On Thu, June 1, 2006 8:56 am, Deborah J. Leslie wrote:
> Brian Schottlaender writes:
>
> "ARL supports the Library of Congress' efforts to redesign its services
> in order to focus better on the needs of the end-user-the individual
> researcher-and to streamline processes in order to make information
> accessible more conveniently and more quickly."
>
> How do we know what benefits the end-user? Where is the research on use
> of series in cataloging records? Where is the evidence that supports
> statements about how important or unimportant controlled series access
> points are?
>
> Someone said (or wrote) that it isn't important how much cataloging
> costs, but how much it would cost if we didn't. Determining costs of
> non-action is probably impossibly elusive, but we should have
> *something* to go on. Regardless of whether LC's decision turns out to
> be a good one or not, surely it is precipitant.

In any case, though Deanna Marcum has declared that cost per se isn't the
motivating force in the series decision, it's plain that cost is on her,
and other LC administrators', mind -- why else would there have been a
retirement package on offer last year, available to (and taken up by) so
many?

Which inevitably, in my mind, brings in Karen Calhoun's treatment of the
research library as a business: a useful exercise, maybe, in drawing some
things to our notice, but a false analogy.  After all, our "customers"
don't pay us per transaction or engage our services on contract: measuring
the worth of our output can't be done by measuring our income from sales!
There are other ways of ascertaining the comparative value of the access
we provide: that is the evidence that is lacking here, and the willingness
of LC administration to go forward with abandonment of series control does
not, to my mind, reflect well on them.

Hal Cain
Joint Theological Library
Parkville, victoria, Australia
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