**** Please excuse cross-posting ****


Attending at ALA Annual 2019? Please join the ALCTS Creative Ideas in
Technical Services Interest Group, an open forum for discussion of all
things technical services!  Everyone is welcome to participate in any of
the 9 exciting roundtable discussions.

Session details:

Saturday, June 22

4:00-5:00 PM

Marriott Marquis, Scarlet Oak Room

Washington, D.C.

#citsig-2019

Save to your Scheduler here:
https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/ALA-Annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=519404

We are proud to present the following discussion topics for our session at
ALA Annual 2019:

Topic: Technical Services for Data Management

Presenter: Kate McNamara, US Census Bureau

Summary: The discussion will focus on technical services librarians’ role
in the data ecosystem. Data management is an evolving field and working
with data often involves novel challenges for librarians. Catalogers,
metadata librarians, and other technical services librarians must work
across departments and disciplines to acquire, catalog, and disseminate
data resources. I will share my experience as a librarian at the Census
Bureau, where I work on documentation and metadata for administrative
records data. This discussion will touch on workflows for data management
and cataloging, training for data librarians, and collaboration around the
world of data.

Topic: Ethics of Cataloging

Presenter: Jennifer Martin, Salisbury University

Summary: Cataloging has always implicitly held itself to a standard of
professional ethics: provide complete, accurate data that is useful to the
user. Increasingly, though, catalogers are being challenged to not only
make their professional ethics explicit but also to expand the scope of
their ethical considerations to include broader ethical themes such as
feminism, post-colonialism, and privacy. As a result, challenges to and
critiques of established systems or aspects of systems are becoming more
common and librarians must navigate situations in which their understanding
of what is ethical conflicts with the practices in place, such as when the
preferred name from the Library of Congress Authority Files does not match
the name a person or group uses for themselves. This discussion will focus
on the types of ethical issues encountered in cataloging, how those issues
can conflict with each other, and how changes to increase ethical practice
might impact the future work of cataloging.

Topic: Empowering Through Staff Training and Team Skill Building

Presenter: Jennifer Eustis and Meghan Bergin, UMass Amherst

Summary: This topic aims to open up a discussion on how staff training and
skill building workshops can empower both veteran and new staff in
technical services and cross train staff outside of technical services on
metadata and cataloging projects. Training and skill building occur
frequently in and out of the office. At UMass Amherst, several staff have
moved on, new staff have arrived, and the library is preparing for a
migration to a new Library Services Platform. These changes have led to
staff taking on new responsibilities and well as several cross training
opportunities. Workshops have been recently offered to learn new software
such as Outlook calendar, Trello, and Slack. Other workshops have been
offered to prepare people to better their use cataloging tools such as
MarcEdit and OpenRefine. Documentation has been updated or created to help
staff learn new workflows such as cataloging music, updating local holdings
records with OCLC, cataloging archival books, or how to handle batch
loading.

Topic: RDA toolkit redesign and LRM

Presenter: Jessica Janecki, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Duke University

Summary: The RDA toolkit is getting an overhaul (
https://www.rdatoolkit.org/3RProject)! It is both an organizational
overhaul as well as an integration of some new concepts from the IFLA
Library Reference Model (https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11412). On
April 30th a major update will be made to the Beta site, including a stable
English language version of the text with the latest changes made to
incorporate LRM concepts. By Annual we should have had a chance to poke
around in the Beta Toolkit and maybe attend a webinar or two. Let's get
together to discuss our impressions. What works? What doesn't? What
questions do we have?

Topic: Core competencies for technical services staff - how do we assess?
how do we plan? how do we train?

Presenter:  Lynn Whittenberger, NC State University Libraries

Summary: There are a host of core competency documents that may (or may
not) have relevance to technical services librarians developed by different
library-related groups: NASIG Core Competencies for Electronic Resources
Librarians; OCLC New Skillset for Metadata Management; ALA Core
Competencies for Cataloging and Metadata Professional Librarians; and LLAMA
Leadership and Management Competency, to name just a few. Most of these
competency lists contain a mix of ‘hard’ and soft skills, and with some
skills more specialized and narrowly defined than others. Deriving
actionable plans for technical services staff training from these documents
can be a challenge. Developing and delivering pertinent training for staff,
both one-off and continuous, is also difficult. The group could discuss:
strategies for identifying the competency documents relevant to one’s
specific situation; ways to evaluate existing competencies in staff, and
identifying gaps; developing strategies for delivering training, both
short-term and long-term.

Topic: Managing expectations while providing great customer service

Presenter: Elizabeth Miraglia, UC San Diego

Summary: Very often the work done in Technical Services goes unnoticed
unless something goes wrong. It can be difficult to explain our workloads
to other areas of the library and we also have a strong desire to provide
excellent service to users and other library staff. Technical Services
departments can also develop reputations for being the bottle neck for
processes or for being too picky about certain details. As our field
continues to grow and as the volume of work continues to increase, it is
imperative that Technical Services departments be able to not only set
healthy limits on what their departments can do, but also be able to
explain the reasons for those limits and to re-evaluate past practices when
the time comes.

Topic: Collaboration across library departments to improve library services

Presenter: Beverly Charlot, Jean M. Charlot, and Rosamond Panda, Delaware
State University

Summary: Technical Services collaborated with departments in the library
and university stakeholders to improve outreach and library services for
nursing students. The project involved the development of a Nursing
Students Resource Center, Nursing Subject LibGuide and catalog index to
search/discover nursing materials located in the new resource center.

Topic: Responsive Technical Services for Non-Roman Materials

Presenter: Erin Grant, University of Washington

Summary: Non-Roman language programs outside of the mainstream in academic
institutions can be subject to rapid disruption as federal funding sources,
students and faculty numbers, and institutional support fluctuate. How can
technical services departments better position themselves to prepare for
and respond to the cessation or addition of non-Roman language programs
that result in changes to materials being collected?

Topic: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Positioning, Collaboration, and
Finding Balance Across Technical and Public Services

Presenter: Jeffrey M. Mortimore, Georgia Southern University, Nikki
Cannon-Rech, Georgia Southern University, and Sai Deng, University of
Central Florida

Summary: Technology, budgets, and library reorganizations have dramatically
reshaped the roles of technical and public services librarians in recent
years. Ways of collaborating across library units have changed as well.
Together, technical and public services librarians are asking how we should
position ourselves, seek collaboration, and find balance in our work.
Drawing on participants' experiences, we will explore how engaging
strengths and expertise across technical and public services, and
partnering with students and researchers in scholarly communication
practices, reframes librarian roles and contributes to well-rounded,
impactful services for patrons. This discussion welcomes voices from across
technical and public services.


-- 
Timothy Ryan Mendenhall (he/him/his)
Metadata Librarian
Columbia University Libraries
Original and Special Materials Cataloging
102 Butler Library
535 West 114th Street
New York, NY 10027

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