Universal Classification of the Internet

Note: I wrote this post as background research for the current chapter (“Applied Classification”) of HumanCrafted Metadata. It is not an excerpt from the textbook itself (in case you’re wondering if my goal is to bore students to death).

In developing the background chapter on classification I went on a quest to look for vestiges of “universal internet classifications” in order to find the main classes of organized knowledge in the online universe.

Those of us who traffic in Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Classification have Baconian systems of knowledge branded onto the brain. Even a brief, elementary-school exposure to the DDC frying pan has seared the main classes into LIS student brains to such an extent that they can’t easily consider alternatives. I’ve routinely asked students over the years, “If not using DDC, what would you use as the basis for main classes in a hierarchical system?” It’s not an easy question for anyone to answer because Dewey remains a cultural touchstone. During the birthing years of the Internet I happily browsed nascent efforts to use DDC or LCC or DDC to create collections of links. But I was there in the 1990s at San José’s SLIS when we all cheered the Bay Area grad who found herself on the Yahoo! classification team. Classifying all the things! on the Internet was sizzling back then. Not any more.

My quest was discouraging from the first, because Google’s abandonment of its Directory project in 2011 pointed to the complete collapse of internet classification efforts: “With search now dominating our web navigation, directories are seen primarily for their link juice value.” I was hard-pressed to find the venerable Yahoo! Directory from the Yahoo! home page filled with aggregated headlines. (Try and find it! I dare you.) (If you can’t, here’s the direct link.) When I finally discovered its location, I was pleased to see it still was an active site with new links, but there is no denying that it relies on revenue from paid links. It is more of a “yellow pages” for advertisers than a map of the open Internet. The high annual price Yahoo! commands highlights its position as the oldest and most well-known of the many directories that are now mostly vehicles for search engine optimization.

Not only is Yahoo! the most successful of the paid directories, its classification system is the model followed by every Internet directory. When you click through to see these other directories, you will certainly see 14-16 main classes presented in alphabetical order. The class names will be either single words or two concepts joined with &. While the classes are nearly identical to Yahoo!’s, some directories choose a few different ones that elevate commercial concepts to the top level: travel, automotive, real estate, free stuff, law. The two major not-for-profit directory projects still being curated are built on the Yahoo! model. Dmoz, the “largest human-edited directory of the web,” has one-word main classes that separate out “Home” and “Sports,” and “Shopping.” (The founders of its predecessor NewHoo decided to derive their classes from Usenet newsgroups, which would suggest there was a similar inspiration in the Yahoo! founders’ minds, though it is hard to see the Usenet hierarchy as a clear predecessor.) IPL2, “information you can trust,” has fewer classes (& they are full of ampersands). It echoes Dewey’s academic focus ever so subtly: “political science,” “technology,” “economics.” I think the answer to my question about the basis for main classes outside of DDC is clear: Yahoo’s categories, stable since its launch in 1995, show the contours of knowledge (things worth classifying) in the Internet Age.

Yahoo!	dmoz (ODP)	IPL2
Arts & Humanities	Arts	Arts & Humanities
Business & Economy	Business	Business & Economics
Computer & Internet	Computers	Computers & Internet
Education	Games	Education
Entertainment	Health	Entertainment & Leisure
Government	Home	Health & Medical Sciences
Health	Kids and Teens	Law, Government & Political Science
News & Media	News	Reference
Recreation & Sports	Recreation	Regional & Country Information
Reference	Reference	Science & Technology
Regional	Regional	Social Sciences
Science	Science	Special Collections
Social Science	Shopping
Society & Culture	Society
	Sports
	World

While the top level categories in Internet directories are stable, the subcategories churn around unpredictably and proliferate madly. Clicking on “Arts” in any of the three major directories is an adventure because the concept is defined differently in each. In Yahoo! we find Photography, History, Literature … (in 1999 the subcategories were Literature, Photography …); in dmoz we are led to Movies, Television, Music …; and in IPL2 we choose amongstFine Arts, History, Literature, Philosophy, more>>. The “Business” class shows more clearly the different emphases of the directories. B2B, Finance, Shopping, Jobs for Yahoo! looks like the Yellow Pages again. Jobs, Real Estate, Investing in dmoz are beckoning to people who want to improve their economic standing, but really the bulk of the links in the class are for company sites—nearly 20,000 in “Industrial Goods and Services” (aka B2B). For IPL2, the reference function is obvious: Accounting, Economics, Employment, Tax. IPL2 has good information about job seeking, but no links to the major job listing sites like monster.com. There are thousands of LIS research papers waiting to be written about these subcategories, the types of links chosen, and what that means for users of these three directories.

