasingly important aspects of our work. It might be time for a new lens.

I continue to worry about whether librarianship considers itself a ‘technical’ profession. My experience suggests that it doesn’t, even though I’ve worked in ‘technical services’ for most of my career. The Technical Report mentions the technology competencies listed in the 2014 WebJunction Competency index for the library field whereby anything beyond ‘using email and the internet’ is expected to be the IT department’s responsibility, describing systems librarians as an ‘accident’ that would only happen in small libraries. It’s inaccurate and insulting, but it betrays a more disturbing truth about how some parts of this sector conceptualise librarianship as being solely a ‘customer service’ profession, excluding core infrastructural work from this definition. In this model, ‘IT people’ look after systems, acquisitions work is outsourced to vendors selecting whatever fits a ‘profile’ and catalogue records are commodified, purchased, uploaded as a one-and-done process, and left to decay. None of these workers would be considered ‘librarians’ because their technical work is pushed outside the physical and ontological bounds of the library. It therefore becomes ‘not library work’.

Cataloguing has had to persistently prove its worth over the years like no other area of librarianship. At one point people tried victim-blaming cataloguers for the fact nobody liked them, but more recent studies note that all library workers have a role to play in improving communication about, and perceptions of, cataloguing work (this feels rather like the famed ‘double empathy problem’ in autism studies). My work inhabits a third space, client-focused though not client-facing, deeply technical yet deeply personal. Metadata forms the nexus between a person and a resource, mediated through data and ontologies and systems, sometimes guided by a library worker but usually ‘discovered’ by users themselves. Encoding this knowledge is skilled, technical work. I know by now not to presume that such data curation is self-evidently important.

The Technical Report discusses ‘skills for future professional practice’ at considerable length—digital curation, data librarianship, digital humanities librarianship, information governance, et cetera—but they’re really future areas of practice underpinned by a solid foundation of technical skills, including (meta)data creation and maintenance, ontologies, data literacy, data ethics, database design and related systems architecture. Precisely the kinds of skills that cataloguers and metadata librarians ALREADY HAVE. The areas of practice listed in the Report appear to be more about building the next new shiny thing than about maintaining the umpteen broken shiny things that came before it, especially when this maintenance is already thinly resourced. For years it’s been fashionable to shit on cataloguers, and now you’re telling me that our skills are the future of librarianship? People sure do have a funny way of showing their appreciation.

And yet: am I wrong, now? Are things really, finally, slowly, starting to change? The success (ish) of the long-running campaign to Change the Subject and remove the term ‘Illegal aliens’ from the Library of Congress Subject Headings has fiercely demonstrated that cataloguing is power—and that libraries have the power to take matters into their own hands and use local headings when LCSH is no longer up to the task. Suddenly critical cataloguing is the hottest new library trend. Except now it’s been rebranded as ‘inclusive cataloguing’ or ‘reparative description’.

Institutions are hurriedly declaring their intentions to ‘decolonise the catalogue’ (a near-impossible task, given that Indigenous societies have not historically organised their knowledge this way) and are championing efforts to improve the description of First Nations materials. Adding AUSTLANG codes and AIATSIS subject headings is a part of this process, but the real work is in reframing descriptive elements of a catalogue record from a First Nations perspective, adding content warnings or explanatory notes, Traditional Knowledge Labels or keywords for First Nations concepts.

Other archaic or questionable Library of Congress Subject Headings, such as ‘Sexual minorities’ to describe the queer community or ‘East Indians’ to describe people from India (as opposed to ‘Indians’, which pejoratively describes Native Americans), could be replaced with terms from alternative vocabularies like Homosaurus, or with local headings. Edith Cowan University’s 2021 Library of the Future report includes as a priority ‘Update outdated or discriminatory cataloguing (i.e LGBTIQA+, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander)’ and Deakin University Library’s 2022 Strategic Plan includes a goal to enhance metadata with AUSTLANG codes and AIATSIS subject headings.1

Librarians increasingly recognise that our work is not neutral, that we imbue our values and ethics into all areas of professional practice, and that we make active decisions in favour of certain things and against others. This includes metadata. It means training and educating library workers at all levels to make the best decisions for their collections. We don’t all have to be hardcore cataloguers, just as we don’t all have to be maestros of children’s storytime. But our profession needs—and our communities deserve—a higher baseline of catalogue and metadata literacy.

I admit I felt a great sense of unease upon finishing the draft Technical Report. I struggled to see myself and my work reflected in Professional Pathways, to the point where I wondered whether I ought to join DAMA instead. I said all this to the project team, who graciously took my sternly-worded feedback on board. But the Technical Report is notable to me for what it didn’t say. Still I worry about our profession’s history and its deep-seated biases against cataloguers and cataloguing, that there remain people who still don’t think of what we do as real, core library work, who forget that yes, this is still a thing. I desperately want to be wrong about this. It really does feel like we are on the cusp of a metadata renaissance. But I can’t forget what led us here.

  1. Possibly as a result of this accidental speech. ↩

Beyond ‘Ditch Dewey’ in the academic library

Posted on by Alissa

An old 90s television displaying a blue screen, set in front of a red brick wall

‘Why don’t we just ditch Dewey?’

Well, why don’t we just. After all, it’s a fair question, provocatively asked by a client services librarian at a session of our week-long end-of-year zoom gathering. My heart sank. Of course somebody asked this. A fellow colleague cheekily posted in the zoom chat ‘Your time to shine, Alissa!’ I can’t recall ever meeting him properly, but I guess he knew who I really was? I could see the University Librarian about to respond, as the Q&A portion of the hour was intended for the library executive, when suddenly I found myself interrupting, unmuted, to over a hundred people:

‘Uh, could I just say something here?’

With approximately zero seconds notice I ad-libbed five or so minutes of explanation around this idea, having entirely forgotten to put my camera on. My hands were shaking by the end of it. Surprise public speaking is really not my thing.

Here’s a much fuller version of what I think I said, with some added points that I only thought of after a strong peppermint tea and some chillout time with my fern collection. I know my comments were recorded for an internal audience but I’m deliberately not going back and listening to them! While I’m not a classification expert, I have spent many years agitating for more critical attitudes to this work, and I am the metadata team leader here, after all. If anyone was going to give a (decent) answer to this question, it was gonna be me.

Smart move, loser. Now you’re gonna have to say something!

Shut up, brain.

