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Cataloguing

Library Trainee Day in the Life – Day 4

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Today’s Day in the Life comes from me, Kat, the Information Resources trainee at the Law Bod. For an overview about what I do, have a look at my earlier posts: introducing myself, and a bit more about what I do. Like most of the other trainees, I have quite a few different things to get on with these days, and although this was quite a typical one for a day in the office, I also get to go on quite a few training courses, meetings with colleagues from other libraries and visits to different libraries around Oxford.

Moysing away
Moysing the USA section

9.00-11.45 : Moysing the USA section. You can’t spend much time around the Bodleian Law librarians without coming across Moys. It’s a classification system specifically for law books, arranging them by subject, and we’re gradually progressing with the mammoth task of converting all our textbooks into the Moys system. We’ve done all of the UK law section (many thousands of books), and now we’re doing the USA section. They’re not actually being moved yet, because that would be carnage with books being reclassified as we went along, but lots of the staff spend a few hours a week reclassifying the books, and recording what the new shelfmark will be when we eventually swap them all over. Then we’ll have the fun of reshelving them all! This happened in the UK section over last Summer, and it was apparently a pretty surreal experience with all the books off the shelves. I enjoy reclassifying, because it’s one of the more problem-solving things that I do – does this book called ‘Punishing Corporate Crime’ come under Criminal law – companies, or Company law – crimes? There is no right answer, the whole thing is very subjective, so the rule is generally that if you can justify your decision to someone else, that’s fine. You can also look at what other books have been given similar classifications to see if they’re about the same kind of thing. So far we’ve got through 100 pages, which is about 3000 books, so not bad going since the Summer! I’m still pretty slow, (not knowing very much about law, particularly US law, doesn’t help!), so this takes most of my morning to reclassify, write the new shelfmarks in the book, and add them to the catalogue record.
There is also the extra complication of our Secondary Collection: because law changes all the time, it’s important to distinguish between outdated or superseded old editions of textbooks and the most recent ones. So the old ones are stored downstairs in another area of the library. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always get reflected correctly on the catalogue, and sometimes things have been incorrectly shelved in the main library as well. So often doing Moys reclassification also involves finding the physical locations of the books, making some catalogue changes or reshelving, and reclassifying the things that should be on the shelf. This sheet had a whole series of books on the History of the Supreme Court which needed some shuffling around.

11.45-12.00 : Looking for catalogue records. Every week Law gets all the legal deposit books about the subject that the Bodleian has claimed. This means (in theory) any book published in the UK within about the last year can be claimed and a copy will come to the Bod, and then to us. In practice this means we get 40-50 books  a week. Some of them will already have been catalogued, but others have only a very minimal record of the title, author etc., and I save our English-language cataloguer a bit of time by having a look to see if there are any better records anywhere else that we can use. This involves searching other library catalogues (the British Library and the US Library of Congress) and databases of catalogue records from lots of libraries (Research Libraries UK and WorldCat) to see if they have anything to offer. This didn’t take very long today because there were only about 15 books to check, and quite a few were already in the British Library (the most reliable source), so that was good!

12.00-13.00 : Lunch

13.00-15.00 : Desk duty. The Law Bod is different from quite a few of the other Oxford libraries (but the same as the Bodleian itself) in that it doesn’t lend books, but we have a desk at what is called the Reserve Collection, where we ‘lend’ the most in-demand, high-use books within the library, so we can keep track of who has them and so they don’t just get left on a desk somewhere when people need them. Today I worked with a more senior member of staff at the main desk, where she could answer the phones, operate the entry gate if people didn’t have their cards, and go with readers to help them with queries. The library was very busy, so I spend most of my time lending and receiving books from the Reserve Collection, explaining that a lot of them were already out (all the first-years want Roman law at the moment!), helping readers find books in the main collection, lending ethernet cables to research students, and generally answering questions about how to do or find things. One particular DPhil student wanted to see several DPhil dissertations, which we keep on the ground floor in locked cabinets, so that involved a fair amount of going up and downstairs and fetching and carrying, but he was very grateful to have a look at them. On top of all this, I was getting on with some looseleaf filing at the desk. Lots of staff do this during their desk duties – it involves getting one of our many looseleaf binders and the new issue of loose pages, and following filing instructions to insert the new pages and remove the ones they supersede. We are pretty much the only academic library in the country that files all of the looseleaf law parts (the British Library receives the new issues, but doesn’t file them, which makes them almost impossible to use). I find it quite relaxing, although it can get a bit difficult if there are a lot of loose pages on the desk when readers are trying to borrow or return books. There were a few hairy moments where I thought the pile of returned books on my desk was going to topple over before I could check them in! Desk shifts are one of my favourite parts of my job, and I really enjoy the fact that we’re a popular library for students and researchers at all levels to work in. I recognise a lot of our regular readers now, so it’s nice to slowly build more of a rapport with them. And of course, the more I work at the desk, the better I am at knowing what we have in our collection, so the more confident and competent I am at dealing with them!

