SIVACRACY.NET

I will save an analysis of the implications for more knowledgable folks. But what this means in the short term is that LC wants more libraries to participate in bibliographic description. It doesn't necessarily have to do with social tagging and the like, although LC is clearly interested in this, as their new flickr account indicates.

So instead of having LC do most of the cataloging and other library catalogers just copying it, LC doesn't want to carry the water for all libraries and therefore wants more to join in the effort of bibliographic description. It's a more participatory, decentralized approach to description.

In turn, LC wants to focus more on describing rare materials, like manuscripts and archival collections. This is usually where cataloging becomes less of a science and more of an art, since the descriptive information contained within older and/or unpublished materials isn't as standardized as what's on a title page or the verso of published material. As an archivist, this development obviously interests me.

This is actually a good thing, Siva! This is a tactful report. Certain phrases are a tip-off, such as "user success in the catalog" on page 15. Whether intentional or not, LC has enjoyed a long hegemony among libraries. LC cataloging practices have been "slavishly" followed, despite the fact that LC practices were originally developed for the LC collection. In other words, as the report details, special collections have not been catalogued in the same manner as books which are ubiquitous to all libraries. A breath of fresh air is long over-due here. There was once a practice of not using up-to-date technical terms as subject headings because LC had not changed their use of an outdated term. LC had not changed the term for logistic reasons only, because they had a long run of physical cards which would have had to have been corrected or updated. But no matter, across the nation, librarians religiously used terms such as "public works" instead of "infrastructure". If such a library had used a term with which the public was familiar, said library would probably have received a demerit from the cataloging consortium to which they belonged. Because it wasn't in the LCSH!
Consider me chuffed to bits about this report!

You might be interested in this response. Though the LC report talks about participation, it skirts the issue of open access (and, iirc, mentions cost recovery measures.)

http://www.okfn.org/wiki/FutureOfBibliographicControl

You have to scroll way to the bottom for the statement.

The thing to keep in mind is that, while the Library of Congress is responsible for the maintenance of several important taxonomies and vocabularies that are key to interoperability and shareability of library data, they are far from the sole source of the records that our institutions use to represent items in our collections. Many institutions do "original cataloging" and share records through utilities such as OCLC. So do vendors of books and digital resources. The report basically says that we need to do this more efficiently than we do now. Check.

More cataloging needs to happen that allows us to share rare and "hidden" collections. Check.

Records representing items are shared and transformed into new and different forms of metadata for different uses. Check.

The library community needs to be better educated about these issues. Check.

That said, there are many issues around intellectual property and who owns the rights to records that are becoming more important when discussing distributed creation and knowledge sharing. This report isn't a dire one for the community -- it's just stating the reality of the current state of cataloging and metadata sharing and letting everyone know that LC can't fix everything for everyone. They have resource limits, too.

I wouldn't say that this has any impact on collection building. I haven't heard any collections librarians say that they won't buy something because the way cataloging is going to take place cooperatively is going to change in the future. What this might effect is how quickly we can make an item added to our collection known to our user community. It may take longer for an item to be cataloged, so longer to get into a catalog.

But, I am not a cataloger and there may be ramifications that I am just not getting.