These days, ditching Dewey is no longer an outrageous, unthinkable suggestion. Only 19% of American academic libraries were found to be using DDC in 2018, with that number steadily dropping. The biggest problem now is what to replace it with. If there existed a better classification system for generalist academic libraries like ours, chances are someone would be using it already. I could spend my entire career devising something better and still never be finished – and it’s not like OCLC are resourcing this work for DDC anymore. The only other system in wide use in Australia is Library of Congress Classification (LCC), which isn’t exactly a better option. It encodes the biases, perspectives and priorities of the United States government, just like LCSH does, and why would we want that in our library? The nexus of classificatory power is located far, far away from us, when it needs to be right here. LCC has a tendency to historicise Indigenous peoples—that is, place everything about them in the history section, as if they have ceased to exist entirely—and encodes archaic and offensive perspectives on topics as diverse as Arabic literature and the geography of Cold War-era Eastern Europe.

Genrefication isn’t really an option for academic libraries. Our collections are designed for serious research and study, not recreational reading or other types of lifelong learning; whimsical genres are largely inappropriate for an academic setting. Besides, even public library genrefication projects, such as the one at the flagship branch a stone’s throw from my office, are often built on Dewey’s foundations; the books are shelved in distinct genres, yet continue to use a DDC number as a shelfmark, meaning the substrate logic remains the same but is made impenetrable to a casual browser. It makes the browsing experience more frustrating, because you no longer have the granularity of Dewey to guide you, only a broad category. Academic library users are typically quite focused in their browsing. We couldn’t just say ‘here’s the economics section’ and leave them to it—we need the kind of granularity only a formal classification system can provide.

Our print collections have been largely unavailable for browsing for the best part of two years. We’ve been doing distance education for decades and have a large and growing cohort of exclusively online students. It’s not like a lot of people are actively browsing our physical collections right now. Also, reclassifying an entire print collection fills me with dread! My team of 1.6 FTE are nowhere near resourced enough for such a enormous undertaking – physically retrieving, reclassifying, restickering and reshelving every single print book in our branches would take months and involve huge amounts of work. We just don’t have that kind of capacity.

Besides, is large-scale reclassification truly the best use of my team’s limited time and considerable talents? I feel like there are more immediate and more focused things my team and I can do to improve the cultural safety of our metadata. We could be adding AUSTLANG codes and AIATSIS subject headings to our First Nations materials, overlaying records from Libraries Australia that already feature this data. We could work to contextualise offensive and culturally unsafe depictions of First Nations topics, adding content warnings where necessary. We could work with our Indigenous knowledges institute and our colleagues in the Archives to apply Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels for materials we collectively hold, ensuring their provenance, protocols and permissions are clearly documented.

I had a conversation with one of our liaison librarians and her boss a few weeks ago about her campus library shelving First Nations Dreaming stories in 398.2, the myths and fairy tales section. The juxtaposition of core cultural and religious texts with lightweight children’s stories is manifestly inappropriate; the former’s continued placement here, in spite of clear DDC instructions to the contrary since 2003, is a damning indictment of the cultural incompetence of library cataloguers.1 My liaison librarian colleague mentioned this situation in the zoom chat—I suspect it was a surprise to many of our colleagues, including the University Librarian. I responded after I had finished speaking with ‘Absolutely – I look forward to fixing this next year’. I was going to do it anyway but it’s nice to have senior management buy-in for these things 🙂

The Dewey Decimal Classification was designed by a particular man, at a particular time, in a particular place, with a particular collection and for a particular audience. His notoriously questionable values and those of the classification system that bears his name are, by and large, not those we share today. But who is ‘we’? Who gets to put books where? Whose values are encoded and embodied in the placement of books on shelves? What values would our institution like us to project in our physical and digital spaces? What about the multitude of value systems that our students and researchers bring to those spaces? How do we represent such multitudes in a linear shelf arrangement? Should we even try?

Don’t get me wrong, colleagues: I am all in favour of doing classification differently. But please don’t underestimate the difficulty and the sheer amount of work involved. It’s not as simple as just ‘ditching Dewey’.

At this point I ran out of courage and trailed off. The University Librarian, who I get the impression chooses their words carefully, said nothing for a few agonising seconds before inviting a question from another audience member. I had noticed them listening intently as I spoke. I hoped they didn’t mind me interrupting.

Two days later, in another session of our week-long end-of-year zoom gathering, the conversation turned to the ethics of AI, and how systems reflect the biases and perspectives of the people who build them. The UL remarked that the discussion really went to the heart of critical librarianship—recognising that the library profession also has a long history of perpetuating all sorts of biases and harms in our work. And I just about fell off my chair.

Was this real? Did I really work in a library where the University Librarian not only uses the phrase ‘critical librarianship’ in front of the entire staff but makes a point of actively living those values? Did I really hear the directors echo those comments and agree that perhaps it’s time to reconsider our classifiation practices? Did I really hear the UL namecheck me twice in the closing session, for both my colleague’s presentation on our project to fix our batch file loading processes and also for my impromptu Dewey comments? Did I really say all that in front of everybody?!

Truly I feel like I’m working in paradise. It’s one thing to blurt out my Big Metadata Feels in response to a question that wasn’t even directed at me, but it’s quite another for my senior management to embrace these ideals, making a point of publicly supporting the work I do and the things I am so passionate about. Hearing ‘critical librarianship’ out loud at work has just about made my year. Every day I am so grateful to be here. I can’t wait to make good on this promise.

  1. I did not say this part out loud. ↩

Classifying autism spectrum disorders in DDC, LCC and NLM

Posted on by Alissa

Everyone, justifiably, wants to see themselves reflected in their library’s classifications. But the two major classification systems used in Anglophone libraries—Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and Library of Congress Classification (LCC)—as well as the (American) National Library of Medicine classification (NLM) have a long history of reflecting the biases, perspectives and limits to knowledge of the times and spaces they were first devised. Sometimes small aspects are updated, but structural biases are baked in, and far harder to fix.

The following outlines the treatment of autism spectrum disorders in these three major classification systems. None of them are sympathetic to the neurodiversity movement, and range from the benign to the downright offensive. It’s an insight into the history of social and medical attitudes toward autism, but a classification system is not the right place to be storing that history. I wish we could move with the times.

