Category: libraries and librarians

Ongoing learning

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I’m writing this just after New Year’s, which is a time when a lot of people start to think about improving themselves or learning something new (along with wanting to pick up new habits). So for today, I want to talk about how I structure ongoing learning, and some things that help.

Skills and tools : Glasses and pen resting on sheets of printed music

Professional development

A lot of my approach to this is shaped by my professional education. I’m a librarian, and I’ve worked both in K-12 schools and in a university (as well as my current place). In both those environments (as well as librarianship in general), it’s expected that part of your job is to continue learning – it’s often an expected part of the discussion at your annual reviews!

There are different ways to do this. They can include:

  • Membership in professional organizations.
  • Attending conferences, workshops, or other educational events (often organised by those professional organizations).
  • Reading blogs or other informal writing from others in the field.
  • Reading formal articles or research from others in the field.
  • Finding spaces to talk to others in the field, both formally and informally. (Sometimes at conferences, sometimes online.)

As a librarian, I currently have a membership in the appropriate professional organisation (at my current job, that’s the Special Libraries Association). I read the email digests as they come in, and an email list for people in an associated field. (Historical information in that field is relevant to me, and sometime I can sometimes help with, but 90% of the content isn’t relevant to what I do.)

I hang out in an internet space with other librarians (from all kinds of libraries) and often pick up really cool resources there. I keep an eye out for useful articles (both formal and informal) and I read a bunch of librarian blogs (and newsletters.)

I don’t go to as many conferences as I used to, because they’re less relevant for my current job but I do get to see people in our specific (very specific) field occasionally and I’ve collaborated on some projects in the past.

Witchy things

So how does that transfer into my witchy life? Right now, I…

Take in a variety of sources

Specifically blogs and newsletters (and listen to a few podcasts) by people with a variety of backgrounds and interests.

One part of this is exploring my own interests – for example, right now, I’m reading a range of astrology blogs because one of the things I’m focusing on learning is astrology, and it’s useful to see how different people approach the same basic information.

But I also make a point of including a range of resources for other reasons – I want to be aware of current issues, conversations, and general trends in the community around me. I don’t think that’s essential for a solitary practitioner, but I think some sense of broader awareness is important for anyone who’s teaching or presenting material to a larger audience. (And I do both: I have current students working toward possible initiation and I write for Seeking, as well as my own forum posts.)

Read books.

This is, of course, a classic option – and these days there are more and more books about specific topics within Paganism, witchcraft, magic, and ritual coming out every day. (My book budget – both time and money -can’t keep up with all the things I want to read!)

Think about what you’ve got time for in your life

And how you learn best. Some topics you really do need to have material in front of you. (For example, it’s hard to keep an entire astrology chart in your head. Some parts of astrology lend themselves to podcasts, but others, like chart interpretation, you probably want a book or online site.) When do you have time for learning? If you have young kids at home, podcasts or videos may be hard to get time for – but if you’ve got a long commute, a podcast might be just the thing.

Take advantage of online workshops and courses.

Of course, you have to find ones that have worthwhile material, but they’re out there. Ask around among people you know, or look for detailed reviews or comments. A lot of the more reputable options will give you some good ways to understand the material and how they teach (such as a sample intro lesson, an active blog with a fair bit of content, and/or detailed descriptions and examples of what’s in the course material.)

Courses can run from a week or so, to a month or six weeks, to a year. Obviously, longer courses tend to cost more. (Shorter courses or online workshops can be a good way to check out a teacher you’re interested in taking something longer from, though! And a lot of reputable teachers will make it easy for you to figure out if there’s a decent fit.)

My usual plan with courses (or anything more than the cost of a regular book) is to think carefully in advance about what I’m hoping to get out of it. What is being offered? How does that fit in with my goals? That’s even more true if there’s a significant commitment of time and/or money.

Build networks of people with related interests.

You don’t have to share all the same interests – just have some overlap. If you’re looking for a new resource, or checking out a possible course, or trying to figure out what material would help with a particular question, that network can be really powerful and helpful. It doesn’t need to be a big thing. Finding community spaces (online or offline, as works for you), sharing a little bit about yourself that’s relevant to that place, and offering other people ideas all help a lot.

Use the other tools at your disposal.

If your physical world options aren’t getting you traction, try asking your divination tools, focusing on what you need in meditation, or doing a ritual around finding the next step.

I have a meditation I do and have shared with people in person that is about visiting the Great Library on the astral, and wandering around looking for sources that will help with a particular need. It’s been really good for breaking through a logjam in research or in figuring out what my next step in a project is.

Other options

These are just a few of the possibilities. Don’t feel you need to try all of them – pick one or two to explore, or make a commitment to spending a little more time with the ones that you’re already enjoying. Even a little more time every week will add up over the course of the year.

Inexpensive information sources

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I was talking to someone last weekend about Pagan topics, and money’s tight for her (like it is for a lot of people), so we got to talking a bit about the usefulness of the library.

Which leads me to wanting to talk about some tips for getting books inexpensively in general.

Skills and tools : Glasses and pen resting on sheets of printed music

​The library

Let’s start with the most obvious – libraries exist to share materials so we don’t all have to buy our own. This is a win for basically everyone involved. (Even for authors. If their work is popular, the library will probably buy more copies. A copy in the library means many more people may explore their work, and eventually start buying it.)

There are some complexities, though.

1) Library purchasing practices

Libraries do buy books on a huge range of topics (unless they’re a specialised library). However, many libraries rely on a fairly limited set of sources to figure out what they’re going to buy. Large library systems may have a structure to how items are selected (some libraries routinely order a certain number of copies of books in particular categories, like award winners or new books by a list of much-loved authors.) In many cases, libraries look at a number of review publications (designed for librarians) and make selections from that.

