The back room and the back office

We are hearing a lot these days about the "back office". Everywhere you look, "efficiencies" are being achieved by slimming down the functions of the back office - that is, that part of an organisation which does not deal directly (face-to-face) with customers and clients, or taxpayers. (I was amused, when looking at a few websites as background for this post, to find that I couldn't view some of them in my local library as they don't make it through the local government firewall. The blocking is a bit arbitrary though: the most well-known - or notorious, depending on your point of view - UK-based outsourcing firms are not blocked).

"An alternative to hiring locally" is how one company advertises itself. Pause to consider that for a moment, and wonder just how any politician could ever recommend such a thing to his/her constituents. Pay, possibly with public money, to send work somewhere else, into someone else's economy (India, in the case of that company)? Bring this down to local level, and you are actually talking about the employment prospects of people you may know (and who have a vote) - and you are talking about impoverishing your own neighbourhood, as people without jobs cannot support local businesses, and some of them will need help in the form of benefits paid by taxing those who remain in employment. In Wales, this point appears to be at least partly understood and acted upon in the awarding of government contracts: it remains to be seen whether this idea will flourish.

I have worked in both the iniquitous "back office" and in the more immediately public parts of libraries. (I'm trying to avoid using the term "front line" here - it seems antagonistic and not an expression we should be using in terms of our relationship with the public - but I'm afraid that it's a very common term in this context!) I know that I depend on things happening successfully behind the scenes to make the "public" part of my job work well, and it is sad to see that the back office is seen as an inefficient encumbrance merely because it is hidden from view. (Is that the problem? Perhaps people don't really believe in the value of things they can't see happening?)

Capita is one of several well-known firms who offer not only to achieve efficiency in this area, but also, note, to "improve the end user experience" by doing so. The implication is that the users will be better off without your own in-house way of doing things (and your expensive staff with their long-standing employment rights). This is not very pleasant for a cataloguer to read, but if you're not one you might very well think that's fine. In which case, why stop there? Information Literacy in academic libraries might be a good candidate for outsourcing, when you consider it. Qualified teachers working for an agency (which could be one of the same well-known outsourcing firms) could do the work with more consistency across subjects than subject librarians, and less duplication of effort. (I'm not particularly advocating it myself, just playing devil's advocate and idly wondering whether the reaction to outsourcing might be rather different if it affected people in a more visible role).

The High Visibility Cataloguing blog is one step towards improving the general awareness of what cataloguers do in that mysterious and much-maligned "back office", encouraging cataloguers to emerge and engage, where possible, with the wider library community and beyond.

All larger workplaces have an element of hidden or "invisible" support. There used generally to be far more of these roles: those who have been around for a while will remember that at one time typing was confined to those who had qualifications in it. The back office has been shrinking for a long time. And the back room? A different thing entirely! Possibly not shrinking, but definitely has fewer cataloguers!

The Rule of Three

"The Rule of Three" - I love the name, it sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story! Nothing so exciting, of course: it is the name commonly given to a cataloguing rule from the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, and it's been there since the 1970s. (Wikipedia seems to think differently. "Inherently funnier, more satisfying"? hmmm). As AACR2 is on its way out, so too is this cast-iron rule, and it can't be allowed to pass without comment.

Here it is :

21.6C2
If responsibility is shared among more than three persons or corporate bodies and principal responsibility is not attributed to any one, two, or three, enter under title. Make an added entry under the heading for the first person or corporate body named.
[from AACR2, 1988, but the rule predates this edition].

RDA, the new code which is due to replace AACR2,  takes quite a different view, abolishing the idea of a "main entry", allowing all the authors to appear in their own right in the catalogue, and leaving far more policies up to "cataloguer's judgment".

What was the reason for the Rule of Three? It always seemed a bit mean to cut the authors off arbitrarily. A book with one, two, or three authors would include an entry in the catalogue for all three authors: more than that, and they were abruptly relegated to an added entry for the first author, and not even a whisper of a mention for the others. The trouble with it, at least for academic libraries, was trying to stick to the rule in the face of upset authors (often members of the academic staff known to the librarians) who didn't take kindly to being airbrushed from the catalogue.