Dewey Decimal (DDC)

Works on the medical aspects of autism are classed at 616.85882, under ‘Intellectual disabilities; developmental and learning disorders’. This is how the medical establishment sees us, so therefore this is how Dewey sees us. The broader number 616.8588 sits between factitious disorders (including Munchausen syndrome) and ADHD, and is itself part of a grab-bag of socially-marginalised disorders at 616.858 that also include personality disorders, gender-identity disorders and ‘disorders of impulse control’. Can’t say I love this particularly pathologised perspective—and that’s even after looking the other way at ‘Diseases’!

The scope note reads: ‘Class here comprehensive works on pervasive development disorders’, with a note for PDDs other than autism to be classed at 616.85883. This echoes the DSM-IV and ICD-10 (that is, a previous) approach to autism, which classed autism as one of five pervasive developmental disorders. The DSM-5 and ICD-11 moved to using the term ‘autism spectrum disorder’, encompassing a range of autistic traits and severities, including those previously categorised as Asperger’s syndrome. Asperger’s is classed at 616.858832, but as this term is no longer used, I imagine the call number will eventually fall out of use as well.

WebDewey notes that the class number for autism changed with DDC edition 22, published in 2003. Previously autism was classed at 616.8982, as… a subtype of schizophrenia. I gotta admit, this was news to me too. Autism was once considered a form of childhood schizophrenia; while WebDewey doesn’t tell me when a class number was first introduced, I’m guessing this dates from around the 1960s or 1970s. It could be worse, for sure, but it could be a lot better, too.

A class number for the social aspects of autism was harder to find. WebDewey returned no results in the 300s for the search term ‘autism’, but returned two strong suggestions for the search term ‘developmental disabilities’: 305.9085 for works on autistic people ourselves, and 362.1968 for social services to autistic people. The term ‘developmental disabilities’ doesn’t exactly reflect how I see myself, but I’m very aware these schedules were not designed with low-needs autistic people in mind.

Library of Congress (LCC)

Until recently autism had only one LCC call number: RC553.A88, under ‘Internal medicine—Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry—Psychiatry—Specific pathological states, A-Z—Autism. Asperger’s syndrome’. I must admit, ‘specific pathological states’ is a more polite descriptor than I had expected to see in LCC—I don’t entirely hate it. Being a straight A to Z list it sits between ‘Auditory hallucinations’ and ‘Cognition disorders’.

Library of Congress cataloguer Netanel Ganin recently wrote about his efforts to address this absence, reinterpreting a call number range in the social sciences, HV1570, to include the social aspects of autism spectrum disorders. This accords with the treatment of other disabilities, such as blindness and deafness, whose medical aspects are classed in R and social aspects in HV.

Netanel notes that the full hierarchy of HV1570 (‘Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology—Protection, assistance and relief—Special classes—People with disabilities—Developmentally disabled’) is not without its problems, as LCC can’t help pathologising autistic people as needing ‘protection, assistance and relief’ and most medical literature regards autistic people as being developmentally disabled, which also explains its preponderance in DDC. This class number is, however, an improvement on LCC medicalising the entirety of the autistic experience.

As an autistic cataloguer I applaud Netanel’s work in this area to help books find their most appropriate home in the LCC schedules, and to make the best of a bad system.

National Library of Medicine (NLM)

Sadly, NLM classification is the worst of the lot. Here, autism doesn’t even warrant listing under its own name, instead being lumped under ‘Pervasive child development disorders’ and classified with ‘Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders’, at WM 203.5. The number for autism sits between schizophrenia and neurocognitive and perceptual disorders.

In a rare act of classificatory transparency, NLM schedules are full of ‘[This number not used]’ where a call number has been removed and its subject classified elsewhere – unfortunately, between the Cutter number and the see reference text, one can often surmise which archaic or offensive words or concepts were previously listed.

Unlike DDC, NLM continues to encode the discredited view of autism as a form of childhood schizophrenia by choosing WM 203.5, instead of an unused number in the WM 200s. Yet as medical understandings of autism spectrum disorders have grown and improved, their classification here remains stuck in the 1950s. It’s also very strange that a call number relating to child development disorders, a diagnosis typically made in, you know, childhood, is specified for works relating to adults only.

Adding ‘spectrum’ to the broader category doesn’t change which individual disorders are collocated with each other. Nor does it change the overall message that sends. Am I supposed to be grateful that autism isn’t classed as a mental illness, or an intellectual disability? I would have expected NLM to be more in line with the classification decisions made by the DSM and ICD, but instead they’ve changed a dressing instead of closing an open wound. I hope they will reconsider this classification in future.

Don’t dream it’s over; or, A return to cataloguing

Posted on by Alissa
A double rainbow joins the National Book Church™ and the National Science Temple™ against a backdrop of dark clouds, November 2018. Photograph by the author

A handful of Wednesdays ago I quit my job at a mildly prestigious library that shall remain nameless, after just over three years of employment. I wore my favourite cataloguing-themed t-shirt to work, bought one last book with my staff discount at the bookshop, and treated myself to a final helping of bain-marie slop at the cafeteria across the road. It still doesn’t seem entirely real that I’ve left. I still had so much to do.

The last six months have been the happiest and most fruitful of my entire career. I’ve absolutely loved being a systems librarian. I’ve had great fun crafting Access queries, running Perl scripts, devising Excel macros and more, while running complex data reports and conducting bulk data edits for business areas. I learned a heck of a lot about how data and systems work together (or not). But more than anything I’ve really loved my team. They’ve been wonderful people to work with, and I wish them every success.

I was a little surprised by how much time I spent saying ‘thank you’ during my last week. I’m not sure I expected to feel quite so grateful at the conclusion of my time there, but I guess I had a lot of complex feelings about the whole thing. Besides, it turned out I had a lot of people to thank: my wonderful boss Julie, my colleagues Sue and Brad, my director Simon, my previous director Libby, my old boss Cherie, good people like Ros H and Ros C and Catherine.

I wanted to finish that job feeling like I achieved something of lasting value. Instead I settled for starting something that will outlive me and hopefully become standard practice. Sure, helping implement a new service desk ticketing system was useful from an internal workflow perspective, but it’s not quite what I went there to do. Instead I called a meeting with a bunch of managers (well, my boss called it for me) to highlight several pieces of egregiously and systematically racist metadata in our catalogue, mostly relating to Indigenous Australians. Some of the old subject headings hadn’t been updated to the current terminology, while other headings should never have been in our catalogue in the first place. I outlined how my team could remediate these problems, but some policy decisions needed to be made first—ideally by those attending the meeting.