Because the Yahoo-like classifications are not published outside of the directory sites themselves, it is hard to fully understand the hierarchy below the class level. Understanding the hierarchy is made more difficult because of cross-reference links (preceded by the @ sign) mixed into the list of subcategories (always alphabetical). One thing is for sure: the editors of these directories do not shy away from creating close classification. On the dmoz home page, the project brags—“5,114,083 sites … over 1,014,849 categories.” One million categories for only five million sites! A lesser paid directory with fourteen main classes boasts 7832 subcategories, but only 1945 links! This suggests that the editors of these schemes had a grand time developing a close, universal classification scheme, but do not have the resources (either human or content) with which to fill it. In Yahoo! a significant percentage of its innumerable subcategories are those that refer to a single person or television character. Hierarchies such as Entertainment > Actors > Forbes, Michelle and Entertainment > Television Shows > Science Fiction and Fantasy > Star Trek > Star Trek: The Next Generation > Characters > Ro Laren are not based on the model of generic topics that have governed classification of library collections with DDC. Again, bring on the researchers to provide some understanding of the conceptual underpinnings of these systems!

As a final point, Internet classification systems for kids deserve a mention, though I won’t compare them in detail. I would rate the dmoz “Kids and Teens” all-text subcategories (14 of them) as not being very in tune with children’s browsing needs—would a child know to look for “Pets” under “Your Family”? The dmoz categories seem more like they are set up for adults browsing for resources to share with children—a search for “dinosaurs” leads to forty-five deep (six- or seven-level) hierarchies that are pretty intimidating chunks of text. So I don’t think that dmoz has made a kid-centered Internet knowledge organization that could be transferred to other web applications. Yahoo! Kids Directory has only six main classes—compacted from the eight in the original Yahooligans!, and it seems welcoming to a browsing kid, even though the subcategories are as numerous and unpredictable as those in the adult hierarchy. The resources themselves—mostly interesting, high quality, and non-commercial—are not being scrupulously maintained (about half of the dinosaur links were broken or redirects), which indicates that the subcategories must also date from long ago—their history could be traced in the Wayback Machine. The nine classes of kids’ knowledge at IPL2 are enhanced by a sidebar with direct links to homework-helping categories about Presidents, States, Science Fair, with “Resources for Parents and Teachers” broken out so they don’t interfere with kids’ browsing. What is most interesting about it is that the subcategories displayed on the main page seem chosen because of their importance to kids. “Football” and “Dance” under Sports & Recreation, or “Animals” as the first under “Math & Science.” (The dinosaur links all work.) The only other currently-maintained kids’ classification that I found in my research was Awesome Library, which emphasizes school subjects and homework help.

While Internet directories and their classification systems are mature tools, their situation in 2013 is not flourishing. Except for the IPL2 directory that is curated by LIS students, the directories are a marginal enterprise in the organization of knowledge of today’s Internet. That has implications for those of you who are evaluating them for use in library settings, but for me the continuing question is how well the Yahoo!-like classification structures reflect knowledge as we experience it online. These few survivors of the Internet directory era continue to provide rich food for thought with regard to applied classification.

Using WebDewey and Understanding Dewey Decimal Classification 23

I know that no one reading this blog entry will be swayed by advertising copy like “Do the Dewey, Dudes!” So here’s a simple announcement about the upcoming DDC course:

If you want a thorough grounding in DDC 23, please sign up for my ALA Editions eCourse It begins on February 4th and lasts four weeks; the cost is $175. The course has been updated to include new material about WebDewey’s “Create built number” tool.

Here’s a sample from one of the instructional videos in Week 3 of the course–number ten of the sixteen included. Former students will note that I still haven’t conquered my addiction to PowerPoint clipart, but rest assured that the remainder of this video and the others have plenty of serious screenshots and useful examples from DDC itself. (I can’t show any of that because of our license agreement with OCLC.)

Syllabus of the Course

At the end of the course, you will understand the structure of DDC notation and be able to parse DDC number patterns, as well as use the DDC schedule and tables to understand the meaning of long DDC numbers. You will know how to use WebDewey 2.0 to search for and assign appropriate numbers for simple and complex subjects. You will also learn how to apply standard subdivisions from DDC Table 1 and how to build numbers from within the main schedules and the other DDC Tables. Using these skills as building blocks, you will learn how to construct fully synthetic numbers in the 400 and 800 classes.

