Getting to Know TS Librarians: Sue Burkhart

Sue Burkhart is the Acquisitions Librarian for the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals Library and she has been here for 24 years.  She grew up in Middle Georgia and went to Tift College in Forsyth, GA (now closed) and worked in a library for the first time as a student assistant. From there she travelled around the country and worked in libraries wherever she went.  Sue got her MLN from Emory University with two young children in the house.

Sue worked at a law firm in New York City, Mercer University Law School Library, and the University of Southern California Law Library before starting with the Circuit Library.  She began her career here as the catalog librarian keeping our online catalog up to date.  She moved on to acquisitions of legal materials for the libraries, the judges and other court staff.  She is also in charge of our Library Digital Collection of court historical material.

In her spare time, Sue enjoys spending time with her nine grandchildren and travelling to visit them as often as she can.  She also has an old English bulldog who takes her for a walk rather than the other way around.  If there is any time left she enjoys quilting and reading.

1. Does your job title describe what you do? Why?

I believe my job title does describe what I do. Since we have a small library staff I get to wear many hats.  I am the Acquisitions Librarian purchasing reference materials for judges, probation officers, federal public defenders, and other federal court staff in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. I am also the Catalog Librarian performing copy cataloging using OCLC and original cataloging when the demand is there. I am also the Serials Librarian in charge of bindery for the few law reviews that we still bind. I am also in charge of our Digital Collection which consists of staff scanning historical court documents, creating metadata for these items, and entering them into our digital repository.

2. What are you reading right now?

I am usually reading two or three books at the same time.  I like all genres but at the present time I am reading historical fiction and non-fiction. For my book club I am reading America’s First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie. This is an interesting look at the life of Thomas Jefferson through the perspective of his daughter, Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph, from the time she was a young girl, acting as hostess at the White House during the presidency of her father, and through his death. I am also reading Not Everyone Gets a Trophy by Bruce Tulgan so that I can learn how to better manage members of the millennial generation.

3. If you could work in any library what would it be? Why?

If I could work in any library it would be the one that I am working in right now. I have been here for 24 years and I still love my job. People ask me when I plan to retire and right now I can not give them an answer.  I like the variety of things that I do everyday.

4. You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on? 

I do like the variety of tasks that I do everyday, but some days it feels like I don’t get a lot accomplished because I do have so many things that need to be done.  If I suddenly had a free day at work I would work all day on our library digital collection. That always seems to be at the bottom of my list of things to do but I like having our court history available to people who are looking for a specific item and we don’t have to go looking in file cabinets for them.  

Getting to Know TS Librarians: Celia Gavett

1. Introduce yourself (name & position). 
Hi everyone, I'm Celia Gavett. I'm actually at a point of transition between two positions within Columbia Law School's Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, so the invitation to interview for this blog post came at an interesting time! Since January 2016, I have served as the Head of Continuing Resources & Collection Maintenance. Starting October 1st, I will be working as a Law Cataloger (my first post-MS ILS position).

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?
Yes, I think the job title for my current position is accurate. As Head of CR & CM, I manage two small teams responsible for print serials processing and maintenance of the stacks, respectively. These two units also handling filing (microforms and print supplementation) and claiming, so although a joint CR & CM unit is perhaps a less common combination, there are several ways that communication and workflows overlap. We are expecting a very large series of book moves within the next year, so I've definitely been thinking more about ways to streamline and improve upon the shift planning processes we've used in the past.

In my upcoming position as Law Cataloger, I'm looking forward to taking on original and complex copy-cataloging of items in various formats and languages. I really enjoy learning new things, and I'm excited to contribute to another area of Technical Services.

3. What are you reading right now?
For work, next on my list is to check out Steven Carl Fortriede's Moving Your Library. Now that I don't have assigned readings from LIS coursework, I'm gradually getting back to more leisure reading too. As a fairly eager home cook, I've enjoyed flipping through J. Kenji López-Alt's The Food Lab over the past couple of months. I know there are a lot of musicians in the law librarianship ranks too, so I'll also mention that I'm trying to get back into playing piano for leisure more regularly -- a couple weeks ago I dusted off my old copy of Mozart sonatas and have found it fun to (badly and stiffly) sight-read a movement or two at a time.

4. You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?
Free time is especially unexpected for me these days, since our entire Technical Services Department is working through a complete retrospective inventory project. If I suddenly had a truly free day at work with no sensible catch-up tasks to do, I might take some extra time to play around with some of our ILS's reporting functions, because there's always another interesting tip or quirk to discover. I might also try to study up on a bit of basic bibliographic/legal vocabulary in a language I don't read.

RDA Toolkit update

An American Library Association sponsored webcast, "What's next for RDA and the 3R Project" was presented Friday, September 14, 2018. The presentation provided updates on development of the new version of the RDA Toolkit available at beta.rdatoolkit.org.

The presenters emphasized that changes to the beta toolkit scheduled for implementation September 26, 2018 were at least partially driven by user feedback. These enhancements include improvements to the HTML editor, improvements to search, updates to tools, and improvements to MARC mapping. The RDA Steering Committee plans to have the beta toolkit function in compliance with W3C accessibility guidelines by the end of the year.

In response to a "use case" for a way to cite to particular guidelines in RDA, citation numbers will be introduced. These will be six to eight digit numbers randomly associated with instructions. They will be "invisible" but searchable within the toolkit.

The presenters again emphasized consistence in structure across instructions; every element will be laid out in the same order. This "boilerplate" is a feature of the content management system used to edit the beta toolkit. Reusable components will enable more efficient updates and translations.

