Leap Year for Libraries

I started thinking about what academic libraries could look like next February 29th (or maybe what I hope they will look like) and here is what I came up with:

Acquisitions

Books will still be a part of the budget but we will see more agreements like the journal-subscription model for serials: print, online only, or print and online. Libraries will be able to decide if they want the book in print or full-text online or both and will pay vendors a fee for each type of access.

Information Commons

Harvard Lamont Library Cafe    Originally uploaded by cindiann

There will be increasing pressure to have a cafe with Wifi for informal collaboration and research. Libraries will need to come to grips with how they really feel about food. The Commons will be a place to share and mashup the streaming content available from on and off campus (e.g., course videos, presentations, YouTube, etc).

Cataloging

I would like to say (once RDA finally is adopted) that in four years MARC will at least be enhanced by FRBR principles or, even better, MARC will be replaced altogether (*sigh* if only). As it is, this seems optimistic in the extreme.

Interlibrary Loan

Although the total number of interlibrary loan requests may not go down, there will be less requests for individual articles as more content is available online. I actually tried to find a citation in Ebsco, Gale and Proquest recently that didn’t have either an HTML or PDF available; it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Requests will increase for items which are not online (old–out-of-print, but still in copyright–books) or, in the case of special collections, may need institutional authentication. ILL will be sending out a sort of temporary login for digitized special collections.

ILS

Open source initiatives like LibLime will be a more popular option for libraries because of their timely adoption of user-centric tools for searching and collaborating. The expensive ILS vendors of the past will be marginalized as more libraries turn to ILS overlay systems (Primo, Endeca, etc) or open source options like LibLime for simple, intuitive searching.

Reference

While face-to-face interaction will still drop over the next four years, virtual reference will increase. iPhone functionality in most phones by 2012 will make texting a library easier and more comfortable.

Publication

Open access journals will still be an issue for some academics but the number of citations to free online articles will continue to increase, despite the ‘experts’ who only see top-tier journals as viable publication outlets. As citations from free articles skyrocket, most scholars will admit (either privately or openly) that open access journals are really making a substantial impact on scholarship.

Of course there are many other aspects of libraries that will evolve over the next four years but these are what I would like to see happen. Maybe some of my thoughts are a bit drastic for just four years. If you think about it though, last February 29th, most people were just starting to glimpse the power of Google; Facebook had just barely been launched; and user-generated content and blogging had just started gaining real traction.

“Is Cataloging Worth It?”

I just went through NACO training and at the end of the initial three-day seminar one of my colleagues who is not a cataloger approached me about the training.

With no disrespect in his voice he asked me flat out if I felt that the investment in time and money was worth the returns. We ended up having a ten-minute conversation on why we should spend so much money on cataloging. This is a tough subject for me. On the one hand I know that what I do really can make a difference for our patrons, but on the other hand I frustrate myself because I also know that some of the MARC fields I populate are just plain useless (at least our ILS can’t use them). I love cataloging, but it is hard to defend some of the things we do to other colleagues who really have a good point. My friend asked some other legitimate questions that went something like this: Is it better to put more money into describing an item a little better, or to take that money and instead just buy another book? Do we really get back a return worth the investment (A.K.A. does the patron usage justify the cost)?

Fortunately I was able to confidently state that NACO training really is worth the investment. But I don’t think I could be as confident about some of the other rules we follow as catalogers–not that they are less important, just that they may not be as utilized by patrons as name authorities.

RDA, MARC, and AACR2 aside, what do you say when people wonder if cataloging is worth the expense and relevant in today’s world?