It’s a shame this meeting wound up happening on my last day. But the looks on the faces of my Indigenous colleagues convinced me I was doing the right thing. These terms should have been nuked from the catalogue twenty years ago, but the next best time to do that is now. I kinda felt like this shouldn’t have been up to me, a systems librarian, telling a roomful of people who all outranked me how to fix a data problem. But it needed doing, and I was in a team that had the technical ability to make the necessary changes. I regret that I won’t be around to see them happen.

Shortly after this meeting my director Simon was regaling us with an anecdote about longitudinal datasets; he has a background in statistics and often compares library metadata to things like the HILDA survey. But the key difference is that while HILDA’s questions and expected answers have changed over time in a discrete fashion, making it easier to see where such changes have occurred, library metadata corpora are a total mismash of standards and backgrounds, with each MARC field potentially having been added at a different time, in a different socio-cultural context, for a different purpose. Metadata librarians are grappling with the ongoing impact of data composition and recording choices made decades ago. We have virtually no version control (though it has been suggested) and little holistic understanding of our metadata’s temporal attributes. It makes retrospective #critcat efforts and other reparative description activities a lot harder, but it also hinders our ability to truly understand our descriptive past.

I was pleased to end my time there on a constructive note. But like I said, I have a lot of complex feelings about the last three years. I started out being one of those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new professionals who didn’t have a whole lot else going for her, wanting to prove her passion and devotion to her dream job by working herself to death, thinking that maybe her job would start to love her back. Please don’t do what I did. I might not have realised at the time how harmful this mindset is, but I also did not realise that I deserved better from an employer. Whenever I think about my time there—barring the last six months—I can’t shake these feelings of deep unhappiness. I feel like I was thrown in the deep end right at the start and spent years desperately trying not to drown. I started thinking nobody would care if I did drown. I was lucky that the restructure threw me a life raft, but the damage was done.

Happily, I have much more to look forward to now. After a pandemic-induced false start I’m finally fulfilling a lifelong dream to move to Victoria, to be closer to friends and forests, and to take up a role as a metadata team leader at a regional academic library. Professionally I feel like I’m returning to my metadata spiritual home, and I like having the word ‘quality’ in my new job title. The ‘team leader’ part is slightly intimidating though—I have no supervisory experience whatsoever (and they know that) but it’s something I’m very keen to do right. Everyone I’ve met there so far has been really lovely. I can’t wait to start next week.

I’m glad to be ending this rather turbulent chapter of my life and beginning a new, hopefully calmer one. I took this job for many reasons, but I keep coming back to the potential I sensed in it. There’s so much possibility here. It’s very exciting.

Cataloguing the songlines

Posted on by Alissa

You know what? I feel like we don’t talk enough about the structure of metadata. We’ve been talking a fair bit in recent years about offensive subject headings, inappropriately-used call numbers, for and against demographic details in name authority records. But my time as a systems librarian has reignited my deep interest in library data structures. Learning to write SQL queries and structure data in my head like our ILS does (that is, idiosyncratically) has meant I now spend most of my work days staring at spreadsheets. And I’ve started to wonder about some things.

How do our data structures and systems shape our data? How do MARC principles, informed by Western ways of knowing and speaking, influence our understanding and description of the books we catalogue? What biases and perspectives do our structures encode, perpetuate and privilege?

Consider the book Songspirals: sharing women’s wisdom of Country through songlines, joint-winner of the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards non-fiction category. The book is credited to the Gay’wu Group of Women, a collective of four sisters and their daughter from Yolŋu country in north-west Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, and three ŋäpaki (non-Indigenous) academics with whom they have collaborated for many years. The book is told in the sisters’ voice, sharing women’s deep cultural knowledge and wisdom through five ‘songspirals’. Settler Australia might know these as ‘songlines’, a term popularised by Bruce Chatwin in his 1987 book The Songlines, but as the Gay’wu Group writes,

In this book we call them songspirals as they spiral out and spiral in, they go up and down, round and round, forever. They are a line within a cycle. They are infinite. They spiral, connecting and remaking. They twist and turn, they move and loop. This is like all our songs. Our songs are not a straight line. They do not move in one direction thorugh time and space. They are a map we follow through Country as they connect to other clans. Everything is connected, layered wth beauty. Each time we sing our songspirals we learn more, do deeper, spiral in and spiral out. (p. xvi)

A collective author like the Gay’wu Group of Women sits uncomfortably within Western resource description paradigms. Does RDA consider them a person, family or corporate body? Would MARC enter them as a personal name (100) or a corporate name (110)? Why are these my only options? Why are groups of people considered to be ‘corporate bodies’? Why are ‘families’ limited to those who share a surname?

I borrowed Songspirals from my local library a few weeks before I delightfully received a copy as a birthday present. Their new, shiny catalogue distinguishes one author from the rest, mirroring the main-versus-added-entry choice MARC forces us to make, but I was puzzled to find their choice of main author was one of the seven, Laklak Burarrwaŋa. Her name was misspelt as ‘Burarrwana, Laklak’, missing the letter eng ŋ, which represents a ‘ng’ sound in Yolŋu Matha. (This letter is not commonly found on a standard keyboard, and so Laklak’s surname could also be acceptably spelt ‘Burarrwanga’.) Did this record originate in a system incapable of supporting quote-unquote ‘special characters’? Was it originally encoded in MARC-8, which appears not to support the letter ŋ? Did a cataloguer misread the letter? Or could they simply not be bothered?

It’s a questionable choice of main entry, as the Gay’wu Group of Women are prominently credited on the cover, spine and title page as the book’s author. But knowing the history of cataloguing as I do, I suspect I know why this choice was made: an old rule from AACR2 preferred personal names over corporate names for main entries, as explained in this heirloom cataloguing manual from 2003. Corporate bodies were only treated as main entries in limited circumstances, largely relating to administrative materials, legal, governmental and religious works, conference proceedings (where a 111 conference main entry was not appropriate) and for works ‘that record the collective thought of the body (e.g. reports of commissions, committees, etc.; official statements of position on external policies)’. It’s a fascinating and bizarre set of proscriptions. At no point does the manual explain the logic or context behind these rules. They are simply The Rules, to be broken or ignored at the cataloguer’s peril.