Cataloguing rules seem to be a mystery to non-cataloguing librarians, who probably think that the cataloguers in their institutions make all these things up as they go along. We have had librarians of long standing (caught between intransigent cataloguers and miffed authors) insisting to us that they have never heard of this rule. Making things up might have been possible when each catalogue was a separate being in its own institution, but these days everything is visible on the web and many records are shared. This saves a lot of time and money and avoids the waste of duplication. It also means you need the rules even more - all that saving of time and avoiding of duplication goes down the drain if you are then constantly altering policies to suit local needs or tinkering with individual records on a random basis (i.e. when someone complains).

Like many rules, it dated from the days of the card catalogue, and it was probably partly designed to reduce the typing and filing of catalogue cards. Three was as good a cut-off point as any. Technology moved on long ago, and the idea of the "main entry" is no longer so important in the catalogue (it's still useful for allocating suffixes to classmarks for shelving purposes). While there is some additional work involved in including all the authors of a multi-author work, it is not the laborious drawer-filling process it would have been in terms of extra cards. There was a bit more to it than that, though: AACR2's definition of a personal author is "the person chiefly responsible for the creation of the intellectual or artistic content of a work" (21.1A1), and once you get beyond three authors you might well wonder whether you can say this of all of them. The "main entry" concept is also still as relevant as ever in bibliographic citation, which can these days be derived directly from the catalogue.

I think I can safely say that of all cataloguing rules the Rule of Three has probably been the cause of most complaints over the years, at least in the academic libraries I have worked in. Heddwch i'w llwch, as we say in Wales.

You can't have it in Welsh because ...

1. It would cost thousands of pounds

2. It would confuse people

3. It would make people have accidents

4. Of course we all want it to be in Welsh but at times like these we have to tighten our belts, it's a luxury we can't afford, we could be spending the money on children in hospital, people will have to go without their operations if you have it in Welsh ... [&c. &c. ad infinitum - increasingly frantic variations on 1.]

5.  It isn't compatible with the software

6.  But everyone speaks English anyway

7.  It's too much work to have it in Welsh, so if it has to be in Welsh as well you can't have it at all

8.  It can't be translated because it is a brand name

9.  The Welsh version is a work in progress

10. "You can never have it in Welsh because you have an insatiable appetite; if you have it in Welsh you will never be satisfied, you will want more and more!" - or words to that effect; paraphrasing the late Lord Tonypandy


Have I missed any?

As easy as ABC

At one time, alphabetical order was something we were all used to using. When I was at primary school, we even lined up in the yard in alphabetical order of surname (an early lesson for me in alphabetical discrimination!) At secondary school we sat in that order in class: the friends I still have from school days mainly had surnames beginning with "P".  If you wanted somebody's phone number, you went to the phone book, which in those simple nationalised days contained most people's numbers in one sequence, and you used your knowledge of the alphabet to find the right page. You were used to the idea that a page headed Allen-Atkins would include names such as Andrews and Ash. (All right, some people didn't get it even then, but it worked pretty well).

Times have changed. The phone book which popped through our door last week is a shadow of its former self. (It's still in alphabetical order, but it's not so useful now that so many people are not in it!)

Students give the impression that they are not used to alphabetical order, but as a parent I know that children do still get taught the alphabet. Younger children's classrooms still have colourful letters with pictures of things beginning with the appropriate letter round the walls in alphabetical order, just as we had. (You can even practise getting the order right here !) Perhaps it is more that students have already forgotten something they used to know, because it is no longer needed to the same extent in daily life.

The library catalogue is now in its death throes, with the new discovery platforms jettisoning the idea of linear lists arranged by alphabetical order. Internet searching has given us so many more ways of finding what we are looking for. We can't get rid of the concept that easily, though. Our books are classified using LC, which is based on the alphabet. P is a section, PR is another section, PS is another one again, and that is the order in which those sections are shelved. That second letter seems to cause a lot of confusion. Use the index to any book, and you are back with the same "phone book" principle. In an e-book you may be able to search for the term you want and find information without it, but the physical object still requires you to be able to use one.