That is a great start, but there are a lot of limitations to it. One big one (for Pagans and other people with esoteric interests – and I’m using that word both in the magical and occult sense, and in the sense of ‘interests that are uncommon and not widely shared’) is that those review publications don’t include a wide range of books in the relevant field.

In a previous library job we got Booklist, one of the major publications for library reviews, and there’d be a handful of books a year on explicitly Pagan, magical, or divinatory topics that got reviewed. There’d be other relevant titles (myths, herbs, history, and so on.) There’s only so much room in the publication, after all. Mostly those would be books from mainstream publishing houses that publish an occasional Pagan title, and a select few from the bigger metaphysical and magical publishers like Llewellyn or Weiser.

2) Publishing methods

Libraries buy most of their books from traditional publishers. While there’s been a big rise in the number of self-published books (and I’m gearing up to do some of that!) it’s been a big challenge for libraries. That’s because the quality is so incredibly varied, and because people doing independent publishing methods often aren’t aware of what information libraries used to make their decisions, or what they need to consider adding.

(Take a look at the copyright page of a traditionally published book, and you’ll see a lot of information that looks a bit incomprehensible, but has cataloging information for libraries. When a book doesn’t have that, someone has to create it for the library to use, and that takes staff time and therefore money. When the publisher provides it, the library still has to do some steps, but most of the time-consuming part is already done, and they just have to make the changes for their particular standards.)

It’s also just plain hard for libraries to find out about small press or indie published books. It can take really significant time to search sites, figure out what formats are available, and so on. (And quality for format of printed books can also be poor, and not hold up to circulation.)

Because of this, many libraries have limited selections of indie books. Sometimes their collection development policy will be available online and explain how they handle this (for example, they may collect books from local authors, or set in or about the local area, but not others.)

3) Library networks and interlibrary loan

Getting books via the library network is often what happens with esoteric books (more specialised topics, in less active demand). You may need to plan ahead a bit, but if some library in the system has it, you can get it fairly quickly, check it out as many times as your library lets you renew it, and enjoy!

4) Requesting books

One great way to get books into public libraries is to see if the library has an option for requesting titles. You enter the information about the book (title, author, publisher) and usually there’s a way to comment on why you think it’s of interest. There’s usually a box where you can sign up to be the first person to check it out if the library buys the title.

Libraries review these requests, and if there’s money in the budget and the book seems like a good fit for the collection, they may well buy it. Picking books that have really solid reviews will help a lot.

A word about libraries and privacy

Privacy when using the library is a key part of library ethics, and librarians and library staff shouldn’t be sharing what you’ve checked out unless required to by law (which in many libraries involves a subpoena). Many libraries actually delete loan records once the item is returned specifically so they can’t be forced to share that information.

That said, if you use a local library where the staff know you, they can’t erase the part of their brain that’s about you checking out books on a particular topic. Library ethics says they shouldn’t talk about it, but sometimes people do gossip. If you have concerns about privacy, consider getting your esoteric topic books at a different library, or even a different library network.

Used books

If you’re trying to save money, used books are a great way to go. Amazon has extensive listings for used books, and ABE Books is now a subsidiary company of Amazon, but has independent listings. There are other used book seller online tools.

In general, for online sellers, look for ones who have a good rating (I look for 95% or better satisfaction), and whose shipping prices are reasonable. (A lot of places price the book very cheaply, but make it up in shipping charges. If the book is cheap enough, that’s not a big deal, but it can make it harder to make comparisons.)

Another option is to find a used bookstore – if you find a store that has the kinds of books you’re generally interested in, the owner or staff may be willing to keep a wish list for you, or to help you search for particular titles.

Some Pagan, esoteric, or metaphysical stores have used book sections, or Pagan community groups may have periodic book sales or other chances to swap materials.

If you get to know people in the community, you may also hear about chances to pick up books inexpensively – sometimes if people are moving, or their focus has shifted, they’ll be glad to part with books to someone who will appreciate them.

You can also occasionally find great things at library book sales. (Often these books are donations, not books from the library collection that have been withdrawn.)

Ebooks

If you can read ebooks, they can sometimes be very affordable options. I subscribe to a couple of announcement lists for ebooks on sale, and have a running list of titles that I’m interested in.

This is harder to do specifically with esoteric books (though if you have favourite authors, it can be worth getting on their newsletter or email announcement list) but for history, cookbooks, and some types of wellness or lifestyle books, it can be a great way to pick up books you’re interested in at a steep discount.

(It can also be hard on your bank account, so be cautious here!)

What not to do

If money’s tight, it can be easy to be tempted by pirated copies – PDFs of books that sometimes get circulated in various ways. There’s a couple of reasons not to do this.

First, it can destroy the market for an author’s future work getting published. (Which, if you like their work, is something you probably care about.) It can also damage the ability of publishers to put out new works. (Especially smaller publishers – and basically, every esoteric or magical book publisher is a small publisher, just for different definitions of small.)

Publishers rely on data about what’s selling (and how) to make decisions not just about an author’s books, but about other books on similar topics or similar approaches.

Second, it can open your computer up to viruses, malware, and other bad things. Not worth it!

And finally but most importantly, it’s just wrong. Authors work hard on their books. They may choose to share some material for free, but that choice needs to be up to them. They can benefit from library sales or giveaways, or other ways of sharing books that put them out in the world cheaply, without the utterly destructive effects of pirated books.

For the same reasons, don’t take copies from libraries and not bring them back. Libraries have limited resources, and in many cases, they can’t afford to replace copies that go missing (or not quickly). Bring your books back. If you’ve honestly lost a copy and can’t find it, talk to the library staff: they can suggest the best options.

