About the UC CONSER Funnel Program

• Charge
• Advantages to CONSER participation
• CONSER = Cooperation [PDF; 16KB]
• UC CONSER Funnel Implementation Plan
• Reports

Charge

The UC CONSER Funnel represents an opportunity for any interested UC campus to obtain training and contribute serial cataloging to the national database in OCLC. As such, it is a concrete first step toward making UC cataloging a "single enterprise." Among the many Funnel benefits:

Established by the Heads of Technical Services (HOTS) in April 2006, supported by CONSER, and approved by the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), this is the first funnel program that involves bibliographic records in the PCC. The UC CONSER Funnel reports to CAMCIG, the Cataloging And Metadata Common Interest Group.

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Advantages of CONSER participation [Click here to view or download as Word document]

Thoughts on the Advantages to CONSER Participation
from an Administrative Perspective

John Riemer

December 21, 2005

Streamlining the Dataflow for SCP records

Campuses receiving SCP serial records are moving in the direction of simply overlaying the existing local records, thereby positioning themselves to receive newer copies of the bibliographic description as often as SCP issues updates. If campuses become aware of any information belonging in the bibliographic record, CONSER membership would enable them to contribute it to the master record in OCLC directly. Because SCP uses the CONSER record, updates sent to campuses would also contain the maintenance performed on a campus. This is much more efficient than striving to protect locally-stored data from overlay or contacting SCP staff to make the changes on the campus' behalf.

Efficiency

When a serial is copy cataloged at a non-CONSER library, the editing done at that time resides only in the ILS. Sometimes the non-CONSER library adds significantly to the record because it has newer issues and more current information. Generally, none of this can be shared with other libraries. Original cataloging contributed by non-CONSER libraries resides in OCLC but cannot be updated by that library in the future unless there are less than 10 holdings on the OCLC record. Subsequent work to handle title changes or other critical maintenance becomes inefficient and awkward when the local record is out of sync with the national record in OCLC. This can cause duplicate or extra work when the differences between the two records must first be dealt with before processing the title change. CONSER libraries are able to keep their records in sync by editing records just once directly in OCLC and avoiding backtracking to process bibliographic changes in the future.

Effective Use of Cataloger Time and Energy

Taking on CONSER responsibilities should not cause the per-title cataloging time to go beyond 110% of what it is now. And the cooperative approach encourages reflection on the nature of the editing now done for correctness and completeness of the record. The world could be divided up this way: Things grievously wrong with records should lead to locking and replacing the master OCLC record. Lesser matters probably should be let go. This is a good opportunity to move away from unnecessary local customization.

Recruitment and Retention and Recognition for UC Catalogers

If UC catalogers already strive to create records to the same CONSER standard that LC catalogers use, why not channel that original cataloging energy into the master records that everyone uses in OCLC? It is professionally rewarding to contribute cataloging to CONSER and in so doing have one's work matter far beyond the wall's of one's own institution.

Strengthening the Community of UC Catalogers

PCC involvement represents a great training opportunity for catalogers, with a built-in chance to consult UC and other CONSER colleagues on cataloging problems and challenges. Shared communication improves common understanding of cataloging/metadata within the community and awareness of special strengths in the UC cataloging community (for consultation). Providing CONSER mentoring and training represent additional professional development opportunities. Activities such as these promote consistent system-wide cataloging standards and policies.

Influence on Cataloging Standards and Practices

Through CONSER there are frequent opportunities to influence standards development or to advocate changes in practice, for the benefit of library operations and our users. When problems are found in bibliographic or authority records, CONSER catalogers are able to correct them, instead of writing to ask someone else to do it or working around the problem. If new LCSH are needed or language is outdated, CONSER catalogers are able to initiate proposals, instead of settling for the limits of existing terminology. When an identifier is needed to support a bibliographic service such as SFX, CONSER catalogers can formally request that an ISSN be assigned.

Giving as Much as We're Getting

All of us in technical services are hopeful of finding a high hit rate for cataloging copy, largely usable as-is, so we can keep costs down. We are aware that LC cannot by itself support all the copy cataloging operations, without any contributions coming from ARL members and other institutions. We do not want to be “all take and no give.”

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UC CONSER Funnel Implementation Plan [Click here to view or download as Word document]

UC CONSER Funnel Implementation Plan
February 16, 2006

Funnel Organization

The UC CONSER Funnel would be a formal entity in relation to CONSER but would operate as a virtual team within UC with only the amount of administrative structure necessary to sustain a coordinated effort. Campuses with current CONSER membership would maintain their independent status (including voting). The UC Funnel would have a group membership in CONSER and participate as a non-voting member. The minimum administrative structure needed to operate the Funnel is envisioned to be a small steering committee whose membership could rotate over time and a local contact/liaison on each campus. The steering committee would have the following positions and roles:

Campus contacts for the Funnel would be responsible for coordinating training and mentoring at the local level and keeping local staff up-to-date on Funnel news.

