Unit 9 cataloging consistency

Unit 9 Blog

Cataloging metadata,digital repository software and queries across repositories.

Cataloging has always been a part time do it as needed sort of chore in my career. Not having the “luxury” of a full time cataloger on my staff, when something required original cataloging I selected myself under the old labor delegation theory of: I wouldn't assign something to somebody unless I was willing and able to do it myself. Sort of... Anyway, law libraries are fairly standardized collections of serials, monographs are few, with treatises also being serial in nature, a new cataloging entry is a rare event. So while I always knew that reference work begins with cataloging and classification, it wasn't something I had to do every day. This is all in the way of justifying some of problems I am having crafting subject listings, key words, tags, and categories descriptive of each item in my Saratoga Springs digital collection.

Digital collections are extraordinarily dependent on the construction of precise standardized metadata. Browsing the shelves, persistence and luck might avail a researcher sufficiently to find a poorly cataloged printed book or report. However, without excellent metadata, digital objects are lost.

My digital objects are fairly heterogeneous, with text, images, audio, and musical scores forcing me to build a sort of polyglot metadata stew. So with only ten objects in the collection and each of those being fairly distinctive and dissimilar from one another, I haven't focused much on consistency. This week's question has me thinking a lot more about it.

Consistency is something that every digital curator will have to confront sooner or later. Most collections are so new that metadata creation is probably still in the hands of the initial cataloger.
As the years pass and digital collections grow in scale and scope, people will leave their digital collections jobs and new people will be hired and it is likely that the new cataloger will diverge from the perspective and practice of his or her predecessor. Metadata consistency will likely suffer.
Something to watch out for.