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More, Better, Faster, Cheaper—RLG Members’ Forum

Developing practical and effective descriptive practice in the library, archive and museum sectors was the focus of this year’s Research Libraries Group (RLG) members’ forum. Called ‘More, better, faster, cheaper: the economics of descriptive practice’, the forum was held over two days in early August 2006 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Catherine Argus attended the forum for the National Library of Australia.

The forum opened with a thought-provoking keynote address from Mark Dimunation, the Chief of Rare Books and Special Collections Division in the Library of Congress. He spoke about the need to balance the allocation of resources for projects utilising new technologies with the need to provide a level of access and control to cataloguing arrearages. He suggested that libraries should be innovative in how they address cataloguing arrearages, such as leveraging digital projects to assist in dealing with arrearages, or exploring cooperative initiatives between institutions as a way of maximising limited resources. He warned against downgrading standards simply to expedite the elimination of backlogs.

Interested delegates had the opportunity to tour the Folger Shakespeare Library with Richard Kuhta (Librarian, Folger Shakespeare Library) at the end of the first day.

A highlight of the second day was the opening paper: a summary of the principal findings of the Greene-Meissner report by Dennis Meissner of the Minnesota Historical Society. The report suggested that current processing benchmarks and practices are inappropriate for large contemporary collections and that a minimal processing approach should be adopted. The suggestion has excited a great deal of discussion in the archives sector.

Other topics covered during the two days included:

  • achieving efficiencies in the day-to-day workflows of cataloguing (two papers)
  • a web archiving trial using Archive-It
  • innovative ways used in the museum sector to provide access to their vast uncontrolled collections (two papers)
  • an initiative from the museum sector to achieve more consistent cross-institutional resource discovery of cultural objects and images of them
  • folksonomies or social tagging (two papers)
  • the progress of the MARC Content Designation Utilization Project.

Webcasts of the forum and some PowerPoint presentations are available on the RLG website.

Catherine Argus
Special Materials Cataloguing, Standards and Training