How catalogues work: algorithms

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The last part of how catalogues work is looking at algorithms.

( was not a computer science major. This is going to be the non-technical discussion.

Also, the two links I mention here are from 2016, and technology has moved on a bit, as technology does, but these are good illustrations of my specific points.

Catalogues: Wooden chest of old-fashioned catalogue cards

What is an algorithm?

A good definition is that an algorithm is a step by step way of doing this. This video from the University of Washington notes that sorting your laundry is an algorithm (is it a white shirt? This pile, these things get washed together. Is it a red shirt? That goes in a different pile. Does it need special treatment? Follow these steps.) The video’s a great overview of the topic in a couple of minutes.

Computers are extremely fast at doing this kind of step, but how successful the algorithm is depends on what the people programming the algorithm have told it to do.

An important digression

The fact that human beings design these lists is a particularly business-centered reason why diversity in technology (and in companies in general) is such a big deal – people who have different backgrounds, life experiences, or ways of looking at the world are going to think about different things in the design process,. When that’s managed well, a diverse group will likely come up with algorithms and other programming that work much better for a wider range of people.

(An example here – though it is a legitimately sort of complicated record keeping – is that the Apple Health app didn’t include any menstrual cycle tracking for a long time, and it’s still much more rudimentary than some other apps. If your body does things outside of the expected timeframe, you have fewer options.)

What does this mean for catalogues?

Some of the things a catalogue uses an algorithm for are pretty straightforward. Sorting a list by the last name of the author, or the title of the work, or the year it was published is pretty simple, so long as the data is consistent.

What data might be inconsistent? An example would be if the date formats swap between United States standard dating (Month-Day-Year) and the Day-Month-Year common in parts of Europe, your results are going to be confusing. Good data is essential to sorting and organising your catalogue.

(This is why I am spending my summer cleaning up a lot of data in our catalogue at work. This week, this has meant hours of moving identifying file numbers from the format area, where they shouldn’t be anyway, to a different area, and making sure the correct format is actually entered.

We can automate some kinds of data changes, but this one requires moving data into a different field, and we don’t have an easy way to do that automatically.)

Where it gets complicated

However, once we get into things where there is a bit more of a value judgement.

What kinds of images should we get if we search on “beautiful”?

One of the examples that has stuck with me the most was something illustrated in a keynote Dr. Safiya Noble illustrated in the keynote she gave at the LibTech conference in 2016 (LibTech is my favourite library conference for a reason) It’s worth noting this was given in March of 2016, and she talks about the manipulation of algorithms and the effect on elections….

In her keynote, she did an illustration where she did a search on “Beautiful” and at that time the algorithm turned up a lot of landscapes (that were really gorgeous). But if you searched on ‘beautiful woman’, you turned up white women (and white women of a particular kind when it came to facial structure, hair, body size, and a bunch of other characteristics’. That’s what happens when human programming goes awry, or is not sufficiently questioned.

And if you tried searches like “black girls”, you got a whole different set of results, and much more mixed ones in terms of positive and negative.

So, when your library catalogue tells you you can sort by ‘relevance’ or gives you options for ‘similar topics’, there are probably a lot of different things at play. Usually, there’s software decisions in there somewhere. Some of these may be accessible to the library staff, others may be decided by the software programmers, and the librarians may have no idea how it works.

(In our new catalogue, we can choose which things to weight more – so for example, we could choose to weight phrases in the abstract (where we put a summary of the content) more than the title, or less than the title (depending on what decided). We haven’t played around with this much yet, but it’s a way to help refine options for people.)

Even more complicated

Large companies – Google, Amazon, Facebook, any of the big ones – also look at your reactions to what you click on, where you spend time, what you click away from and when (and where you go to) – because it helps them create vast maps of data they can use. Sometimes this is really handy (like when Amazon’s list of also-boughts shows you a book you love and you had no idea it existed, or Spotify’s algorithm suggests music you really like.)

Sometimes it’s a lot creepier and more awful. There’s a famous story, when it comes to algorithms, of Target figuring out a teenager was pregnant based on other purchases before her father found out about it, based entirely on purchases that were not specifically intended for a baby, but rather things like body lotion, a larger purse, two common supplements, and a bright blue rug.

And of course, it gets even scarier if we start talking about government agencies making decisions about who can get visas, fly, or do many other kinds of things, based on algorithms and data management decisions that are obscured to the end user of the information.

What you should take away from this

Trusting a computer on fairly simple sorts (like title or author or date) is fine – but if the computer is suggesting related items, and you care about getting a wider range of options, or you are concerned about implicit bias in how a system designed by unknown people might work, that’s a good time to do some more digging, or to try a variety of searches with specific parameters so that you get a sense of what is there, what’s recommended, and maybe what isn’t.

Simply knowing more about algorithms will also give you a lot more choices and awareness.

How catalogues work: editorial influence

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There are several places in a catalogue where there’s a degree of what might best be called editorial influence. More bluntly put, it’s people (at some degree) making decisions about these things, and those decisions come with biases, both good and bad.

We also use algorithms and those algorithms have biases, and that’s a different topic (and one for next week.)

Words mean things

Those words we use as a controlled vocabulary come from somewhere. Humans came up with them – humans with all their virtues and all their biases.

Sometimes, terms were recommended by experts in the field, or people who knew a topic intimately. (Those aren’t always the same thing!) Both these perspectives bring history and assumptions with them that may or may not fit in with the larger collection or way terms are arranged.

Sometimes those terms were the current thing at a particular time, but we have come to new understanding (this is true for a lot of terms about gender identity and sexual orientation, and also for terms around neurodiversity, and around topics like disability.)