I never learned AACR2 so this convention has never made much sense to me. But I can easily imagine an elder cataloguer examining this book and going ‘hmm, the Gay’wu Group of Women don’t fit into any of the corporate body main entry rules that AACR2 burned into my brain, the members are listed individually by name on the title page, I’ll pick the first name as the main entry’ and entering Laklak’s name almost by rote. I don’t think any Australian libraries still use AACR2, but old habits die hard. It’s ridiculous that we still have to think about these things. Don’t cataloguers have better things to do than contort our data into antique data structures?

The DDC call number, 305.89915, is a catch-all for ‘books on Indigenous Australian societies’ irrespective of topic. All kinds of books end up here: Singing Bones on ethnomusicology in Arnhem Land, Sand Talk on philosophy across the continent, Surviving New England on the Anaiwan genocide. I suppose I should be grateful Songspirals wasn’t classed in 398.2049915, the number for Aboriginal Australian ‘mythology and fairy tales’. But this book is truly interdisciplinary, transcending Dewey’s rigid classes of knowledge and encompassing all corners of the Yolŋu lifeworld. In DDC logic, it makes sense that this book would be classified in an interdisciplinary place. I guess I’m just tired of seeing 305.89915 used so indiscriminately. It doesn’t help that the -9915 suffix encompasses the entirety of Indigenous Australia, with no further enumeration of specific nations or groups.

What if… we stopped choosing only one number? What if we routinely classed multiple copies of books in multiple places? A copy in history, another in the social sciences, a third in music? What if those weren’t even the categories? What if our classification system were a spiral, with multiple lines of intellectual inquiry reaching out from a core of knowledge, instead of our current linear system of ascending numbers? I wonder where the Galiwin’ku Library would place this book, having replaced their simplified DDC with a more culturally intuitive arrangement. Perhaps we should follow their lead.

The item part of the spine label, ‘BURA’, reflects the initial choice of Laklak Burarrwaŋa for main entry. The practice of including the first three or four letters of the main entry, or otherwise constructing a Cutter number, for a spine label theoretically ensures that each physical item in a given library has a unique call number. Meanwhile the ‘CUL’ at the top stands for ‘Culture and society’, part of this library service’s continuing effort to genrefy its collections. Some branches (including my local) are still arranged in Dewey order, while others are grouped more thematically. It’s been this way for years. I kinda like that they haven’t picked one yet. It keeps things interesting.

Disgruntled with my local library’s cataloguing and the state of things in general, I next interrogated the Australian national union catalogue, Libraries Australia, which is now part of Trove. There are seven records for Songspirals in the database, two for the ebook and five for the paper book, collectively held by over 160 libraries across Australia. I’m not surprised to see so many records; Libraries Australia’s match-merge algorithm is notoriously wonky and often merges records incorrectly, which are a massive pain to sort out. I’d rather a dupe record than a bad merge.

The source record used by my local library appears to have been updated since they acquired the book, though the seven LA records can’t quite agree on whether Songspirals is one word or two (the text of the book spells it as one word). Pleasingly, Gay’wu Group of Women are now the main entry in all seven records (as a 110), although one uses the questionably inverted form ‘Women, Gay’wu Group of’. Some records list all eight women’s names in a 245 $c statement of responsibility field, while another lists them in a 500 general note field. Only one record gives each contributor a 700 added entry field, with the surnames painstakingly inverted; we can safely assume none of the contributors had name authority records created.

MARC makes this more complicated than it needs to be. Systems often can’t index names that aren’t in 1XX or 7XX fields. Perhaps name authority records could be automatically created, or close name matches proactively suggested? Could systems embed named-entity recognition, a form of AI, to extract and index names wherever they appear in a record? (One record spells Burarrwaŋa two different ways, neither with the letter ŋ. These kinds of simple errors don’t help.)

Five records misspell the collective authors’ name as ‘GayWu Group of Women’, without the glottal stop and with a capital W, which seemed a curious mistake. I refused to believe that every single cataloguer who touched these records had blithely gotten this wrong, so I wondered if a system had forced this error. Two other records included the glottal stop, confirming LA systems could handle these characters, while a peek in the LA Cataloguing Client showed that this was a data error and not a display error in the LA search interface. While poking around the backend I noticed that all five misspelt records had at some point been through the WorldCat system, evidenced by various OCLC codes in the 040 field. Could this be an OCLC system problem? I don’t know for sure, but it warrants a closer look.

Several cataloguers went to the effort of including AUSTLANG codes in their records for Songspirals. Three records include a code for Yolŋu Matha in the 041 #7 language field, but only one record has a correctly-formed code, N230. The others have ‘NT230’, which is likely an overcorrection from people thinking the ‘N’ stands for ‘Northern Territory’, and is not a valid AUSTLANG code. While this mistake is simple and easily avoidable, it has also now propagated into hundreds of library catalogues. I wonder if more attentive systems could validate such language (041) or geographic (043) codes against controlled lists, including the MARC defaults and AUSTLANG.

It’s worth noting that the library at AIATSIS, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, whose research arm maintains the AUSTLANG database, assigned the additional code N141 for the Gumatj language, a dialect of Yolŋu Matha1. I habitually defer to AIATSIS on matters of First Nations resource description: if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

Describing books using the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is often an exercise in frustration and futility, searching for concepts that don’t exist in the American psyche, but doing justice to the songlines with this vocabulary is flat out impossible. We are reduced to phrases like ‘Folk music, Aboriginal Australian’ and ‘Yolngu (Australian people) — Social life and customs’, flattening the spiral into the linear thinking of the coloniser’s language. From my whitefella cataloguer perspective, the closest LCSH probably gets is the notorious ‘Dreamtime (Aboriginal Australian mythology)’ heading, which as I’ve written before is not appropriate in a contemporary catalogue, and which no LA record appears to have used. But I don’t think this omission is necessarily due to individual cataloguers’ ethics. Songspirals does not name the Dreaming, or discuss it as an academic pursuit. Rather, this book is the Dreaming. It feels a bit daft to say ‘it’s not a subject, it’s a genre’ but even this artificial distinction between what a book ‘is’ and what a book is ‘about’ feels deeply irrelevant to this work.

The English language fails me here. But it’s how I interpret the world. It shapes what I know. And it shapes how I catalogue.

