Celebrations and Silos
Well, Native American Heritage Month was a few months ago, so this is not exactly timely, but how do libraries celebrate it and similar events? Can the library catalog take part?
A typical library might do some of the following:
Have a Native American speak or dance or sing at the library (and post the event to social media)
Put a display of Native American books at the entrance to the library (and post a picture of the display to social media)
Add a list of Native American books to the library website (and post the list on social media)
None of these are necessarily bad ideas, but what about the library catalog?
From the outside, where I sit, it seems as though technical services — here including acquisitions and cataloging — are in a silo separate from patron-facing activities like events and book displays. Although some technical services teams are beginning to work on underserved communities, such as Native Americans, that work is separate from the kind of activities that are promoted on social media. When was the last time you saw a social media post celebrating improvements to subject headings?
The purpose of this note is to illuminate some ways in which technical services can work with other parts of the library on celebrations like Native American Heritage Month. Naturally, this applies to other celebrations like Pride Month or Black History Month.
A disclaimer
This is not a polemic about what public libraries should do. That will in any case always be limited by available staff time and money. My goal is to point out what public libraries might do.
On the other hand, there is an argument for technical services taking part in (e.g.) Native American Heritage Month: if the library has the time and money to arrange events, build book displays and develop curated book lists, some of that time and money could just as well be directed towards catalog enhancements.
"Not just books"
The following is a very common sentiment among patron-facing librarians [1]:
Becky Calzada, president-elect of the American Association of School Librarians and the library coordinator for the Leander Independent School District, said ...
"We aren't just about kids checking out books. We provide spaces for kids to work, we provide resources such as technology - our school district recently had a bond package pass and so, every school library has a 3D printer that a student can have access to."
It's not that I disagree with this sentiment. The library is about more than books. But it's also about books. My focus here is on borrowing and how the catalog enables that.
A one-book literature review
The book is "Auditing Diversity in Library Collections" by Sarah Voels. Voels points out that what matters isn't the diversity of a library's collections, but the diversity that a patron can see. For example, if a book is about a Native American, but there's no way you could tell that by looking at the book on the shelf, it doesn't actually contribute to the diversity of the library's collection. That's also true of the online catalog: if a book isn't part of the results for a catalog search on "native american", it also doesn't contribute to the diversity of the library's collection.
This means that collection diversity has two prongs: ensuring that a public library owns a collection of resources that reflect the diversity of the communities it serves; and ensuring that a patron can find those resources. The first prong is thoroughly described in the literature; I want to talk about the second prong.
Improving catalog search results
If you wanted to improve the retrieval rates for catalog searches related to Native Americans, where would you start? Well, it depends. You should improve the kind of searches that patrons actually do, whether it's keyword searches, searches on subject headings, or searches on language.
To check on subject headings, I use searches like this [2]:
anywhere:("native american") -subject:("native american")
which finds items that don't have the subject heading "native american".
[While patrons might never type a subject heading search themselves, they might click on a subject heading on an item page. That search relies on subject headings being accurate. If a subject heading is incorrect, the search results will be incomplete.]
Checking on the effectiveness of keyword searches involves a small catch-22. How do you find items that can't be found with a catalog search? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Language
Cataloging Native American languages can be problematic. For example, the Library of Congress language codes [3] direct the cataloger to use DAK (i.e., Dakota) for any of the languages of the Sioux, Assiniboine, Lakota, Santee, Yankton and Teton. While that might be linguistically accurate, it's not the most helpful for patrons.
One way to deal with this is to use the "official" code in the 041 field of the catalog record and describe the situation more fully in a 546 Language Note. Unfortunately, this probably eliminates the possibility of finding Lakota, Santee (etc.) resources using the language features of the online catalog.
Offensive terms
Native American Heritage Month is a great time to look at the catalog and edit subject headings and notes which contain deprecated terms like "American Indian", "Eskimo" and others which I will not repeat here.
The teaching mission of the public library
If you asked the executive director of any public library whether the library had a mission to educate its patrons, you'd get a resounding "YES!".
But ...
What about teaching patrons how to use the catalog, particularly its more advanced features? This is something that can be done at any time, but during a special month like Native American Heritage Month, relevant examples can be used. For example, the query:
"native american" (health OR wellness)
This example demonstrates a few different features, such as use of quotes, parentheses and boolean logic, including an implicit AND [4].
The idea behind this is "Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day; show them how to catch fish, and you feed them for a lifetime". Giving a library patron resources about Native American health and wellness is certainly valuable and useful; explaining the search behind the resource is not a substitute but a complement to the resources themselves.
Book lists
Book lists are a staple of library outreach and social media. While a curated list of book recommendations is a great idea because it is curated, a catalog search can return many more books, and can be rerun in the future when more books will appear in the results.
Also, example searches can address the educational mission we talked about in the previous section. Curated lists will necessarily not include many books on particular subtopics, such as history, politics or economics, but they can be retrieved with a catalog search.
Combining lists and searches will depend on details of the library system, so it will require a little research. The patron side of BiblioCommons allows URLs to be included in book lists, so that could be a way to include a catalog search [5].
Events
It might seem implausible that the catalog can be used to enhance events, but you just need to balance "It's not about books" with "It is about books".
Let's suppose a public library is hosting a speaker talking about the local history of Native Americans. The publicity for the event on posters and social media could include a QR code which leads to a curated list of resources on local history — and that list could include catalog searches for more local history resources.
This isn't something that needs to be tied to a particular week or month. If someone is giving a presentation on roses, the publicity materials could link to resources about growing roses, including catalog searches. Did you know that the "official" (Library of Congress) subject heading for growing roses is "Rose Culture"? How many public library patrons know that?
Conclusion
It's not easy to compare apples and oranges, but public libraries probably have as many people visiting their web site as they do walking through the door.
Effective diversity means accessible diversity.
Accessibility is just as important on the web site as it is for the building. Accessibility for the catalog includes complete and accurate data in the catalog and patrons having the knowledge needed to use it effectively.
Some of the things I've discussed are quite visible, like adding a QR code to a poster, and some are "invisible" like improvements to the catalog, but of course that's a false dichotomy. Everything Technical Services does ends up being visible to patrons one way or another. So why not have them take part in events like Native American Heritage Month?
Notes
[2] This is the Advanced Search syntax for BiblioCommons. YMMV.
[3] Library of Congress MARC Code List for Languages
[4] Obviously you'd introduce these concepts one at a time rather than starting with this example.
[5] I don't know if the staff side of the BiblioCommons system has the same flexibility.
Enjoyed the post. A few observations based on my work experience with local Frederick County MD Public Library (FCPL)
Carl Connect Discovery (Discovery) has an online Help system for search and other features. See the link below.
https://ls2pachelp.tlcdelivers.com/carlx/3_6_7/UserApp/LS2PAC.htm
With Discovery, the search term "tag:Native American" finds tags left by other library Patrons.
Discovery allows patrons to save a search, and in an obscure part of the web page an RSS feed URL link can be shared.
FCPL could probably increase usage of QR codes on online event web pages, most every printed flier or poster includes a QR code, however, and FCPL Staff maintain a visible presence at events in order to answer questions, distribute printed information (with QR codes), and register new patrons for library cards on the spot.
Academic libraries frequently offer introductory tours each semester that include a login session at a public Catalog workstation. It's a good idea for public libraries to regularly schedule similar tours.