Sometimes topics are entirely new – as technology changes, we need to come up with words to help us find things about it. Do we catalogue it by the current tech device, or do we use a more general term, because the iPhone X of today is going to be barely in service in five years, and mostly forgotten in fifteen?

Sometimes we have to pick one – like my exaple in earlier posts, you sometimes need to pick an option so that you have one main subject heading, rather than making people search through

  • Cat
  • Cats
  • Felines
  • House cats
  • Kitties
  • Pussy cats
  • Fuzzballs who take over the bed

(Ok, that last one isn’t very likely.)

Some of these terms are more clinical than others. Some are questions of ‘do we make a standard of singular or plural for groups of things’? Some are ‘do we include a common nickname or slang term’. Some terms might be more historically dated than others.

Why does this matter, anyway?

This might not seem like a big deal with cats – but it can be a bigger deal if you’re talking about health information, or topics where there’s often a difference between experience of a thing and professional knowledge and training about a thing.

(Dealing with the legal system as a person dealing with a crime versus lawyers and judges. Dealing with a health issue as a person experiencing a problem versus being a doctor or nurse or health care professional.)

Sometimes terms can bias our assumptions about results. I mentioned the issue with the Library of Congress wanting to drop ‘illegal alien’ and use other terms, and being blocked by Congress (because of the role the Library of Congress plays with the actual work of Congress and the need to reflect the terms used in the laws.)

Individual library systems may decide to change their terms for these kinds of topics, to create a more welcoming and diverse environment in various ways and to reflect the needs of their particular communities.

That part, of course, is where it can get complicated. Libraries are aware that they’re serving the people who come into their building (many of whom do so fairly anonymously: librarians don’t know what you look at on the shelf, and many libraries deliberately do as little tracking of activities, loans, and other user-specific details as they can get away with, to preserve patron privacy.)

But libraries also serve people who never come into them. Not just the people who use online resources (libraries can see what’s getting used), but libraries should also be thinking about all the people who don’t use their services but could.

This is most easily illustrated by public libraries, since they serve a particular location. A library might notice that they’re seeing some types of people use the library regularly, and may be able to tell from demographic information about their area that they’re not seeing some groups as often as they should be.

Sometimes that’s about the words we choose. Whether people can see themselves reflected in the library and the catalogue and the displays.

Who decides subject headings for a work?

There is also a degree of editorial influence on who sets the subject headings.

Large publishers often suggest them – you may see this in the front of the book, on the copyright page. Below the legal information, there will be some suggested subject headings and call numbers. Libraries don’t have to listen to that, but in practice they often do unless there’s a specific reason to overrule them.

In other cases, it may be a central cataloger (in a large library system) or an individual librarian. It’s hard to tell!

Generally, no one in this process (except maybe someone on the publisher’s end) has read the whole book, and the subject headings will reflect the large topics in the book, not specific ones.

People will also pick how specific the subject headings are. For example, do you pick United States – History or Massachusetts – History? Or maybe Women – United States – History – 20th Century. (Here’s a page explaining some of the options from New York University.)

Next time, a brief look at algorithms and how they affect searches. (It’s a huge topic)

How catalogues work: figuring out search terms

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One key step in using catalogues is figuring out search terms.

Catalogues: Wooden chest of old-fashioned catalogue cards

What kinds of searches can you do?

In most electronic catalogues you can search by all sorts of things.

Many libraries have gone to the single search box (popularised by Google). Technically, this is called a keyword search, and it usually searches all the text in the record.

Pro: You don’t need to guess which field a given thing might be in, and searching on things that aren’t subject headings but show up in the title or blurb will still come up.

Con: You can get a lot of false results that don’t actually have what you want, especially if you’re searching for commonly used words.

If you end up with all sorts of results that don’t help you, two things can help. First, there’s probably an option somewhere on that first search screen that says something like ‘advanced search’. Second, once you do a search, you may be presented with some options to help you filter the results.

Advanced search

Depending on the catalog, you will usually see a variety of options that let you limit your search in different ways. Common ones include:

  • Searching just the author, subject, or title fields.
  • Searching a range of years.
  • Limiting the results to a particular format, location (for systems with multiple locations), or sometimes specific collections (like juvenile books), or languages.

You may need to do a little digging in the help information (likely also linked from the search form) to understand your options in detail.

Limiting results

It’s sometimes (okay, often) a lot easier to start with a keyword search and then limit your results in different ways.

In my library’s catalog, I can limit by the following, to give you an example:

  • Location (so I can find books in my local library)
  • Availability (books I can get right now, either in a library or online)
  • Whether the search term is found in the title or subject
  • Format (book, ebook, audiobook, etc.)
  • What collections it is in (this distinguishes library and children or adult)
  • Places the book takes place

And then it shows me related searches, including established subject terms, and some additional suggestions.

Understanding subject headings

In practical terms, you are probably not going to do what librarians do to learn about subject headings.

(For the curious, this involves most library schools require a class in cataloging that includes a lot of the specifics. Then you go out into the world and spend a lot of time starting at instructions and hoping you’re doing it right, punctuated by asking other people if you are.)

Individual libraries also have their own policies – the library I work at has set up a list of keywords instead of official subject headings, because a lot of our needs aren’t represented in them (or are using terms that aren’t a great fit for us – they’re dated, they draw from specialities that aren’t the terms the people who use us will use, or both!)

As a library catalog user, my best tip is for you to look for hints about what kinds of terms will work. Fortunately, these are pretty straightforward

1) Try searches

One of the best tips for getting your bearings in a new catalogue (by which I mean one that’s new to you) is to try some searches of items you’re pretty sure are in there, and that are reasonably similar for other items you want to look for.