Participants must have access to WebDewey 2.0 to take this course. You may use an existing WebDewey account from your library. If you do not have access to WebDewey, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial from OCLC at the WebDewey login page. Please put “participating in ALA online e-course” in the comments box. This will allow OCLC to set the starting date to February 4th.

Week 1 Learning Objectives At the end of Week 1 you will be able to
• Identify the parts of the DDC and become familiar with the main classes, divisions and sections
• “Read” the patterns in existing DDC numbers and express the meaning of numbers in hierarchy
• Understand how DDC can be applied to make library collections browsable
• Assign appropriate DDC numbers to simple concepts
• Login to WebDewey and
o Navigate the hierarchy of the Main Schedules and Tables
o Search and browse for concepts that are in the Relative Index

Week 2 Learning Objectives At the end of Week 2 you will be able to
• Choose appropriate DDC numbers from the main schedules for subjects with multiple facets that may require a table of preference or consultation of the Manual
• Use Table 1 to add standard subdivisions with the correct number of zeroes
• Apply major patterns from the tables for geography and groups of people
• Apply the concept of “approximate the whole” and its exceptions

Week 3 Learning Objectives At the end of Week 3 you will be able to
• Do complex number-building with base numbers and pieces of other numbers
• Follow number-building instructions through multiple steps in the main schedules and tables
• Truncate DDC numbers correctly to preserve meaning • Make decisions about appropriate length of DDC numbers for different
collections within your library

Week 4 Learning Objectives At the end of Week 4 you will be able to
• Build synthetic numbers for specific languages in the 400 class using Tables 6 and 4
• Read the meaning of numbers in the 800 class that you find in library collections
• Build synthetic numbers for literature in the 800 class using Tables 3A, 3B, and 3C
• Use WebDewey’s new number-building tool to construct and save your built numbers

The Feral Cataloger in 2013

It occurs to me that only the Feral Cataloger staff has full access to my schedule and they are just sitting on the information, so it’s up to me to share with you domesticated catalogers what’s in the works for 2013.

I write on HumanCrafted Metadata (“a cataloging textbook with helpful electronic resources for students and educators”) daily, and in 2013 it will be ready to publish. For now my priority is sitting here and writing and revising and rewriting, so I don’t get out much. I will be at Midwinter in Seattle with some demo materials on my iPad, if you run into me and want to hear about the book.

In February 2013, I will teach Using WebDewey™ and Understanding Dewey Decimal Classification™ for ALA Editions eLearning. This is my second time teaching the workshop, and it will be updated from last year’s version to reflect the changes in WebDewey that OCLC has just announced. The course lasts for four weeks and it takes participants from no previous knowledge of Dewey all the way through the complexity of built numbers in the 800s. (There is no link for sign-up yet, because ALA and OCLC are concluding the license agreement*)

I’m hoping to teach one or two workshops in late 2013 based on other chapters of the textbook.

*As in: The 23^rd Edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification and Relative Index is ©2011-2012 OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (“OCLC”). All copyright rights in all previous editions of the Dewey Decimal Classification are owned by OCLC. WebDewey screen shots are ©2012 OCLC. Mr. Dewey and His Dot are ©1992 OCLC. Dewey, DDC, Dewey Decimal Classification, OCLC and WebDewey are registered trademarks/service marks of OCLC. Used with permission.

Confucius and the Contributor

The other day the Feral Cataloger was consulted on a severe case of reaction to AACR2 rule 21.1C1b. A colleague who had been working with catalogs for decades suddenly discovered that editors cannot be main entries. She was in pretty bad shape–afterwards she described the experience as “a habit of the brain, completely blasted apart.” A calming manatee was summoned to stabilize her mood, and I was able to dispense some advice about cuttering in the 800s to reassure her that title need not be the last word in DDC subarrangement. In order to inoculate her and other unsuspecting colleagues against the future shock of editors in RDA, though, I felt I should write another entry in my dissertation series and discuss the most significant finding of my research: the relationship of editors to authorship.