Cataloguers are expected to judge books by their covers, quickly ascertaining the salient facts about a work and categorising it within the boundaries of their library’s chosen schemata. Without having read the book in its entirety, I could tell these records were wonky just by looking at them. But they are structurally wonky. Indigenous knowledge will always sit uncomfortably within Western descriptive practices. It’s more than deciding if something is ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’. It’s not about yelling at individual cataloguers, although some of these errors were clearly unforced. It’s hard to transcribe names accurately if our systems can’t cope with ‘special characters’ or to represent a work’s collaborative authorship if our data structures insist on privileging one author above all others. It’s difficult to represent the interdisciplinarity of a work if our policies dictate it can only be classified in one spot on a linear shelf. Systems caused these problems. But perhaps systems could help fix them, too.

Our sector chooses the data structures, encoding standards, controlled vocabularies and classification styles that we work within. These choices have consequences. We could make different choices if we wanted to. These things did not fall out of the sky; many people built these structures over many years. But our potential choices are each a product of their time, culture, context and ways of knowing. This doesn’t make them ‘bad’ options, but it does mean they may struggle to describe forms of knowledge so different from their own. Perhaps we could choose a different way.

At home, I keep meaning to organise my books properly but never seem to get round to it. I have a shelf of library books (mostly overdue), a shelf of recent acquisitions and a shelf of ‘books that vibe with my thinking of late, and which I ought to read soon’. At various points Songspirals has sat on all three. Perhaps the very notion of fixed metadata is inherently at odds with the cyclical and adaptive nature of songspirals, of oral histories passed down through the generations, layers of wisdom accumulating like layers of the Earth’s crust. Knowledge is always changing and adapting to the world around it. So, too, should our ways of describing that knowledge.

  1. My initial training in assigning AUSTLANG codes recommended against using codes for languages where their entry in AUSTLANG was capitalised, as in ‘YOLNGU MATHA’. This indicates a language family, rather than a specific language, and further investigation may be needed. Songspirals itself refers to the language in the book as ‘Yolŋu matha’, so understandably cataloguers outside AIATSIS would have followed the book’s lead. ↩

On agency

Posted on by Alissa

A bare forest shrouded in fog

I’ve been thinking about this month’s GLAM Blog Club theme (‘invalid’) all month, though as usual I’m writing this post with hours to spare. ‘Invalid’ is one of those neat words with two pronunciations and two different, but related, meanings. ˈɪnvəlɪd. ɪnˈvalɪd. Which to write about? This year I’ve been both, but together they characterise something else: a lack of agency.

Events of this cursed year have robbed us of our agency: collectively isolated, forbidden by law to leave home unless for a specified purpose, unable to live our lives in ways we might ourselves choose. These events didn’t necessarily invalidate us, but they did invalid a lot of us, directly and indirectly. I’ve spent almost all year being an invalid to varying degrees. I’ve needed a lot of looking after. I’ve thought a lot about the rights and abilities of the chronically ill and disabled to make decisions about our own lives. I consider myself lucky to have retained those rights when they counted, but there’s a lot I couldn’t do, and it frustrated me deeply.

My illness conspired to strip me of my agency. So did my work, in a way.

It’s taken me a long time to realise this about cataloguing. I suspect it didn’t quite catalyse until I moved roles last week, where I now work with metadata very differently. I had no control over the material I processed—being in the legal deposit business meant I catalogued whatever turned up in the post—and no control over any of the structures, systems or standards that governed my work. We’ve all heard cataloguing described as ‘glorified data entry’, yet cataloguers have virtually no say in the design of the form, or how their painstakingly-entered data is used.

The thing is, though, it wasn’t always like this. Cataloguers designed traditional catalogue cards and wrote maddeningly specific rules on how to squeeze as much information as possible on a three-by-five-inch index card. Cataloguers devised added entries and filing rules. From this angle, it feels like the cataloguers of yesteryear had far greater agency over their work. Cataloguing rules were still necessary (and strictly enforced), but there was far greater scope and possibility for local practices, as locally-produced cards weren’t often distributed beyond their immediate library. More to the point, this structural work was conducted by cataloguers themselves, and it feels as if there were more opportunities to shape cataloguing policies at various levels.

Modern library systems are very different. It feels like there is no overlap whatsoever between system designers, system developers, and system data managers. Our data formats, our descriptive standards, our implementation policies, our controlled vocabularies, our classification systems: none of these are up to us. The advent of library automation in the latter half of the 20th century brought computer science into libraries, and with it computer scientists and IT professionals. People, usually men, with very different ideas about data and a dislinclination to listen to those who’ve been there before. Our sphere of influence shrank as our data and systems were ruthlessly standardised—by other people, who were suddenly more ‘technical’ than we were.

You’d be forgiven for guffawing slightly at this point, muttering something about cataloguers being on a power trip. Certainly the stereotype of cataloguers as rules-obsessed authority control freaks has some merit behind it. But I’ve come to understand that many cataloguers are like this because it’s just about the only aspect of their work that they can control. For many people, blindly enforcing cataloguing rules with scant regard for local sensitivities is the only agency they have left.

Contemporary cataloguing practice is characterised by a lack of influence over what data to record, how that data is processed and displayed, and the extent to which that data is shared. It doesn’t invalidate our data, but it does call into question how cataloguers can best fulfil their professional responsibilities. I want to be clear that this is a systemic problem, by no means unique to me and my career history. But I do wonder if other metadata librarians feel this as keenly as I have. Do others chafe against a monolithic metadata enterprise over which they have zero control? Does the supposed interoperability of our data instead consign it to irrelevance? Does our drive for efficiency compromise our values? Would our libraries be better if library workers had greater control over their data systems?

I’m lucky to be in a better place now. My new job grants me considerable agency, my health continues to gradually improve, and my bad days now are still better than my good days three months ago. But I’ve been an ˈɪnvəlɪd, an ill person, working with ɪnˈvalɪd data, which didn’t fit the system. For much of this year I had almost no agency in either my personal or professional life. It’s hard to live like that. I hope not to make a habit of it, but there’s a lot beyond my control.

A farewell to cataloguing

Posted on by Alissa

A tree in a clearing

Tomorrow is a big day. I’ll be starting a new role at work. I’ll become what other libraries might call a systems librarian, in a new team, on a new floor, doing new and exciting work. Critically, I will stop being a cataloguer. Turns out I have some feelings about that.

My last day on Friday was ordinary enough. In honour of the occasion I wore my second-favourite library-themed outfit to work, a dress with LC call numbers on it, though I don’t think anyone noticed. I catalogued some books and did some advanced photocopier magic as a favour for my boss, for which I was paid in chocolate. I neglected to attend the morning tea for those of us leaving the section, partly because I was busy but mostly because I wasn’t in a great space for small talk. I’ve never felt like I belonged, here.