Ideally, these will be the same subject (generally speaking) as the items you want, but if you’re not sure about that, at least try for the same topic area – if you want to do searches about religious information, try other religious titles or topics. If you’re looking for history, try other historical things. And so on.

The goal here is to do a few searches and see what comes up and how the search terms work.

2) Linked subjects

In many library catalogs, you have the option to click on the subject headings to find other items with that subject heading. This can be tremendously helpful once you find one book that’s what you want. (Of course, it’s finding that first thing that can be tricky!)

You may want to add several books to a wish list or cart (whatever the catalog uses) or bookmark them before you go too far astray in your searches, so you can get back to your starting point again easily.

If you’re having trouble with searches, try simpler ones – for example, if you’re trying to search an entire title, try

3) Look for known books or topics that should be in the collection.

For example, for modern Pagan materials, I often suggest people try Scott Cunningham’s Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner, or Starhawk’s Spiral Dance. Both are commonly held by most moderate to large library systems, and they’ll give you a starting place for what terms are being used.

In my local library system, Cunningham’s book comes up with the subject headings “witchcraft”, “magic”, and “ritual”.

That’s a hint that I probably want to check ‘witchcraft’ as well as ‘Wicca’ as subject headings.

(This is because older books were cataloged before Wicca became an official Library of Congress subject heading around 2006 or 2007 – libraries don’t generally go back and recatalog subject headings unless there’s a very significant reason to, because it’s a big cost of staff time.

Something like ‘witchcraft’ and ‘Wicca’ where it can be tricky to figure out exactly which heading applies to some books, and where ‘witchcraft’ is still accurate, if a bit more general ideal, is less likely to get edited than, say, a library that is fixing or updating subject headings to reflect current understanding of gender identity or sexual orientation or legal issues.)

4) Check the ‘about’ for information or ask a librarian.

Still stuck? Check the library’s help information or ask a librarian for help – you can ask general questions, and they can help you navigate.

If you don’t want to (or can’t get to) the physical library easily, most libraries have an option for email or chat help these days, at least some of the time.

How catalogues work: Controlled vocabulary

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Today’s discussion of catalogues is about how you find things by topic. I talked about some of this in my post from March about personal libraries, but I want to talk more here about how libraries select subject terms.

Catalogues: Wooden chest of old-fashioned catalogue cards

It’s mysterious

Let’s be honest. A lot of the process librarians use to select subject terms is pretty mysterious. That’s because we’re trying to label quite complex things in a very complex world, and we’re using a variety of tools to do it, because outside of very very small collections (relatively speaking – in practice, this is probably a couple of thousand books at the smallest), it’s too big for anyone to keep in their head.

On the good side, this means people have to write things down, which makes long-term consistency easier, and which can help us see patterns.

On the bad side, it means things can feel (and be) very rigid, or slow to change, or complicated to navigate. All of which can make things a lot less accessible or useful. And the speed of change often means terms don’t reflect current understanding of things like identity, culture, or communities.

So where do these terms come from?

In libraries, libraries usually pick a set of subject headings to use. The subject headings act as a controlled vocabulary (which basically means ‘we have a fixed set of terms we choose from.) Like I explained in the post last March, this is what helps us avoid using all of these terms for the same thing:

  • felines
  • cats
  • cat
  • domesticated cat

Sometimes we might want to make distinctions (domestic cats as compared to lions or tigers or snow leopards), but if we don’t, we want to pick one term and settle on it.

Libraries use one of a couple of common lists for subject headings. The most common, probably, are the Library of Congress. These are very extensive (it takes up about 20 volumes as print books on a shelf) but the fact the Library of Congress deals with so many different topics means that it’s often quite slow to make adjustments.

For example, the addition of the word “Wicca” as a subject heading only took place in about 2004, and only after a petition from a librarian. (This is often the way changes get made: one or more librarians notice that a term needs adding or improving or changing, and they provide evidence.) The term ‘Wicca’ had been in broad general use since the 1950s and 60s, so that’s about 50 years.

This isn’t always simple – here’s a story of attempts in 2016 to get the terms ‘aliens’ and ‘illegal aliens’ changed, and how the support from librarians and library associations for a student-led project ran smack into issues of law.

(Why does Congress get a say in this, you might be wondering? The Library of Congress’s first job is to provide resources for Congress and members of Congress. Makes sense if you think about the name.)

One other important note is that many libraries don’t have the resources to go back and catalogue older items to the new subject headings – so you may see pointers from new terms to check older terms as well. (This depends a lot on the library and the priority of the topic.)

Who assigns the terms?

Good question. In many cases, the subject headings are primarily assigned by whoever it is at the Library of Congress assigns the headings for that particular item. These are likely people who have some experience in the general field or area of the books, but you can usually assume they’re not experts or specialists in all the nuances of the field or topic.

(In other words, they’re not going to get really nuanced about choosing, say, a term of magic or ritual in a Pagan setting. They may assign them both.)

Usually terms are based on the few most obvious and relevant topic. If something is mentioned for less than a chapter or two, it almost certainly won’t get a subject heading unless it’s something really unusual. For a full length nonfiction book, you can usually expect 3-5 subject headings.

You can also assume the person doing the cataloguing probably hasn’t read the book. Cataloguers don’t have time for that! They’re relying on the blurb on the back and things like skimming the table of contents. Publishers can also suggest subject headings or terms to include.

Some libraries do have their own cataloguers evaluate materials and add or edit terms. This is particularly true for things like local history or other items of particular local interest.

Or a school library might assign a heading for particular regular class assignments or projects, to make it easier to find those items. (There are other ways to group things, too.) Some libraries do a “Best resource” subject heading to make it easy to find the best resources in a topic. (Mine does this.)