It was probably my friend’s familiarity with The Chicago Manual of Style that lulled her into thinking that editors are always treated like authors. The editors of Chicago style leave none of their fellow editors behind when it comes to citations in a bibliography. Even if editors do not merit the first place in a full citation, they can always be included in the third place. The only requirement is their appearance on a title page. It is true that the earliest American cataloging rules had a similarly expansive view of authorship. In Cutter’s 1904 Rules, you need only look at the list of definitions and read  ”Editor, See Author” to know where he stands on the matter.

It seems so simple, but even Cutter could not accept that all editors were authors. A “collecting editor” merited the place of author in Cutter’s catalog, but not the editor of a periodical or editors of collections “known chiefly by their titles.” Rules 4 and 5 in my copy of the ALA 1949 cataloging rules are filled with underlines and scribbled annotations from the cataloging students who once owned it. “Don’t get confused between author of introd. and editor!” wrote one. By the time of AACR1, many words were needed to explain exactly what made an editor or compiler worthy of main entry. Goaded by Akós Domanovsky’s lengthy and scathing analysis of the subjectivity of editors as authors, the AACR2 editors defenestrated their sundry fellows from the main entry, and it has been that way in cataloging ever since.

It seems like Chinese editorship has nothing to do with Cutter’s American habit of seeing editors as authors.  The position of the first Chinese editor, Confucius, is stated flatly in the Analects: “I transmit but do not create; I believe in and love the ancients.” (Lunyu 7:1, trans. Wing-tsit Chan) The first part of that quote, 述而不作,  is a classical catchphrase so embedded in literate culture it was immediately suggested by the character dictionary as I typed the pinyin just now. Scholar-editors throughout the millennia have always taken the stance that they, like Confucius, do not “make” (“作” zuo, the literal meaning of the last character in the phrase). The Confucian editor faithfully transmits the texts he finds, making judicious changes that only perfect texts and restore their author’s original intent. Certainly the Sikuquanshu bibliographers believed that they were doing just that as they reconstructed damaged texts for the emperor’s library.

In the bibliographic summaries, though, more specific words describe the transmission work that the editors did. In one case of a reconstructed work, the editors reveal that they consulted, compared, sought, collected, supplemented, put together, copied, and revised the text. This evidence shows that the editors’ work is an example of the conundrum of “activist judges” versus “strict constructionists”: it is easy to find activism in any editorial judgment even if the judge does not admit it himself. But the Sikuquanshu bibliographers would never refer to themselves as editing (編 bian)  in the bibliographic description, even though their handiwork is found throughout the library.

Bian–editing–as a relationship designator is most common (second only to the word 撰 zhuan ”written by”) in the Collections (集  ji) class, where it is used in two different senses. One is for a compiler of an anthology. Editors of anthologies ”collect,” “transmit,” “collate,” and “select,” (輯，述， 較， 採), as explained by the bibliographers in the summaries for such works. These are the collecting editor functions that Cutter also privileged, so it is easy to see the reason why they merit a relationship designator in the bibliographic description. The more common use of bian with regard to editing collections is in conjunction with zhuan as a relationship designator. These are cases where a personal author’s works are collected posthumously for publication, and the editor’s name does not appear in the description, only in the summary. These editors are essential to the survival of the author’s works, and the Sikuquanshu bibliographers tell many tales that show the devotion of the author’s relatives, friends or students in preserving written legacies, even in one case the tenth-generation great-grandson of a Song scholar who performed the service. In traditional China editing is a natural by-product of a personal and familial relationship. But the bibliographers would not elevate the status of the word bian when the editor’s role was to transmit the works of the writer-author. 

When I consider the relationship designators in RDA for editors, I think it is a happy thing that the word editor has been reconsidered from the days of AACR2 when s/he was out in the streets, merely preparing “an item not his or her own” for publication. The RDA editor now has a home at the expression level, that is, at the point when the author’s ideas become specific in the realm of language. In RDA, you can be designated as editor or editor of a compilation or editor of moving image work. (RDA I.3.1 Contributors) Editors plain and simple revise or elucidate content, or prepare a work for production; editors of compilations select and put together other works (by a single person or multiple ones); and editors of moving image works assemble, arrange, and trim films and videos. Interestingly, the first two designators ask the cataloger to judge whether the editor might not actually be operating at the work level, as an author who makes a new work out of an old one, or as a compiler who creates a new work out of data or information rather than from other writer’s texts. These distinctions that require a cataloger to judge the true nature of the word “editor” ensure that a new generation of cataloging students will be highlighting and making personal notes just as they did in the 1949 ALA rules, but to me they speak to the cross-cultural commonalities of editorship. The disparate situations of Cutter, the Sikuquanshu bibliographers and today’s catalogers all acknowledge that certain conditions must be met before an editor ascends to the status of author.