The restructure predated the pandemic and was meant to be over by July. It has instead lasted all year and will run into the next. You can imagine how stressful it’s been. Like everyone else in the placement pool, I was asked for my top three role preferences. Unlike most people, by all accounts, I got my first choice.

My new role joins an established team that used to be in the collections division but now sits in IT. The team maintains the catalogue and discovery layer, but also seems to get asked for reports and statistics a lot, which in turn involves a lot of funky database queries and data massaging. My new boss specialises in beautifully colour-coded spreadsheets. One of my new colleagues is a MarcEdit wizard. Everyone is a keen cyclist. I think I’ll like it here.

While I am a bit sad about no longer being a cataloguer, truth be told my professional interests have always lain in this kind of zoomed-out, macro-level work: analysing data at scale, maintaining and theorising the platforms and systems that house, shape and contextualise metadata. I’m a systems thinker with attention to detail, an unusual disposition for a cataloguer. Where others in this line of work have traditionally struggled to see the forest for the trees, I have spent aeons trying to make sense of the forest, from the canopy to the undergrowth, losing sight of how I was meant to be precisely recording only certain attributes of a given tree. Besides, those attributes wouldn’t even help someone find this particular tree. The directions were all wrong and the scientific name was meaningless to those who called the forest their home. Why can’t we describe this tree better?

…Sorry, you wanted this catalogued today? Yep sure I can do that.

And I can do that, but I can’t keep doing it in isolation, and I definitely can’t do it forever. Cataloguing is highly structured and solitary work, and in some ways it suits me down to the ground. But that structure is also the most frustrating aspect, that solitude the most soul-crushing. It might have been what I wanted, but it’s not necessarily what’s best for me.

The second-last book I catalogued on Friday was a biography of a nineteenth-century Queensland ship captain, written by his great-grandson. The author related in some detail how his ancestor was, among other things, a blackbirder for 14 years, ‘recruiting South Sea Islanders’ as if this were a fine and normal occupation and not at all kidnapping or indentured servitude no sir. The two catalogue records for this book on Libraries Australia reflected its deep whiteness and the banality of its horror. Neither featured the LCSH ‘Blackbirding’. Only one gave Australian South Sea Islanders their own heading.

I’ve catalogued more than my share of self-published biographies, histories and genealogies over the years. It is striking what this country chooses to forget. But I expect better from cataloguers whose job it is to contextualise this stuff. A primary tenet of cataloguing is to record what you see. But what if we’re as blind as the author? It’s this kind of thing that prompts me to think, well, maybe I wasn’t wasted in this job after all. Maybe I came here to notice these things, and to do better, and to demand better.

I’m looking forward to this new role. It’s no higher up the payscale, but it holds a lot of promise, and I hope to be happy there. At last I can climb one of these trees, and marvel at the forest.

How to catalogue a jigsaw puzzle

Posted on by Alissa

Two puzzle boxes stacked on top of each other: Rachael Sarra's Diverse Women and Wim Delvoye's Cloaca jigsaw puzzle

It’s been a while since I catalogued much of anything, so it’s quite nice to be (intermittently) back in the office doing this work. I would have been happy enough dealing with the usual print monographs, but recently two jigsaw puzzles wound up on my desk: one featuring a beautiful contemporary Aboriginal artwork, Diverse Women, and the other featuring the infamous mechanical stomach at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Cloaca Professional. My boss knows I love cataloguing weird stuff and also nobody else wanted to deal with these for some reason, so I volunteered to take one for the team.

The majority of our jigsaw puzzle collection, if it can really be called that, is either cartographic (map-based) or an added extra that came with a book. These two puzzles were neither of those things, so there wasn’t a whole lot of precedent in the collection for how best to process them. I had a peek at the OLAC guidelines but was hoping for something a bit more accessible, so I thought I might as well write it myself. Besides, when the next jigsaw inevitably winds up on my (or your) desk this way perhaps we’ll be a little bit consistent. (I also figured I could shoehorn this into this month’s GLAM Blog Club theme, ‘Discovery’.)

As always, these observations are all mine and not those of my employer. I swear I’m not writing blog posts on company time, honest.

Fixed fields

Fortunately someone scrounged up for me a cataloguing template for jigsaw puzzles. Unfortunately this template was really intended for map-based jigsaws, and as such was coded as a cartographic resource (‘m’ in LDR/08). In my mind regular jigsaws are realia, so I coded these records as such (‘r’ in LDR/08), taking out the map-specific fields as I went.

I learned that the 008 for cartographic resources has a specific byte for jigsaws (‘l’ in 008/73). The 008 for realia1, however, is less specific; I settled on coding these as ‘games’ (‘g’ in 008/23), which apparently includes puzzles. This seems an unfortunate gap, but I was unwilling to add a cartographic 006 field just for this one byte, as it has a negligible impact on discovery. Also neither of these things are maps.

Title and access points

Both puzzle boxes featured easily identifiable titles, recorded in a 245 as usual: $a Diverse women and $a Cloaca jigsaw puzzle.

Access points, however, were trickier. A quick Google for ‘Rachel Sarra diverse women’ only returned results that related to the puzzle, which implied that Diverse Women was primarily intended for release as a puzzle, and existed publicly only in this form. I contrasted this with Cloaca Professional, which was already well-known as a public artwork, and of which a photograph was used for the Cloaca jigsaw. Diverse Women artist Rachael Sarra was credited on the puzzle box (garnering a 245 $c); so was Cloaca Professional creator Wim Delvoye, but as that artwork’s creator, not of the puzzle itself.

This suggested to me that the Diverse Women jigsaw is a standalone work, while the Cloaca jigsaw is a derivative work of a different, pre-existing (art)work. I gave Rachael Sarra the 100 field (with the $e artist reationship designator) and was going to only give Wim Delvoye the 700 field (as part of a name/title authorised access point; that is, $a Delvoye, Wim, 1965- $t Cloaca professional), but after thinking about it for way too long I decided to give him the 100 field as well in his own right, to aid discovery of his works. For some reason I kept thinking I could only give him either the 100 or the 700, but not both? I don’t know why I thought that. Perhaps I was taught it at some point.

It’s important to remember that this kind of nuanced distinction is practically meaningless for modern-day search and retrieval, but cataloguers care quite deeply about this stuff because the MARC standard forces us to. I wish it weren’t necessary.

