Editorial

Mary Beth Weber

It is the time of year when the winners of the ALCTS annual awards are announced, and I am delighted to announce that the 2018 winners of the Edward Swanson Best of LRTS Award are Deborah M. Henry and Tina M. Neville for their paper, “Repositories at Master’s Institutions: A Census and Analysis” (LRTS volume 61, no. 3, July 2017). The authors studied a population of Carnegie-designated master’s institutions to quantify the existence of digital repositories at those institutions. They also conducted a content analysis of repositories containing some type of faculty content. The authors considered various ways that these collections might be discovered, including open web searching, inclusion in repository directories, and access through an institution’s website. The press release for this award notes “No other study has examined the IR’s of this group of academic institutions, nor so carefully analyzed their faculty, student, and other types of content while also gathering data on their platforms, or comparing discoverability using Google, OpenDOAR, ROAR and institutional websites.” I congratulate Tina and Deborah and am honored to be able to present the award at the 2018 ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans.

The work of technical services is often thought of as acquisitions or cataloging. It can be both of these things, as well as collection development and preservation. Our work is guided by procedures and best practices to document workflows that are intended to ensure consistency that will in turn facilitate discovery and research. I recently participated in a series of meetings aimed at business process improvement to identify, analyze, and improve existing processes within my department. There is overlap and duplication of work between my department and another within my library system, and the goal was to streamline processes and eliminate unnecessary duplication. It was an interesting and enlightening process that was frustrating at times. It also reinforced the importance of periodic review of workflows and procedures, particularly within the larger context of my library and the community we serve. My department’s work enables the work of my public services colleagues and the subject specialists. It is often easy to view one’s work in a vacuum without considering the time, effort, and costs involved or the larger implications. The papers in this issue of LRTS address collaboration, processes, and workflows to enable cataloging, preservation, and access to resources:

• In “RDA Implementation in Large US Public Libraries,” Chris Evin Long discusses the results and analysis of a survey he conducted to investigate how the transition to Resource Description and Access was handled in the hundred largest US public libraries. Long specifically examined whether catalogers believe that some of RDA’s major goals have been met and how some of the anticipated impacts of RDA implementation have been handled.
• In a paper with one of the catchiest titles possible (“Motley Crew: Collaboration across an Academic Library to Revive an Orphaned Collection”), authors Amy Jankowski, Anne Schultz, and Laura Soito relate how difficult it can be to find time and motivation to effectively address collection management for materials in specialized areas that fall outside the primary scope of one’s usual responsibilities. Their paper describes how a team of librarians and staff evaluated and consolidated an “orphaned collection” of books in health and medicine call numbers. The project team established a data-informed evaluation and weeding process that minimized affective decision making and considered the nuances of collection management between disciplines.
• Elizabeth Hobart demonstrates how conservation documentation provides important information about a library’s collections, including condition assessments and treatment decisions in “Recording Conservation Information: The MARC 583 Field in Practice.” She notes the shortcomings of paper files and local databases to document conservation information. Her paper outlines how Pennsylvania State University implemented use of the MARC 583 field to record conservation documentation for items in the Special Collections Library, making it publicly viewable, searchable, and protected by regular database backups.
• The importance of name authority work cannot be disputed. Teaching library personnel, particularly non-catalogers, to create name authority work is an enormous challenge. In “Extending Name Authority Work beyond the Cataloging Department,” Dana M. Miller and Amy Jo Hunsaker detail how the University of Nevada, Reno Libraries’ Metadata and Cataloging Department partnered with their Special Collections and Digital Initiatives departments to obtain NACO certification. The three departments collaborated to create a new workflow and a tool that effectively extended name authority work and record contribution beyond traditional MARC cataloging.
• And for your professional development and enlightenment, this issue of LRTS includes book reviews courtesy of my colleague, LRTS Book Review Editor Elyssa Gould.