Next week, more about working with search terms in practice.

How catalogues work: Search

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Welcome to part 2 of my series on catalogues. In this part, I’m going to talk a bit about different kinds of searches you might want to be able to do.

Skills and tools : Glasses and pen resting on sheets of printed music

Keyword

This is the kind of search many of us are most familiar with today is a keyword search. You know, the kind where you. get presented with a search box, and you type words in, and sometimes the thing you want comes out the other end?

Keyword searches basically search anywhere in the searchable text for a word or phrase (depending on how things are set up). This can be really helpful, or really horrible.

Helpful

Keyword searches can be great because you don’t have to remember what kind of information the thing you’re searching for is. And you don’t have to figure out how it might be organised in the thing you’re searching. The word matches or it doesn’t.

They’re also fantastic for something we’re doing at work – instead of having hundreds of subject headings that get used for just one thing (a person, a device or software program, a tool), we’re making sure those are in the abstract, and then assigning more general subject headings.

That way, people can both look at groups of things (handy in a rapidly changing setting like technology) and also find specific tools or people if they need to.

Horrible

The downside to keyword searching is that if the word is only in one place in the record, and there’s a typo or something else that affects how the word is entered, you won’t ever find that record.

That’s also true if someone uses a similar word to the one you’re searching on – but not the exact one. (Remember what I said in part one, about libraries not having cutting-edge computing power?)

For example, in some systems, “cat” and “cats” may be treated as different words, and typos or alternate spellings definitely will be. There’s a word that is all over our work catalog, but it is sometimes spelled with a hyphen and sometimes no hyphen (the two parts of the word together) and our catalogue searches these as different things.

Depending on the system, the catalogue may adapt some things for you, but it probably won’t be as wide-ranging as your favourite search engines.

Somewhere in between

One of the challenges of keyword searching is that you need to have terms that are unique enough to make a search find what you want – and sometimes that’s going to be really challenging.

I was part of a long-term Harry Potter project – it ran for 7 years, and over those years, we averaged 100 emails many days. As you can imagine, a lot of them had very similar terms and names in them, so we had to learn to figure out other ways to search email to find specific details (and since it was such a long project, sometimes those details were a year or two back, and relied on someone’s memory of what term we were using.)

This eventually drove me to create a wiki for the project that ended up with 9000+ pages, but that’s a whole other story…. (And set of posts.)

This is where learning to think about your keyword searches in more complex ways (such as using multiple terms, using boolean searches, or using ways to filter or limit the results) can be a big help.

Boolean?

You may remember hearing about this in library classes back in your education somewhere. Boolean is the term for doing searches that are joined by AND, OR, or NOT.

(You don’t usually actually have to capitalise the terms, and some systems may use symbols instead of words, but people often do when explaining them because it makes it a lot easier to figure out what’s going on. On some systems, you can select them from drop-down menus.)

AND means you want results that match all the items you list with AND. For example, “cats AND dogs” will return only those items that talk about both cats and dogs.

OR means you want anything that mentions either of them (or any of them, if you have more than two terms.) In this case, “cats OR dogs” would return any page that has “cats” on it, any page that has “dogs”, and also any pages that have both terms.

NOT means that it won’t return pages that have the term indicated by the NOT. So, “cats NOT dogs” would give you all the pages about cats, but not any that mention dogs. This one can be tricky because it would also leave out things like “Cats are not like dogs at all!” or “This is the page for people who love cats, no dogs here.”

In many search tools for catalogues, you can do different combinations – for example, you could say you wanted to search all items mentioning cats or dogs (keyword search), and then say you didn’t want a particular format (NOT book, in the format search).

Other tips

In some search tools, you can also do more complex searches. Usually, you can find out about the options by looking for the search help information, or sometimes an advanced search tool.

Some common options include:

1) Searching on a phrase.

Usually, this is done by putting quotes around the phrase. “Sun and moon”, for example. Normally this will search for the exact words in that order.

2) Limiting results in different ways.

These can include by date (usually you can specify a range, with some common ones being pre-set, like ‘last month’ or ‘last year’.) It can include things like ‘this email has an attachment’. It can include multiple search fields.

A lot of this depends on context and your particular technology.

3) Type of resource

In some tools, you can search by different types of resource ( for example, on Google, you can search on word or phrase, and then also look for images, news stories, videos, etc. each of which have some additional tools

Next up, talking about controlled vocabulary and why it is both handy and complicated.

4) Not finding expected results?

Sometimes you’ll do a search, and you’ll get very different results than you expected – you know there are things about that in the thing you’re searching. If that’s the case, try a simpler search (just the title or just a phrase from the subtitle, for example). Sometimes a symbol will do something you didn’t expect (in our catalogue at work, a colon will tell the computer to do a ‘from X to Y’ search, so you get really weird results when you put a colon between a title and subtitle if you don’t put the whole thing in quotation marks.)

Usually the help information or the library staff can help you sort this out.

How catalogues work: An introduction

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We’re working on a major catalogue update at work, which has me thinking a lot about how people use catalogues, databases, and other collections of information.

In talking about our new catalogue, I’ve also been reminded that most people don’t know how these things work, or what might be useful to them – so it seems like a great time for a short series of posts about that.

Catalogues: Wooden chest of old-fashioned catalogue cards

The basics

So, the first thing we should start with is what’s a catalogue?

For libraries, a catalogue is a highly specialised database that holds information about books in the collection. Often these are parts of an Integrated Library System, or ILS, that tracks a whole bunch of things. Sometimes the catalogue only does pieces of it.