Flinging the Files, Flinging the Foucault

Even though the daytime temperatures are still punishing here at Feral Cataloger headquarters, the feline staff are sensing the change in the angle of the sun and starting to pack in extra helpings of Sea Captain’s Choice. I’m also responding to the internal shift that comes from a lifetime of making the start of school year my season for renewed focus on desk work. Last fall marked a decade since my Ph.D. graduation, and I was faced with the painful realization that the dozens of boxes filled with books and papers from my doctoral days no longer deserve the space they’re hogging in the garage. Since deriving publications from my dissertation will not turn me into an “adoptable faculty member,” the garage space can be put to better use–perhaps for stockpiling cases of Turkey and Giblets paté in case of an earthquake. So this fall I am flinging all the files. As I go through the paper, though, I can’t but act like the doting parent who snaps pictures of her children’s school masterpieces to archive the memories. A blog post or two about my research seems like a fitting digital scrapbook to memorialize the hard work and deep thought that are stored in the boxes.

The boxes in the garage remind me of the research I intended to do after graduation. My academic career was supposed to be devoted to cross-cultural empirical study of the conceptual principles of cataloging and bibliography. The dissertation came into being as Michel Foucault threw down a gauntlet with this statement: the author-function “does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilizations.” I wanted to somehow test his assertion that authorship would be constructed differently in traditional China. The Sikuquanshu, that monumental manuscript library commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor in 1772, threw down another gauntlet: its 3474 book summaries were available in 1500 facsimile volumes at the UCLA Library, and they challenged me to prove I could read classical Chinese and imperial edicts and put my summer course on Manchu script to use. The Sikuquanshu is an open window into the minds of the bureaucrat bibliographers of the eighteenth century–what else could I have studied that was more important?

I used to have trouble justifying how a dissertation with the title “What is an Author in the Sikuquanshu?” addresses the concerns of LIS. There was snideness from some faculty at UCLA: “Why doesn’t she go to the history or literature department if she doesn’t want an LIS degree?” The research wasn’t about library operations or information-seeking behavior, and flinging Foucault was simply not done under the tutelage of my advisor in the 1990s. In this RDA century I can easily explain the connection to you: the qualitative study I did was about what we now call relationship designators, and that is going to be very handy as I work on the current chapter in my cataloging textbook.

Research wonks will want to know that I calculated a 1-in-k sample, bought the Chinese input method emulator program for Windows 95, and photocopied 352 of the tiyao (summaries) out of the encyclopedia-like volumes, then read and transcribed data from the lot in Excel. Yes, this was a dissertation with limited twentieth-century technology－everything was done by manual input off paper.

Here are some of the things I learned about how the imperial bibliographers used “relationship designators.”

• The normal situation was single authorship. In 86% of cases, the bibliographers placed only one person’s name in the bibliographic description, and the most common relationship specified between person and work in the description was 撰 zhuan (composed or written by). That relationship designator was chosen for 71% of all cases across four classes.
• There were differences among the four classes of works with regard to relationships. In Histories (shi 史), multiple authorship participants occurred more frequently than in Classics (jing 經) or Masters (zi 子) or Collections (ji 集). In Histories there was a greater variety of words chosen to describe the functions of names; in Histories the authorship participants compiled (zuan 纂), and collated (jiao 校), and the bibliographers often used words that highlight the fact that historians were often writing for imperial history projects. In the Collections class, which contains many writers’ posthumously published works, the bibliographers also included the names of printers and relatives who transmitted an author’s legacy.
• Biographies in the summaries accompanying each book were also an important feature. The bibliographers were building a collection for the emperor’s purposes, so they took a bureaucrat’s perspective. Their goal was to portray writers as loyal Confucian officials, even if their lives did not quite fit into the template. An author in  the Sikuquanshu is a man with an official biography, a life beyond the name in the bibliographic description.
• As a contemporary cataloger, my favorite cases were those in which the author was questionable or not known. The bibliographers were very scrupulous about assigning some kind of relationship indicator to every work they summarized, so 4% of the sample was marked 舊本題 jiubenti — “old editions are labeled …” to show questionable attribution—and 1.7% had the phrase 不著撰人名氏 bu zhu zhuanren mingshi–”the writer’s name is not recorded” to show anonymity.  Being part of the evidential research movement (which looked for historical and textual evidence to justify editing decisions), the bibliographers carefully collated these books with questionable pedigrees. Almost half the time they found an author for the work or found evidence to overturn the traditionally assigned author, but they retained the traditional names and anonymity in the bibliographic description. They imagined themselves iconoclasts who were correcting errors, but that rebel attitude didn’t extend to changing the labels presenting the old attributions!