15.00-15.15 : Tea break!

New journals
New journals
15.15-16.15 : Book processing. This is a substantial part of what I do every day – remember those 40-50 books a week? When they arrive, they need to be stamped, tattle-taped (this is what we call the electric alarms that go in books) and recorded that they have arrived. I also have to tattle-tape most of the 60-75 new journals we receive each week, and they go in files behind my desk in alphabetical order, ready to go on the New Journals Display, which I update every Tuesday. Today there are only a few late arrivals by legal deposit, some new purchases, and a small pile of journals to add to the groaning boxes.

Another part of book processing is labelling, which I do once the books have been catalogued and classified by other members of the team. I finish up some of that, after which the books are ready to go upstairs to be shelved.

16.15-16.40 : Shelf-reading and shelving. This is about Moys again! We’ve just got a new edition (the 5th) of Moys, which makes some changes to the previous edition. So now, some of the books which have been reclassified already in the UK section, need to be re-reclassified to fit the new edition! A few months ago I spent quite a bit of time relabelling a big section of the housing and construction law and reshelving things. Over the last couple of weeks, there have been some more changes made, but the relabelling is now finished, and so I spent a little while checking the order of the books was correct (it wasn’t in a few places), since it’s easy to miss things when you shuffle a lot of books around. Then I spent some time shelving books which readers were finished with. I don’t spend very much time shelving day-to-day, but in term-time things can build up pretty quickly so it’s useful to lend a hand.

16.40-17.05 : Suggestions book. We’ve had a suggestions book at the main desk of the library for the last 11 years, and it’s finally full!

Suggestions book
Suggestions book

The suggestions in it have been dealt with as they were added, obviously, but it’s now my job to look at the comments and book and journal suggestions that have been written over the years and create some pretty graphs and interesting statistics about them. At the moment this involves making a huge spreadsheet with the details of each comment, and whether or not we bought the items suggested. It’s interesting to see themes and trends emerge over time, as wells as the occasional funny comment about the heating or the comfort of the chairs, or the librarians complaining about publishers who never deposit their books without being chased. I’m looking forward to really getting stuck into the data once it’s all on my spreadsheet – I’m about 1/3 of the way through at the moment.

And that’s about it! It was a pretty full-on day, but I enjoy desk shifts, and there wasn’t too much mechanically stamping and tattle-taping books which there can be late in the week, when all of the legal deposit arrives. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post, and have a bit of an idea what another trainee gets up to day-to-day. Do check out the other posts in this series, as our jobs vary a lot – I’ll certainly be reading to find out what traineeships are like in other libraries!

Time in C&RD (Technical Services)

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The experiences most readers have of libraries are of gentle wanderings around the shelves,  furious frustration with the establishment’s electronic equipment and the relentless pursuit of fines conducted by ever vigilant staff. Obviously such an experience is one-sided: libraries consist of far more than their public face.  A vast amount of work is done ‘behind-the-scenes’ and most of it is vital to keeping the public services of the library in operation. Acquisitions provides new stock, cataloguers make sure the library’s collections are accessible, bar coders make electronic check-in systems possible.