I also gave Mona a 710 added entry, as they were intellectually responsible for the puzzle’s production. I’ve never really understood why publishers don’t get 710 fields, or why the 260/264 $b isn’t routinely indexed. I feel like that would be a useful feature. Probably too useful, I suppose.

Descriptive cataloguing

A description of the box and its contents was added in a 300 contents field. Interestingly the Diverse Women puzzle has an ISBN (a use for which this persistent identifier was probably not designed), so it went in the 020 field as usual. I did wonder if there was a controlled vocabulary for the 020 $q but the Library of Congress MARC documentation said there wasn’t, so I just made something up. Nice to be able to do that in catalogue records occasionally.

Neither puzzle gave an age range, so I didn’t include a 521 Target Audience Note (though the difficulty of Cloaca in particular suggests these are aimed at adults). However, both puzzles included specific copyright statements, which I felt it important to reproduce in a grandly-named 542 Information Relating to Copyright Status Note.

Diverse Women came with a summary on the back of the box; the Cloaca jigsaw featured one on the Mona online shop, in their trademark irreverent style. Both were duly copied into the 520 summary field.

Subject cataloguing

I admit I was initially at a loss as to how to index these puzzles, especially the Cloaca puzzle. Just how does one represent ‘jigsaw puzzle of a photograph of a mechanical digestive system’ in LCSH? For better or worse I am paid to figure out these things, eventually settling on the delightful (and new to our catalogue) ‘Scatology in art’ for Cloaca, and ‘Jigsaw puzzle art’ for Diverse Women.

The Diverse Women puzzle was additionally indexed using an AIATSIS subject heading, in line with MPOW’s cataloguing policy for First Nations materials (it’s a great policy and your library should do this too). I tossed up whether to include a heading for the Goreng Goreng people, as the box notes that Rachel is a Goreng Goreng woman but the resource isn’t strictly about the Goreng Goreng. As a white woman I’m not the best person to be making that decision, but I also didn’t want to bother my Indigenous colleagues about every single little thing related to cataloguing Indigenous resources. I ultimately decided not to include the heading, choosing instead to fully transcribe the artist credits on the box in the 245 $c. if a future cataloguer disagrees, they can always add the heading in later.

The Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms vocabulary features the term ‘Jigsaw puzzles’, so that was included in a 655 field in each record. MPOW doesn’t routinely use the 380 Form of Work field and it’s not indexed in our system, but you could use this field instead if you prefer.

Sample records

These may or may not precisely match what’s on the ANBD, but should give you a pretty good idea of what goes where. (I reserve the right to edit these later and fix my inevitable errors, haha.)2

Puzzle 1: Diverse women / Rachael Sarra

=LDR  01351crm a2200277 i 4500
=001  8536424
=005  20200924170121.0
=008  200924s2020\\\\vrannn\\\\\\\\\\\\rneng\\
=020  \\$a9781741177480$qpuzzle box
=040  \\$aANL$beng$erda
=042  \\$aanuc
=043  \\$au-at---
=100  1\$aSarra, Rachael,$eartist.
=245  10$aDiverse women /$cartist: Rachael Sarra (Goreng Goreng).
=264  \1$a[Richmond, Victoria] :$bHardie Grant Travel,$c2020.
=264  \4$c©2020
=300  \\$a1 jigsaw puzzle (1000 pieces) :$bcardboard, colour ;$c69 x 49 cm, 
          in box 33 x 23 x 5 cm
=336  \\$athree-dimensional form$2rdacontent
=337  \\$aunmediated$2rdamedia
=338  \\$aobject$2rdacarrier
=500  \\$aTitle from box.
=520  \\$aThis artwork, titled Diverse Women, celebrates the energy flowing 
          through Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women of the past, 
          through to the present, and bubbling towards future generations 
          of tiddas (sisters). In Rachael's words, it 'celebrates the strength, 
          complexity and diversity of our women, while the harmonious contours 
          acknowledge the caring and nurturing nature of our women'.
=542  \\$fCopyright artwork © Rachael Sarra 2020 ; copyright concept and box design 
          © Hardie Grant Publishing 2020.
=650  \0$aJigsaw puzzle art$zAustralia.
=650  \0$aArt, Aboriginal Australian.
=650  \7$aArt - Mixed media.$2aiatsiss
=653  \\$aAustralian
=655  \7$aJigsaw puzzles.$2lcgft

Puzzle 2: Cloaca jigsaw puzzle

=LDR  01142crm a2200265 i 4500
=001  8536430
=005  20200925173602.0
=008  200924s2020\\\\tmannn\\\\\\\\\\\\rneng\\
=040  \\$aANL$beng$erda
=042  \\$aanuc
=043  \\$au-at-tm
=100  1\$aDelvoye, Wim, $d1965-$eartist.
=245  10$aCloaca jigsaw puzzle.
=264  \1$a[Berriedale, Tasmania] :$bMuseum of Old and New Art,$c2020.
=264  \4$c©2020
=300  \\$a1 jigsaw puzzle (1000 pieces) :$bcardboard, colour ;$c74 x 59 cm, 
          in box 35 x 22 x 5 cm
=336  \\$athree-dimensional form$2rdacontent
=337  \\$aunmediated$2rdamedia
=338  \\$aobject$2rdacarrier
=500  \\$aTitle from box.
=520  \\$aThe joy of puzzles is universal. So is the joy of poo. So we've brought them 
          together in joyful, crappy unison: Wim Delvoye's Cloaca Professional, aka 
          Mona's shit machine, rendered at long last in jigsaw form. 1000 pieces, 
          mostly black, takes weeks to complete-gird your posterior and settle in for 
          the long haul.
=542  \\$f© Wim Delvoye.
=650  \0$aScatology in art.
=653  \\$aAustralian
=655  \7$aJigsaw puzzles.$2lcgft
=700  1\$ibased on (work):$aDelvoye, Wim, 1965-$tCloaca professional.
=710  2\$aMuseum of Old and New Art (Tas.)
  1. Strictly speaking this is the Visual Materials 008, but it covers realia too. ↩
  2. You may notice, as I belatedly did, that Libraries Tasmania also have a copy of the Cloaca jigsaw puzzle. They did things slightly differently to me (and may have convinced me to give Wim Delvoye the 100 field) but life would be boring if we all catalogued the same way :) ↩