Print periodicals, the actual hard copy physical objects (of which we still do have many, especially in humanities subjects) have to be arranged on the shelf, and traditionally that is in alphabetical order. Very often I have found people looking bewildered and saying things like "it's complete chaos", "it's not in any order" and even "why aren't they in alphabetical order?" They are, of course, in alphabetical order, but this sequence includes a further element, a large number of Welsh language titles, which throws people. "W" and "Y" are vowels, but they look strange to the uninitiated (which might include casual shelvers).

Then there is that nasty habit they have of changing their titles. Keep them together on the shelf in one sequence, say the academics - it's the same thing, it may have changed its title but everyone in the academic community knows it is the same thing. Well, fine on the shelves in your own study, perhaps, but if you try this in a large library it will soon come undone - every student and shelver would also have to be able to recognise it, and the only way round that is to complicate your acquisition process and add a whole lot of extra manual labelling (and it probably wouldn't work even then). (There's one glorious exception to this - Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies became Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies when its editorial team moved from Cambridge to Aberystwyth, apparently with a view to keeping it together on the shelf. Strictly speaking, the new title should come before the older one, but it really is close enough to work!)

Finally, there's that old problem of recognising that signage tends to refer to either end of the sequence but not to everything in between. In the card catalogue days, this meant knowing that a drawer which was labelled A-C would include B even if it didn't say so. Our end-of-shelf signs do much the same at the moment. I am toying with the idea of having a full shelf list at the ends of the shelves instead, for more clarity (in alphabetical order, of course!)

Judging (Welsh) books by their covers

If the death of the physical book ever does happen, I suppose the question of book covers may become redundant. For now, however, they are still really important, and don't let anyone persuade you otherwise!

In academic libraries they mean little: the one where I work actually throws the paper covers away (this is a bit upsetting when they are particularly attractive!) A recent technological innovation borrowed from the world of bookselling, the facility to display images of the covers next to the catalogue records, has caused some confusion - the image is meant to help the user locate the book easily, but that doesn't work if the pretty cover has been chucked out. On the whole, though, users in academic libraries are more interested in the contents than the superficial appearance of books.

This is not so in bookshops, where a good cover judiciously displayed can make a difference to sales. In my public library past we were well aware that the same thing applies to the lending of books. Face-on displays of books made a big difference to borrowing figures. You could more or less manipulate what got borrowed by your choice of items for display, and that choice was I fear very often determined by the quality of the covers. However well-written and interesting a book is, it will not be borrowed by casual library users if it has a plain or boring cover. Sad, but true.

Living in a part of Wales where Welsh-speakers are not well represented among library staff, I tended to keep an eye out for the Welsh books arriving in my branch when I worked in the public library; I don't work there now, but I do use a different branch as a regular borrower, and one thing that caused problems then still seems to now. I would often find myself trying to persuade my colleagues that a particular book, despite its bright jolly cover, was actually a novel for adults; and now as the parent of a Welsh-speaking child in primary school I equally often find racy adult fiction categorised as children's stories, again probably because of the covers. I can only really comment on the Welsh ones, but of course the library has a collection of books in other languages which the staff also don't speak, so the same may be true of those too.

I wonder whether the artwork on Welsh book covers is different enough to be confusing? There are quite a few adult novels concerned with childhood (but from an adult perspective), and these are the ones which are most likely to have illustrations reminiscent of children's books on their covers. Thus, books retrieved from the children's section include Lleucu Roberts' Iesu Tirion and Angharad Tomos' Si hei lwli (both of which have the titles of children's songs - a hymn and a lullaby respectively - as their titles).  These books are not meant for young children!

How do we judge what the content of a book may be, especially when we have no plans to read it ourselves? and, moreover, do not speak the language? The artwork on the cover is not always the best way - but perhaps we are so used to judging by image that we have forgotten this.

Living within our means: or, Queen Mary goes shopping

Ever since the banking crash we have been subjected to a lot of propaganda aimed at persuading us to lower our expectations. We have been living beyond our means, we must not have things we can't afford, the deficit (I think this is what we used to call the National Debt - it's not new, by the way!) is all our fault. We must close libraries and children's playgrounds, must work for nothing, must work forever (for nothing, presumably), and must listen to our betters.