Common things included:

  • Information about works in the collection (such as title, author, publisher, publication information, call number, subject headings). This is sometimes referred to as the bibliographic record.
  • Information about particular items in the collection, i.e. each actual thing that’s on the shelf (or however it’s stored or accessed). This is sometimes called a ‘holding’ record (because it describes the holdings of the library).
  • Loan information about specific items in the collection and who has them.
  • Information about electronic resources (sometimes this might be a link to them, sometimes systems pull in all the things in a database so you can search for them all in one place.)
  • Additional resources the library has chosen to add (documents, files, etc.)

These records may have public notes (things to help library users) or staff-only notes (to help staff manage resources and answer questions.)

Again, not every library will have all these things.

Our collection at work has bibliographic records, but doesn’t have separate holdings records (all the information about all our copies is in a single record: this is sometimes a bit clunky, but it works okay for us because we don’t check a lot of items out.)

Likewise, we don’t have a separate circulation (or loan) module – all the loan information is in the record. Library users can’t see it, because it doesn’t display to them, just to the tools staff uses.

(In some libraries, this would be a problem, but in our library, there’s just one and a half staff members, and we both need to have access to it. The library assistant usually deals with loans and circulation, but if she’s on vacation or something comes up, I need to be able to see what’s going on and make changes too.)

Metadata

When you put information into a catalogue, you are collecting metadata – that’s the term for ‘information about a thing’.

My favourite explanation of metadata comes from a Scientific American piece from 2012 that used Santa Claus and Christmas lists as examples. Go read it, if you’re not sure how metadata works, I’ll wait for you.

So, metadata about books includes the title, author, publication information. It might also include things like if a book is considered a particularly good resource, or is on a recommendation list. It might include if it was donated (and if so, by who). All kinds of things can be metadata.

Libraries have some commonly used systems for formatting it. A lot of libraries still use MARC (which stands for Machine Readable Cataloging record). Here’s a longish explanation from the Library of Congress about the details. This provides the structure for the data.

Besides the structure, there needs to be consistency in how you write things down. For a long time, libraries used the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR or AACR2 for the 2nd edition, etc.) but now a lot of libraries use RDA or Resource Description and Access.

Why all the rules?

Computers are still fairly stupid – they’re really quick at matching up things we tell them with things that they have stored, but they need a lot of help to match up things like typos or alternate ways of phrasing things.

(Google, Amazon, and the other tech giant companies have huge amounts of resources and lots of cutting edge design capabilities to make that work. Your average library just doesn’t. Your average library is probably pretty excited if their staff computers are less than four years old.)

So, in order for the computer to match things up, the library needs to be using consistent words (what’s called a “Controlled vocabulary” for things like subject headings and formats) and an underlying structure.

What does this mean in practice?

A lot of what I’m doing in our new catalogue right now is setting up that structure and arranging the different screens so they do what we want.

For example, we have a lot of options on the screen to add things to the catalogue, but when we edit things, we’re usually only editing a couple of specific pieces. So I set it up so those are at the top of the screen, and then we can get to everything else if we need to, but don’t have to scroll to get to it.

(You have no idea how exciting this is, when you’ve been spending years having to scroll down a very similar-appearing form to look for one specific field.)

But another big part of what I’m working on is fixing things so we’re using a smaller list of terms for things like format and location. That means people will be able to filter usefully by them, which will be amazing.

(This is going to take months and months. Fixing the formats and locations are pretty quick, but we have 14,000 subject headings, and a lot of them are tiny variants or typos of the ones we actually want.)

How research has changed : digital work flow

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Penultimate in the current series on how research has changed, I want to talk about digital-only workflows.

Massive pendulum clock (from the Warner Brothers Harry Potter studios) with the text "Times change"

Electronic workflow

I don’t know about you, but a whole lot of how I get information starts digitally these days. Having a workflow that works for you is critical if you’re doing larger projects.

There are a fair number of resources out there to help you get a grip on tools that work for you (I’m going to talk about my current setup here, but there are lots of other ways to do this.)

I find the Prof. Hacker blog, a collective blog focusing on tech tools and resources, a helpful read. A lot of the tools aren’t things I need, but they highlight things I want to know about fairly regularly, and I find it interesting to know about other tools. The already mentioned Productivity Alchemy podcast also brings up interesting tools regularly, on a less academic front.

Basically, though, you want a way to collect things, and then a way to organize the things. If you’re like me, many of your things may be webpages or sites.

My basic workflow

This is what I use for all online content I want to save – it works for me, but it’s not the most elegant option. What I like about it is:

1) I can use it from any device

I use a Mac at home, a Windows machine where I can usually add browser extensions but not apps at work, and an iPad when travelling. Because this relies on extensions (or the iOS ‘send to this app’ option) it’s pretty easy to use anywhere I happen to be.)

2) The management can be sporadic

Obviously, there are benefits to keeping on top of it, but the way my system works, it’s okay if I get behind on moving from the collection point to the organisation part.

3) I can usually find the thing I’m looking for.

This is key. If I couldn’t find things, it’d be a bad system. But I usually know which place to look for it, and the search tools work well enough.

Steps

I rely on two tools, Instapaper and Pinboard. Instapaper is currently free (but is owned by Pinterest, so changes are possible in the future). Pinboard has a small yearly fee ($11 currently) but is run by someone independent, Maciej Cegłowski, who designed and runs the site. There’s also a full page archival option for another $25 a year.

(There are plenty of other tools out there for saving things as you read them, but I really do recommend Pinboard for organizing them once you’ve got them.)

My actual steps look like this.

  • Read or find a thing I want to save.
  • Use extension to save it to Instapaper.
  • Periodically, go through Instapaper and move new items to about 8 folders in Instapaper for later sorting.
  • When I’ve got time and feel like it, put things into Pinboard with much more useful tags.