On that note I will leave you to ponder the disjuncture between bibliographic description in eighteenth-century China and that of today–while we can recognize the words in the Sikuquanshu descriptions as separable elements, perhaps their function for the library’s chief reader (the emperor) was a snapshot of the work that couldn’t be altered. Would it be recognizable by the emperor as the same work if the names were corrected?

You’ll probably head back to Facebook now, but before I quit for the day and feed the staff I will reread some of my favorite moments in the dissertation. Like footnote number 294 on the Thirteen Classics that were carved in stone as part of the Sikuquanshu project (they had typos)! And the really fun subsection on page 202 about the annual distribution of Uighur muskmelons to the Sikuquanshu staff (junior staff got 1/4 melon each)! And the graph in Figure 4–it’s still awesome!

Spending about five years of my life in the company of the Qianlong emperor was a cool thing. It’s too bad that my Chinese history advisor was right: the market for this knowledge dried up in 1912. Oh, and was Foucault right about cultural difference? Yes and no. Chinese authorship as seen by the literati in the high Qing is hardly an exotic “other,” even though its situation in a system of imperial patronage is more extremely circumscribed than European authorship of the same time. But that’s an analysis that someone else in mainstream academia will have to do, because these files are being flung.

The RDA Worldwide Show Plus One

I have to admit that I questioned the need for yet another RDA presentation at ALA 2012 and almost decided against going to RDA Worldwide on Sunday. To atone for my prejudice against it, here is a report about it that shouts to the world: This kind of program justifies the continuing existence of the face-to-face, big-tent ALA Annual. There was no other channel of communication or venue where all of this information about international cataloging could have been brought together except in Anaheim. The speakers brought humor and personal insight into their talks that made them easy to listen to. Where else could there be such a group of presenters and an audience who could share a laugh at quips about the Preußische Instruktionen?

Christine Frodl of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek spoke first about the systematic planning for RDA in German-speaking countries. Those of us who have been buffeted by many years of RDA Wars in the U.S. were impressed by the clear, centralized path the German speakers have taken to RDA adoption, as well as their well-organized program for training. They have put together several training courses in Moodle that are accessible to anyone. Just a click on the button als Gast anmelden and you can enter any of the RDA or FRBR courses (which are, of course, in German).

Frodl revealed that the RDA transition is part of a greater movement toward internationalization in German library standards. The community is making their move into MARC21, a language of tags that is new for German librarians.  The Germans are also part of EURIG, the European RDA Interest Group, which had its launch in January 2012.

After we returned from a fire alarm evacuation, the remaining presenters shortened their presentations to keep within time limits, but there was still a lot of rich detail in their talks.

Ageo Garcia of Tulane University was introduced as the librarian behind almost all the Spanish translations of cataloging rules and tools, from DDC to RDA, and he gave a hemispheric view on the work in cataloging rules to the south of the United States. The International Meeting of Cataloguing Experts in Buenos Aires, 2004 was the start of a new era of discussion among Latin American countries to work toward better cooperation in this area of librarianship. That meeting spurred a series of regional conferences and a commitment beginning this year for an annual meeting on cataloging, in Monterrey. (I believe.  I wish I had his slides to refresh my memory on some of the details.)

The key issue in Latin America is the diversity of circumstances in different countries. The penetration of MARC21 is uneven (with many libraries still using the card catalog), and the Library of Congress has been instrumental  over the past decades in providing technical assistance for the regional development of cataloging cooperation. RDA will be published in Spanish by Rojas Eberhard editores under the title of Recursos, Description, Accés–it was essential to keep the acronym across the languages! What startled me in his remarks was how important the IMCE were  in jumpstarting worldwide discussion of cataloging and FRBR. We in the U.S. tend to fixate on the old AACR3 train wreck of 2004, while all around the world everyone was preparing the track bed for RDA through the International Statement on Cataloguing Principles.