My time in Technical Services was spent between four sections of the department, each with an integral role in keeping the Bodleian Library operating: the Copyright Receipt Office (CRO), Foreign Cataloguing, Acquisitions and Room 215 (where a significant number of differing tasks are completed). However different the work of each of these sections is, they are all part of essentially the same  process: the acquisition of material , its reception into the library and then preparation for public use.  In the Bodleian, this process is somewhat different to that of an ‘ordinary’ library (does such a place exist?) because of the Bodleian’s legal deposit status. This means that the Bodleian is entitled to claim any book published in the UK (and some from beyond the coasts of this sceptered isle):  publishers must send a copy of a work if it is requested. This means that Technical Services have to deal with an absolutely vast quantity of material, not all of it useful. As I found in the Rare Books department, the Bodleian’s role is not simply that of a library: it is also a museum, collecting and preserving the bibliographic heritage of the English-speaking world. Preserving untold numbers of Mills and Boon ‘erotica’ (I use the word in its loosest sense) may not seem to be important to us right now but who knows what service they might render to future generations of scholars studying subjects like gender or popular literature?

Much of my time was spent in Room 215 where I was heavily involved with the X-Backlog project. Books that arrive at the Bodleian are  usually either shelfmarked ‘M’ or ‘X’: the ‘M’ titles are usually academic works or works that will be of use to academic research whilst the ‘X’ titles are much more popular books. As such, the ‘X’ shelfmark is an umbrella that encompasses a wide variety of different material: children’s books, the autobiographies of modern luminaries such as David Beckham and Jordan, puzzle books (Sudoku as far as the eye can see), film tie-ins, self-published manuals developing elaborate conspiracy theories and travel guides. As I’ve already mentioned, the Bodleian is obliged to keep at least one copy of these books for the purposes of preservation and this means that significant resources have to be employed to making these books accessible: bibliographic records need to be imported, bar codes inserted, shelfmarks assigned, shelve space found. These were the general tasks with which I was occupied whilst in Room 215. As these tasks are time-consuming (especially when we consider the rather low-level of demand coming from readers for ‘X’ books), a backlog of several thousand books currently exists, a backlog that needs to be dealt with before the closure of the New Bodleian takes place. Naturally, this deadline has forced certain procedural changes so that it can be met. Room 215 also deals with English-language cataloging and it is also the home to the Bodleian’s liason with the Library of Congress.

The Copyright Receipt Office (CRO) deals with books when they first arrive at the library. They unpack the crates of books delivered by the porters, stamp them and register their reception and their bar code (in a process known as ‘CRObaring’). Journals are checked in and sent to the various reading rooms of the library whilst books are placed on display: the subject librarians flock to the display to pick and choose the materials they want for their collections. Necessarily the pace of work in this section is very brisk indeed due to the sheer quantity of the material submitted via copyright: it all needs to be cleared. The staff here also pursue claims that have not as yet been fulfilled by reluctant publishers. Many problems encountered by CRO staff have been caused by the recent move of the Copyright Agency from London to Edinburgh, a move which caused the loss of the experienced and well-connected staff it had accumulated.

Foreign cataloguing probably needs the least explanation: it is their job to take those new materials written in a foreign language (the Bodleian deals with occidental languages only) and establish bibliographic records for them within OLIS. In some cases, this requires making entirely new records whilst in others it simply requires that records be imported and modified for the purposes of the Bodleian. As graduate trainee, I helped them deal with the large number of auction catalogues that had accumulated in recent months: in doing so, I was given a crash course in the basic principles of cataloguing.

Last but no means least is Acquisitions. Although the Bodleian can and does acquire the majority of its stock for free through a copyright claim, this is sometimes inadequate. Copyright claims can take a very long time to produce results, which is clearly detrimental when a book or journal is urgently required by an academic or the student community.  Books also need to ordered from abroad so Acquisitions (formerly known as ‘Foreign Acquisitions’ for precisely this reason) places these as well, in countries as diverse as Argentina, Russia and Japan. So the Acquisitions staff deal with orders, some copyright claims, invoices and the receipt of foreign journals. Here the constraints of budget and the library’s financial policies are most strongly felt as the Acquisitions staff must ensure that budgetary limits imposed on book orders are adhered to by librarians. I helped process the invoices, set up claims and I also spent a day at the Taylor Slavonic, where I was able to assist with some acquisitions work due to my knowledge of Russian.