Right now, I go through Instapaper every two weeks, a few days before I start doing my newsletter for the fortnight. I have a folder where I put the links I want to share in the newsletter, so I can work my way through writing them up efficiently.

My other folders include recipes, links related to my day job, writing, Pagan topics, writing, and business things. I have a catchall folder (cleverly called ‘links’) for anything else I want to save. I also have folders for things to read (which is where I save books I want to read), and things to watch or listen to.

Every so often, I make a point of churning through links and tagging them in Pinboard – it’s a great project for when I don’t have a lot of focus to write and have a thing I want to watch.

I usually can remember if I’ve moved something to Pinboard yet, so I also usually can figure out where to look for something.

Having a two step process also helps for saving things to read later (especially when I’m travelling and have less time or internet access), or weeding out highly aspirational recipes I’m never going to actually consider making.

I use this process for all my links, but it’s pretty easy to see how to adapt it for research work. You could have a folder for each big project, or make a point of moving those to a bookmarking service more frequently.

Or you could use a citation manager. Which will be my final post in this series, coming next week.

How research has changed : online databases

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Today’s installment of what’s changed in research comes back to a topic I’ve talked about before – the relative wonders of online databases.

(Relative, because they’re not entirely perfect, but they’re still a big improvement in many ways over the previous options.)

Massive pendulum clock (from the Warner Brothers Harry Potter studios) with the text "Times change"

What’s an online database?

An online database collects articles or materials from various (relevant) sources, and provides a way to find things in different ways (by topic, by author, by publication, by whether it’s a peer-reviewed publication, all sorts of options. often.)

A database can collect material from one source (like an archive of a particular newspaper) or it can collect material from dozens or hundreds of possible sources.

Often, when a database is pulling from many sources, they’ll be about roughly similar topics. For example, the ERIC database gathers educational journals and materials, and JSTOR has a number of different modules, many of which focus on different collections of journals in the humanities.

As you might guess from these descriptions, some of what’s in a database can be rather obscure at first glance.

Getting access to databases

Database access is expensive – in academic libraries, there’s a pretty good chance more than 50-60% of the library’s collection budget goes for database access these days. Worse, the costs go up all the time, sometimes by double digit increases.

That means that libraries make choices every year about what databases they have, and which they continue to have – and how to manage access to them.

The actual details get incredibly messy and complicated, because publishers often bundle access (you can only get access to things A, C, and G you really want, if you also get access to B, D, E, and F, which are sort of useful for your library’s users, but if you had the choice, you probably wouldn’t get that, you’d do something else with your limited funds.)

Also complicating the details are the fact that sometimes groups of libraries arrange access to databases jointly – sometimes a library consortium, sometimes there are state or regional contacts.

Probably obviously, there are lots of different kinds of databases out there, and different kinds of libraries will make different choices. A public library doesn’t really need access to a specialist chemistry database, the academic library maybe doesn’t need one about crafts or genealogy.

What that means for you is that it’s usually best to look at a combo of what you’re doing, and what your local or area libraries offer, as a first step of figuring out access to materials.

How do you find out what databases a library has access to?

Usually there will be lists on their website – it might be under “Electronic resources” or “Online databases” or “A-Z database list” or other phrases like that. Sometimes it’ll be along with other kinds of resources, like ebook access or music downloads.

This should give you links, information about what you need to access it. Sometimes you may need to be on site, often you may need a library barcode or other login method.

Tips later in this series will help you find out about other kinds of articles and resources, which you can usually request through interlibrary loan, even if your library doesn’t directly offer access.

How do you get access to a library?

Most libraries, even very small ones, offer a little access to databases – but they may not be very useful ones for your research.

In some places, you can get access to databases at very large public libraries if you live or work or go to school in the state. In some places, you can get access as an alum (though licensing costs make this a bit less common). In some cases, you can get access if you’re physically in the building, but not otherwise.

It’s worth checking the policies of any library you can reasonably get to – even if that chance is once every few months or every year, you can store up things that need database access and do it then.

Especially in more rural areas, many campuses have more generous access options for people who live in the area. And in the United States, state colleges and universities often have fairly generous guest access.

Figuring out what’s out there

Once you find out what databases you have access to, I advise doing a little exploring. Figure out which databases deal with the topics you’re particularly interested in, and explore. There will often be a list of topics covered, or you can find a list of specific journal titles through links about the resource. (Often this will say something like “Publications”

You can also search for topics outside the library database ecosystem. Google Scholar, Academia.edu, and other sites gather information about articles and resources from various sources, and make it accessible in different ways. In many cases, you won’t be able to get direct access to an article this way, but you can read the title and abstract and other information, and figure out how much you want to track it down.

One of the problems with database searches is that computers are often stupid. While Google and Amazon have a lot of data to do predictive searching, the academic journal databases aren’t usually quite so wide-reaching. If you search on a different term or a different way of wording something, you might not find what you’re hoping for.

These things might help:

  • Take a quick look at Wikipedia, Google Scholar, and other public resources to see what kinds of terms or phrasing show up. Sometimes these tools will help you make better searches.
  • If you find an article that looks promising, check to see if there are subject headings assigned by the database. You can often click on these to find other similar articles.
  • If you find an article you like, check out more about the author. Often they’ve written other things on similar topics.
  • Check out the articles they reference – it’s a great way to find more similar items.

As you go, it’s worth paying attention to terms people use. Many academic fields have preferred ways to phrase things (at least at the moment) so figuring out what those are will help you narrow down your research much more effectively. The same thing goes if you’re researching something where the name has changed: dig a little and figure out alternate possible names, and you’ll likely find more articles.