Since RDA is an implementation and extension of the IFLA LRM, the RSC is now able to resolve gaps and inconsistencies within the toolkit. The editors continue to add and adjust content on a regular basis including 96 elements to be added as part of a new Appellation element and modeling of aggregates and serials within the framework of the IFLA LRM.

Navigation and utility should be enhanced by the addition of a "relationship matrix" and a graphical browser intended to show elements in context.

Workshop slides and an archived recording of the session are available. The RDA Toolkit also has a YouTube Channel with links to other presentations.

BIBFRAME Update Forum at the ALA Annual Conference 2018

https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/news/bibframe-update-an2018.html

A BIBFRAME update forum was held at the 2018 ALA Annual Conference with presentations from institutions reporting on projects underway.

Jodi Williamschen, Library of Congress, gave an update on BIBFRAME Pilot 2.0.  She reported that recent infrastructure improvements at LC have been made with the addition of servers and software updates.  The BIBFRAME database, updated daily, contains over 17 million MARC records that have been converted to BIBFRAME Works.

A BIBFRAME 2.0 Implementation Register https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/implementation/register.html is available on the LC website.  Located here is information about a project undertaken at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library (UIUC) that focused on creating an interface and converting 7,829 Dublin Core items to BIBFRAME 2.0.  A link is provided to the UIUC Bibframe search interface http://sif.library.illinois.edu/bibframe/search2.php.

A presentation by Tiziana Possemato, Casalini Libri - @Cult, From MARC to BIBFRAME in the SHARE-VDE project, highlighted a collaborative linked data endeavor developed by Casalini Libri (European bibliographic and authority data provider) and @Cult (ILS and Discovery tool provider).  Initial input for the project was received from sixteen North American Research Libraries.

Jeremy Nelson, Metadata & Systems Librarian at Colorado College and co-founder of Knowledgelinks.io presented a model for using BIBFRAME in a multi-institutional projects.  The project known as Plains to Peaks collective attempts to unite isolated digital collections located across Colorado and Wyoming into one platform.

Nathan Putnam, Director, Metadata Quality, OCLC discussed the OCLC Research process in converting approximately 11 million MARC records to BIBFRAME 2.0.  Through the process the team learned the importance of Work IDs and URI.  OCLC remains committed to working with LC to support development of BIBFRAME

For links to individual presentations and further information see the BIBFRAME webpage at the Library of Congress website https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/news/bibframe-update-an2018.html

Getting to Know TS Librarians: Ryan Tamares

1. Introduce yourself (name & position). 

Hello, I’m Ryan Tamares, Head of Collection Services, Robert Crown Law Library, Stanford Law School. I began my work at the library as Lead Cataloging Specialist in 2004, and was promoted to the role of Catalog Librarian in 2013. I have held the title of Head of Collection Services since 2016. My experiences in technical services roles have been so helpful, providing much background from where the collection has been as well as informing on how the library might proceed in the future.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?

This is not inaccurate, but doesn’t tell very much about what I do. Officially I oversee the cataloging, processing, and preservation of my library’s collection. I collaborate with my colleagues in other departments as well as the main campus library to make sure library users are able to find and access resources, regardless if they are physical or otherwise.

3. What are you reading right now?

I began reading Pamela Druckerman’s There are no grownups (Penguin Press, 2018) on my flight to AALL Annual in Baltimore, and am nearly done with the book. On professional readings, I am taking a look at two new titles: Elevating customer service in higher education : a practical guide / Heath Boice-Pardee, Emily Richardson, Eileen Soisson (Academic Impressions, 2018), and Reengineering the library : issues in electronic resources management / edited by George Stachokas (ALA Editions, 2018).

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?

Given the choice, I would love to work in a music library, as that is in part my training—my undergraduate degree is in music education, and I earned a Master of Music in bassoon performance. Having a background in performing and teaching music has truly informed me about working with others as well as training people. These are skills that have helped me greatly as a librarian.

Revised RDA Toolkit workshop

Recently I was able to attend a workshop at the American Library Association Annual Meeting, sponsored by the RDA Steering Committee, providing an introduction to the beta revised RDA Toolkit. The RDA Steering Committee (RSC)  initiated the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign (3R) project in 2017, redesigning the toolkit to align with the IFLA Library Reference Model.

The beta Toolkit is available at https://beta.rdatoolkit.org/rda.web/ and users are encouraged to explore and provide feedback. Presentations from the workshop are available on the RSC's presentation site, http://www.rda-rsc.org/node/560.

What do I think the takeaways are? An understanding of the IFLA LRM is essential to navigating the revised toolkit as all instructions are organized in accordance with this model. The toolkit is very much a work in progress, so it is difficult to tell how it will be to work with, examples are incomplete and some navigational aids have yet to be developed. While the language used is very consistent, it is also somewhat opaque. The new version will be reliant on "application profiles" to provide guidance to catalogers for use of the recording options presented for each data element. It is anticipated that communities of practice, e.g. music catalogers, law catalogers, will develop best practices for catalogers working in these areas.

The RSC has not determined a date for transition to the revised toolkit; they must first agree that the 3R project is complete. The RDA Board must unanimously approve the determination. A transition date will then be announced; the original site will remain available for one year beyond that date so users can move to the new toolkit.

Stanford Libraries Awarded Grant to Implement LD Environment

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Stanford Libraries a $4 million grant to lead an effort to integrate library data into the greater Web via linked data. Stanford will be partnering with Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Iowa to implement a prototype environment and tools over the next two years. A deliberate partnership with the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) and the Library of Congress has been included in the project, allowing for an expansion of the number of libraries that will be able to implement linked data.

More details can be found in the press release on Library Technology Guides at https://librarytechnology.org/pr/23584.