Meanwhile, in the South Pacific … Chris Todd of the National Library of New Zealand began her presentation with this slide reminding us that the issue of size and distance is key in New Zealand’s situation with RDA. In this regard, she urged the audience to think of her country as “a very small U.S. state, very far off, where people have strange accents.” New Zealand is not at the JSC table, so they follow the Library of Congress’s decision-making out of expedience. On the one hand LC’s hesitation to adopt RDA caused New Zealand’s planning for the changeover to lose momentum; on the other hand, online access to LC training materials is a great boon to NZ catalogers, even if attending webinars means listening at the computer in pajamas in the middle of the night. Also at odds with New Zealand’s local practices is the March 2013 start date for RDA. New Zealanders will delay adoption past that month because it conflicts with vacation season in the southern hemisphere. A final policy issue is language; while we may think of New Zealand as an English-speaking country, there are actually three official languages (English, Maori, and New Zealand Sign Language).

However, the groundwork for RDA adoption is in full swing: the National Library  is committing to training and Barbara Tillett will offer seminars for them later, a cataloguer’s wiki has been set up, and Todd emphasized the value of  being part of the working group going through the instructions together. They have had many serious discussions about long-held beliefs and practice, particularly when going through RDA instructions with the phrase “if considered important …” New Zealand has only two library schools and no local cataloging trainers, so there is a lot of work for everyone to do.

The last speaker on the program began with a meditation on why he was scheduled last–was it because he was the least experienced on the panel, or because China was the country least involved in international cataloging standards? Li Kai, cataloger from the National Capital Library and blogger (note: 他也有不一样的中文编目笔记) on his way to Syracuse University this fall, left the audience amused and enlightened with his wry observations on cataloging futures in his country. First he presented the results of a survey of catalogers’ thinking about RDA modeled after Elaine Sanchez’s work. Despite the size of the Chinese library community, he struggled to find enough respondents, and the results were not encouraging: the overwhelming number of catalogers reported unfamiliarity with RDA, despite recent seminars on it in China. Because RDA translation just started in May 2012 and will not be finished until late next year, Li feels that this is unlikely to change and agrees with Charlene Chou’s “#4″ scenario: there is likely to be no efforts in RDA adoption at this time.

Li’s major emphasis was on the fragmentation of the Chinese cataloging landscape. A difficult issue for the adoption of rules with an AACR2 lineage is the fact that Chinese cataloging rules privilege title entry, and the concept of  ”authorized access point” and the concepts of FRBR have little resonance in cataloging practice. Then professionally, there is little cooperation between the National Library of China and CALIS, the agency responsible for public libraries. Furthermore, the longstanding practice in China is to use Chinese descriptive rules for Chinese materials and AACR2 for Western materials, so a unified approach under RDA and FRBR would require a radical change in cataloging culture. The future of cataloging in China will require bridging these divides if it is to stop being at the fringes of international cataloging standardization.

As a bonus international perspective, I heard Rebecca Lubas of the University of New Mexico at the OLAC Membership Meeting later that evening. She spoke of her work traveling to the National and University Library of Kosovo to provide training in audiovisual cataloging for their librarians. Her talk was illustrated with great photos of her trip, including the one below that shows the high regard in which Bill Clinton in held in Kosovo. (The photo links through to her flickr photostream set from the trip.)

Her experiences presented a stark contrast and unexpected resonances with the RDA Worldwide program. While we may have chuckled about the “isolation” of New Zealand or the international disconnect of China, Kosovo’s isolation does not have a humorous angle. This was Lubas’s second trip to the country to provide technical assistance, and she mentioned that her travel expenses to this far corner of southeast Europe paled in comparison to the library’s cost in translating her instructional materials into Serbian and Albanian (translators knowledgeable about cataloging do not come cheap). Kosovo follows AACR2 and other common cataloging standards, but is not yet on any path toward RDA, nor a member of EURIG. Lubas is planning to do an introductory session on RDA and FRBR via videoconference rather than in person, but is uncertain about the ability of technology and communication links to support an interactive session with Kosovo. The link between Kosovo and the future of cataloging is very tenuous compared to the links in larger, wealthier countries.

I left these programs feeling that my perspective on RDA was truly broadened. Comparing and contrasting different national situations highlights how different the world is now than it was back when Anglo-AmericanCR2 was the new code on the block.

June Poll: DDC Instruction

The question for cataloging instructors this month: how much time do you allot to the DDC unit in your cataloging course? I’m trying to gauge the structure of chapters and exercises in the textbook, and your answer will help me address your needs better.