Once a campus has completed the training and mentoring period, each campus would function independently in its CONSER work. That is, they would do their CONSER work directly on OCLC, receive OCLC CONSER enhance credits directly to their OCLC account and submit their own statistics to LC.

Funnel Establishment

The CONSER Coordinator at LC (Les Hawkins) and the BIBCO Coordinator (Carolyn Sturtevant) have reviewed the proposal and indicated their enthusiasm for establishing a UC Funnel for bibliographic information within CONSER. It is worth noting that this would be the first instance of a bibliographic funnel and that it is seen as an innovative and very worthwhile way to continue building a cooperative approach to national bibliographic access. The UC CONSER Funnel would be modeled on existing NACO funnels, which currently exist to cooperatively build the national authority file at LC. OCLC would establish a CONSER authorization within a campus’s existing location code to enable direct input into the CONSER database and would credit CONSER enhancement credits directly into the campus’s OCLC account. Currently, CONSER enhancement credit is $9.15 per transaction, which is double the amount that OCLC awards for other enhancements to the OCLC database. The CONSER credit is applied for any CONSER transaction at a flat rate regardless of the nature of the contribution (i.e., maintenance, upgrades and new original records all receive the same credit).

The Funnel would be established incrementally, with the goal of training and mentoring new campuses to participate in bibliographic maintenance activities first. Training and mentoring would be tailored to support this type of contribution initially. In the future, if campuses want to increase their level of participation to Associate or Full CONSER membership (contribute and authenticate full records), a plan for providing further training and mentoring could be developed with the steering committee. The campus could apply to the CONSER Program Coordinator through established channels (http://www.loc.gov/acq/conser/forms.html). It is not envisioned that this would take place during the first year. The initiative to propose an increase in participation would be left to campuses. The UC Funnel would provide a supportive environment for UC participants who might not otherwise have the infrastructure to go solo or have large enough contributions for the Associate or Full level.

Initial Funnel establishment would proceed in phases, with campuses wishing to start soon being brought into the process in a staggered sequence during the first phase, perhaps one campus every other month and then being mentored and released for independent work individually. Three campuses have indicated an interest in being part of the first phase: Davis, Berkeley and Irvine. Other campuses could determine their readiness to start as suits their needs. Prior to beginning training, campuses in the first phase could begin saving printouts and/or surrogates of their maintenance work in order to have a pool of records to begin with for practice and mentoring. The specific way a campus might choose to build this pool of records would be left to the campus and could take many forms. This would also provide a valuable estimate of the volume of maintenance work that must be reviewed during the mentoring period. Once mentoring is complete, campuses would begin doing maintenance transactions independently on OCLC and would receive OCLC CONSER enhance credits directly to their OCLC account.

Training and Mentoring

Initial training needs would be modest in light of the goal of starting with just bibliographic maintenance and the fact that Funnel participants are already experienced serial catalogers. Training could most likely take place within a single day and be comprised of a refresher on the rules and principles of serial bibliographic maintenance as well as a unit on the principles of CONSER participation and Funnel organization. The UC Funnel Coordinator or another CONSER mentor would probably be the presenter for the first sessions. Depending on the decision regarding first phase campuses, sharing this first session might be possible. Ideally, the first training would take place this spring, with scheduling and logistics to be determined. Several training tools already exist that could be used to design or supplement training. These include the Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program (SCCTP) workshops and the new PCC/ALCTS workshop on Cataloging for the Twenty-first Century. There are several trainers for these workshops within UC and these people could perhaps contribute to the training over time as needed. If a campus wanted a fuller review of serials cataloging, one or more of these workshops could be given at their request. It is a significant advantage that a corpus of current training materials and trainers to present them in California already exists.

After receiving training, each campus would be assigned a mentor, who would review contributed maintenance work for a period of time. Work could be done and shared via OCLC Connexion’s capability to share files. Surrogates might be requested for some types of work initially. Within UC, there are CONSER-trained catalogers who could share mentoring activities at UCLA and UCSD (after March). Mentors are available at UCLA to handle some non-Roman languages (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Yiddish). As each campus joins the Funnel, its need for non-Roman mentoring could be negotiated. Mostly likely, a mentor would work directly with the campus’s Funnel liaison rather than multiple individuals on a campus. The campus liaison would devise a way to batch maintenance work performed locally and submit it to the mentor. The specific logistics of this process would be worked out between the mentor and the campus in training. In general, the mentoring process would be devised to be as streamlined and short as possible to accomplish the goal of ensuring the campus catalogers understand the principles of maintenance and are contributing accurate and quality work.

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