Anyone would think that in the past people always lived within their means. To be fair, most of us did. In the 1960s, HP (hire purchase), an early form of credit, was looked down on by many who continued to go without the consumer goods which were being heavily advertised. It's a vicious circle: businesses can't expand if nobody can afford their goods, so if everybody lives within their means it is difficult to expand business.

An acquaintance whose father was a GP before and during the transition to the NHS mentioned that he, like many doctors at the time, feared that the NHS would have a detrimental effect on his income, but that he soon realised that this was not the case: whereas in the past he had treated poor people for nothing, he now got paid for it; slightly less poor people who had very little used to try to pay even if it meant great sacrifices, or if they had no money would pay in kind (the doctor was never short of eggs); but rich people, I quote, "didn't pay their bills anyway". The doctor's bill was treated like the bills of other tradesmen and, largely, ignored.

This reminded me of some of the stories I'd heard from elderly relatives and acquaintances. Queen Victoria, for instance, would (according to my great grandmother) descend on a hotel on the French Riviera and occupy it for the summer with her retinue. Great for business? Not exactly - she never paid the bill. Everything free, essentially, for the whole summer - which would just about bankrupt the unfortunate hotelier.

Rumours abound - too many to mention - of the visits of Queen Mary to antique shops, stately homes, country houses, all culminating with the owners parting company with their possessions. I would love to know whether any of this can be verified: I have heard stories about it from so many unconnected people that it is hard to imagine that it is all untrue. I have even been told that shops in Union Street, Ryde (Isle of Wight) had an unofficial Queen Mary insurance scheme, with boys keeping a lookout and running up the street to warn shopkeepers if the Queen was on her way, so that by the time she landed the shutters would be up and the shops shut.

Only little people pay taxes - or, indeed, pay for anything. Something to bear in mind, when you are being lectured by people telling you to live wthin your means.

So you want my opinion?

I don't suppose I'm the only one whose heart sinks at the end of every course, activity, indeed just about anything these days, when the ubiquitous "feedback" forms appear, or when requests to spend anything from "5-10 minutes" to "should take no more than 30-40 minutes" of (precious!) time filling in surveys pop into my inbox, or, infuriatingly, dance across my screen when I land on a website (no! I haven't got time! and I haven't even had a chance to look at your website yet, because you interrupted me before I could!) On occasion I have had the equivalent of half a day's work's worth of feedback and surveys to do - every one may only take a little time but the sum of the whole is too much.

Once you start noticing, you will realise just how many "news" stories are actually based on surveys - either produced by consultants or, just possibly (surely not) by lazy journalists asking a couple of people in the office. These surveys can't be representative (you won't be asked to take part in a telephone survey if you are registered with the TPS, for instance). They are a written version of the vox pop - a cheap way of filling a newspaper or website.

How reliable are the responses? Put another way, how are the questions phrased? Surveys which have an end in view often contain leading questions (they are easy to spot if you are looking for them, but still, lots of people are not looking for them). Thus, a survey on behalf of a local authority which asks its residents "List in order of importance: child protection, social services for the elderly, public libraries" has an agenda behind it. Don't be surprised if such a survey is used as evidence that residents won't mind if their library closes.

We most certainly do need to listen to our users or customers, and the very ubiquity of the feedback forms should ensure that we get a broader view than if we only had complaints to consider. But, a plea from the other side of the fence - feedback fatigue! Regurgitation, even! Ill-considered responses rushed in hurry to get the form-filling done are not really very much use to anyone (and I've been as guilty as anyone of galloping through them).  I wonder (from the point of view of the person who might be reading the feedback/survey) whether it ought to be impossible to get away with a sweeping generalisation or nebulous reply - should we always ask for concrete examples to back up what is being said? (I'd find this useful from the library point of view - though maybe not when I'm the one filling in the surveys!)

Those of you who like me work in higher education institutions will be aware that it's the time of year when the results of the National Student Survey are about to burst upon us. Food, or feedback, for thought!