Although the work of Technical Services is far from glamorous (it is far removed from the human contact encountered on the desk and is sometimes repetitive to the point of monotony), it is utterly vital from any perspective. Without the complex systems set up and administered by technical services staff, the Bodleian could not cope with the large demands placed on it by its legal deposit status.

A day-in-the-life with the futureArch project

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People have been talking about ‘day-in-the-life’ blog posts to give everyone a better idea of the different kinds of work we all do and I thought I’d kick things off. For those that don’t know, I’m the trainee for the futureArch project and I’m  going down the archiving,  rather than librarian route. From what I’ve heard from some of the other trainees, my job is quite different, so hopefully people will find this quite interesting. I think the big difference is that I’m only in a reading room dealing with enquiries and visitors one morning a week and the rest of the time I’m in an office and only have to talk to my colleagues!

So anyway, here is a typical Thursday: I’m based in Osney but on Thursday mornings I go over to the Logic School in the Bodleian Quad as I’m being taught how to use EAD, the cataloguing programme. I’ve been given a small collection of Victorian letters to catalogue first, which thankfully is a pretty standard collection. EAD is pretty simple to use, once you get used to all the little quirks and rules, like when inserting the scope/content you have to also insert a paragraph element within it before you can start writing. If you don’t, EAD has a bit of a tantrum and starts highlighting everything in red. It’s also very fussy about punctuation and where you can and cannot have a comma. The hardest part (but also the most fun)  is trying to read the signatures of all the correspondents and work out who they are so I can list them in the catalogue – there’s a lot of variation in the standard of handwriting. Thankfully most of them are famous enough to be in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, or as a last resort, wikipedia. It can be frustrating (one letter was signed ‘H.H.’) but it’s very rewarding when you finally work out who they are (for anyone interested H.H. turned out to be Hugh Haweis).

I finish at the Bodleian at 1pm and get back over to Osney (for which I love the minibus). In the afternoon I get on with my ongoing struggle with the CD imaging programme. The futureArch project is looking at born-digital archives (computer files, emails, MP3s etc.) and trying to develop an infrastructure for preserving and archiving these. CD imaging is a form of forensic imaging whereby a programme examines a disk to see what’s there without disturbing any of the metadata. For instance, we don’t want to change the last modified date, so we can’t just open all the files normally to see what’s there, besides which not all files are compatible with PCs. The programme also harvests and creates other metadata, like MD5 hash values. These are unique identifiers, so you can easily see if a file actually is a duplicate, or just looks the same. The programme can also retrieve deleted files (though not always intact), but this brings up a whole set of issues over the morality of archiving files the owner doesn’t realise we have. The imager also produces a copy of all the files, which eventually will be preserved in our secure server. This means we’re not reliant on computers still having CD drives in fifty years time to be able to view the files – just look at Amstrads: a lot of disks still exist, but if you haven’t got the computer they’re pretty much useless and the data on them is lost.

Anyway, I have a set of disks to image and we have a robotic loader, so in theory I should be able to pile them up and set the loader to put each one in the machine, image it, take it out and put the next one in, but of course technology is never that simple! Most of the time the loader seems to get confused and tries to remove the disk without first opening the disk drive and then decides to sulk and stop working. It also can’t seem to work out when it’s run out of disks and will bring up an error message and again stop working. I was getting a bit worried I’d pressed the wrong button or something, but my manager assures me other people who use it also complain about it being temperamental. Maybe it just doesn’t like being left in a room by itself.

When I get too annoyed with the loader, or just need a break I move on to one of my other tasks, which is sorting out one of the boxed collections. It’s in one of the cages across the hall and when it was archived nobody properly went through it, so I get the exciting job of going through the boxes and removing any staples and paperclips left in there and removing papers from metal ring binders and folders and putting then into plain card ones. A lot of the metal has started to rust and it’s quite dirty work, but it makes a change to do something manual that doesn’t require much brain power and it gets me away from the computer screen for a while. I normally spend the afternoon alternating between the imaging and the box sorting and then comes home time!

There are other jobs I do on different days of the week, but that’s a pretty typical Thursday. It’d be great to hear what other people get up to and compare it.