Start time: 2 pm
Location: SML 410
Present: Tom Bolze, Daniel Lovins (chair, recording)
Action items highlighted like this
Daniel and Tom discussed a preliminary response to Joan's request for feedback. Specifically, Daniel had tried to rewrite the ALCTS-based professional competencies into a set of actionable goals. He suggested that having Joan or our group answer a few questions in advance would help move the exercise forward, e.g.,:
"Are we involving the entire department, or just a selected members?"
"If selected members, will they be self-selecting, or have their roles assigned to them?"
"What forms of training and skills, specifically, do we most need to cultivate?"
In the list of conferences in the Staff Training section, Tom suggested making it more clear that this is about adding options, not replacing traditional library associations. We would not want to discourage participation in key ALCTS or RBMS committees, for example.
Tom suggested that METS be added to list of important new standards, and that "EID" be corrected to "EAD". [Daniel made the changes].
Tom and Daniel discussed adding to the departmental mission: maintaining a registry of best practices, bibliographies, working papers, technical standards, etc., whereby metadata experts would have range of options available at their fingertips when called upon as consultants.
Regarding competencies re-written as actionable goals, Tom pointed out that it should be made more clear that this is just a working document, since the language is not yet very transparent. Daniel agreed.
Tom pointed out that not all catalogers are interested in becoming more like programmers. This should be made more explicit in the Competencies and Goals as indicated in the exercise. As it stands now, there's a kind of presumption that everyone's work will be transformed almost beyond recognition, and biased toward technical expertise. This is not necessarily the case. In fact, for the foreseeable future it looks like a large number of staff will continue to be needed for traditional AACR2/RDA/MARC21 cataloging. Moreover, subject and language expertise will continue to be in high demand. Given the growing importance of computer expertise in the processing and re-purposing of metadata records, though, perhaps we need to reconsider the idea of a department-embedded programmer.
Daniel cited the Workstation Expert Users program as a noteworthy model, where each team designates one of its members to attend training sessions, keep up with documentation, install new software, and generally serve as first responder should computer problems arise. Some teams have no suitable candidate, so rely on an expert user from a neighboring team. Perhaps a similar kind of expert user program could be set up to help manage XML applications and non-MARC metadata schemas across cataloging units.
We discussed a Collections Collaborative project called WW-I Experience, a proposed special collection of digitized manuscripts, pamphlets, posters, photographs, etc., the original versions of which are held at Manuscripts & Archives, the art museums, Beinecke, and other Yale sites.
End time: 3:40 pm.