Libraries Kill Catalogues, Take new Role

When Widener Librarian Marion E. Schoon was given an old, aristocratic French name to research she logged into the College's library database and, after a few skillful search words, unearthed a clue: a historic museum in a town where a French family of the same name might have resided.

That kind if search might seem easy, but the task of making the largest university library system available at the touch of a keyboard in anything but.

About 60 percent of Harvard's current holdings are stored in the library's database Harvard On-Line Library System (HOLLIS). An ambitious retrospective-conversion project, or "recon," aims to put all of Harvard's books on line.

But getting the library system technologically up to par will not necessarily mean easier or improved access to the facts and figures buried in card catalogues.

Librarians, the human resource in the libraries, will now be more likely to rely on databases that are fast and efficient but significantly less complete than card catalogues.

Technology doesn't even guarantee accuracy. With the transfer of information from about five million cards describing Harvard s' holdings to a machine readable form, there will be errors which may mean bits of information transcribed incorrectly will be lost forever.

According to a May article in The New Yorker magazine, the margin of error in the "recon" process is "less than one percent." By this account, about 50,000 records out of five million will be incorrect.

But Heather E. Cole, Librarian of Hilles and Lamont, says the card catalogue system also contains inaccuracies. Cole, who has worked in Harvard libraries for 25 years says she has seen cards misfiled all the time."

Quick and Efficient

Librarian of Harvard College Richard de Gennaro says the conversion from cards to computers in necessary in order to document Harvard's vast holdings quickly and efficiently.

"It's a historic transition that's taking place," says de Gennaro. He added that in the last 200 years, Harvard libraries have moved from book catalogues to card catalogues, and are now turning to computers.

At present Widener Library is slowly reducing its Union card catalogue which contains entries for every work in the College's holdings.

The Union cards have been microfilmed and are still available to readers. Widener still available to readers Widener still houses cards describing its and Pusey's holdings, as well as some works in Houghton Library.

"The conversion was essential for the survival of libraries," De Gennaro says. "It's a pity some catalogues are being thrown away, but some are not worth hanging onto. We're choosing to preserve the public record upstairs as insurance; we're going to keep it for the next five or ten years."

And since Widener acquires about 140,000 volumes a year, de Gennaro says, it was necessary to have a faster method of cataloguing than cards.

Cole also says the recon project has been critical for the efficient cataloguing process of both Hilles' and Lamont's collections. Prior to the conversion, there was a "backlog" of books which had not been catalogued, Cole says.

"For there kind of libraries we are, for the kind of service we try to provide, books should get ordered quickly; cataloguing should be available quickly," Cole says. "It was upsetting to have a slow process. Books were waiting in the basement."

And head of Houghton Library Richard Wendorf says that before the recon project, a number of Houghton books were only "minimally described" in card catalogues, which are now "fully catalogued" on HOLLIS. Errors in the on-line system are inevitable, Wendorf says, but Houghton has a "very knowledgeable staff" to help diffuse any confusion.

"The staff is there to help the readers," wendorf says. "There's knowledge in people's heads here that are not on those cards. It's not that we're keeping information from the public; you can't put everything you know on a card."

Librarians' New Roles

In The information age, Wendorf says library users often forget a valuable resource available to them--the library staff.

With the onset of modern technology in Harvard libraries, there is "more of a need for reference librarians," says Houghton senior rare book cataloguer Hugh Amony. Librarians are trained to use specific techniques to probe for information which readers may not be aware of, Amory says.

"It's good to talk to librarians and to ask them questions," says Amory, who has been in service for 22 years. "Sometimes people may think they have looked at everything, but they haven't."

Schoon says that readers ready to give up after fruitlessly flipping through card catalogues or hammering away at HOLLIS often approach her with a variety of requests.

"Harvard has a complex library system," Schoon says. "Librarians are not necessarily subject specialists, but rather path-finders."

Many librarians know how to pull up "special collections" that are fully listed to HOLLIS but accessible only through special key search words. For example, Houghton has a collection of about 250,000 pieces of sheet music which are arranged in specific categories.

"With the presence of so many kinds of electronic databases, I think librarians now have a different kind of mission," says Eugene W.C. Wu, librarian of Harvard-Yenching library.

"With different kinds of formats, materials and now the electronic databases, librarians have to learn how to assist readers" in using them, Wu says.

Readers may be unaware of the peculiar classifications, but library staffers are trained to keep abreast of the cataloguing technology, Amory explains.

"Say if you were looking up an 18th century British newspaper, you would have to look under the Berney collection, and not under the individual title of the newspaper," Amory says.

And Assistant Librarian of Boston University's Mayar Library Dave Snyder says the new development in cataloguing technology requires librarians to keep up with new advances.

"Every single CD-ROM product has a different user interface, which librarians may have to be conversant with," Snyder says.

In fact, in the electronic age, librarians may have a greater role than ever before.

"It's a complex maze of how records are linked together, how publications are linked together," says Sarah Mitchell, head of bibliographic access for MIT's Humanities Library "and librarians can help users understand [them]."