Present: Daniel Lovins (chair), Youn Noh, Britta Santamauro, Becky Slitt (recording), Joan Swanekamp, Patricia Thurston

Meeting began at 12:00 noon in room 410.

The purpose of this meeting was to report to Joan on what the VTF has been doing so far, and to obtain guidance from her on what our priorities should be for future discussions and action.

Joan’s main question: How do we see the Catalog Department changing in the future? What contributions can we make in the next year? 2 years? 5 years? 10 years?

• Daniel responded: a lot of non-MARC metadata will be coming in. We need to figure out how to make staff familiar with handling it.
• tools we should be experimenting with: FEDORA? Greenstone (open source digital library software)? MODS? Other XML-based tools and standards? Once we’ve decided, how should we go about making the transition and preparing or training staff?
• keep in mind Team Leader assumptions: the size of the Catalog Department won’t increase, but our duties will increase and change. We need to find ways to speed up production without losing quality.
• need to implement changes (or pilot projects) quickly, i.e., while enthusiasm is still strong among the staff.
• value of learning about and testing ‘social software’ such as wikis and blogs (cf. OCLC’s WikiD: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/wikid/)
• keeping track of open source developments, such as the Evergreen ILS of the Georgia Public Library consortium (PINES): http://www.open-ils.org/
• working with ILTS to learn and implement new technologies, instead of relying on them to do it for us. The more we can do that, the better we will be able to support our own initiatives and demonstrate our continuing relevance (and commitment to catalog usability).
• Britta asked: what about automatic generation of metadata?
• Joan responded: There hasn’t been much work done on it. Highwire Press at Stanford has it, but it’s not very detailed

Suggestions and Discussion for Action

• Youn asked: could we have people from other departments teach catalogers how to deal with non-print materials? (Especially Encoded Archival Description (EAD) for electronic formats)
• Joan said: several library divisions (Manuscripts and Archives, Music, etc.) currently have their own digital repositories. In the future, we will probably have an autonomous digital repository (like FEDORA) that won’t be connected to any individual department or collection, and the Catalog Department will probably be the ones to oversee it. Therefore, we need to have a unified standard for cataloging digital material. It will also be important to find ways to catalog digital images.
• Daniel added: when other universities have created unified digital repositories, they’ve generally just gone ahead and done it, without taking a long time to look for the Perfect Tool
• Daniel asked: What about working with faculty? (eg, on organizing their own collections and publications, or materials for courses, via Fedora? (e.g., as Barbara Gibbons described the FEDORA implementation at University of Rochester) Joan answers: Probably not now, but maybe in the next five years
• Daniel added: Another thing Gibbons pointed out is that What what a lot of faculty really want from librarians is help dealing with copyright laws, especially with regard to digital versions of print materials.
• Joan said: It’s important for us to help people create a unified, controlled vocabulary for search terms and finding-aid subjects.
• Daniel referred to Tina Gross and Arlene Taylor's "What Have We Got to Lose? The Effect of Controlled Vocabulary on Keyword Searching Results". College and Research Libraries, 66:3, May, 2005, pp. 212-230, which demonstrates that having controlled search terms greatly increases the success rate of keyword searches.
• Daniel said: another thing we know that users want is a 'Search Within Book' option. LC is already starting to provide links to tables of contents, bibliographies, and excerpts; Amazon.com’s Search Within Book function is hugely popular. Some universities work with Amazon to provide this function – Amazon is very good at certain things that we’re not good at, so why not work with them and take advantage of it?
• Joan added: OCLC also has something similar to Amazon.com’s “If you like this book, you’ll also like X”; Britta adds that the University of California library system has done this too.
  

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