Books in Process

Not long ago, while we were sweating over an $11.95 Book-of-the-Month Club order, a friend marched in and declared that it costs more for the Dartmouth Library to catalog a book than it costs to purchase the book to begin with. That startling assertion, made on a Monday morning when another increase in the price of gasoline had been announced, seemed like further evidence of the decline of the West. Hardly consoled by a colleague's observation that a library book is of no use to anyone unless, at whatever cost, its location is recorded in the card catalog, we set out to discover if the bad news were true. It isn't, and in the course of being reassured we found out all about what librarians call "technical processing," which is more involved than we imagined.

Technical processing starts out simply enough: Someone, usually a selection officer but often a branch librarian, reference librarian, or librarian in charge of a special collection, decides the library should acquire a particular book. Helen M. Maclam, one of the four selection officers employed here, explained that the decision is based on an assessment of the teaching and research needs of the College, both now and for the future. In order to make such an assessment, she added, the librarians do a lot of conferring with professors and students "to get an idea of the direction in which the departments are going." They need to be familiar with gaps in the library's collections, as well as with what authors and publishers are producing, and because each of them has academic specialties or departments they order for (although they also do "interdisciplinary buying"), it helps that they have advanced degrees in disciplines besides library science.

We asked Helen Maclam how the library goes about deciding which American novels to buy. Of course, not all of the thousands of novels published every year in the United States are purchased, she said, but most novels with favorable reviews are acquired. The library also collects certain authors and will buy anything they write. "We do encourage people to make suggestions," she added.

Last year the library system's collection increased by 26,576 volumes, including serials, at a cost of' $1,030,284 for materials, bringing the total holdings to 1,- 265,198 volumes. According to a Chronicleof Higher Education ranking of university research libraries for 1977-78, that puts Dartmouth 78th from the top for the total number of volumes in the library, 94th for volumes added, and 77th for spending. In terms of total volumes, we're slightly behind first-place Harvard and second- place Yale, whose holdings, if combined, would number about 17,000,000, but we have the edge on the University of Western Ontario and Oklahoma State, ranked 82th and 83rd.

When an order for a particular book is placed, it goes through the Order and Receipt Department where someone verifies the author, title, publisher, and other bibliographic data. Someone also checks to make sure the volume isn't already hiding somewhere on the shelves or among the perhaps 10,000 books that might be "in process." The Automation Department produces the in-process list on microfiche, and until the new book is safely shelved and catalogued a computerized system keeps track of where in the process the order or volume is. The computer will even produce a claim letter to be sent to a publisher if a book does not arrive on time.

Another computer system, located in the Columbus, Ohio, headquarters of the Ohio College Library Center, provides Dartmouth and about 2,000 other libraries with the necessary Library of Congress cataloging information for most acquisitions. When a book arrives at the Dartmouth library, a clerk in the Cataloging Department sits down at a computer terminal, gets the OCLC on the line, and inquires if that book's particular catalog cards are available. If they are, cards are ordered for the main catalog in Baker, and, if the book will be shelved elsewhere, for a branch library's catalog. It's usually as simple as that.

If the bibliographic information is not on file the process takes longer, explained William Meredith, the associate director of library services. Books without catalog records are sent to the Original Cataloging Department, sorted, and held while the computer system is searched again. Some volumes are cataloged by the staff using information from various reference books, and, as a last resort because of the time and effort involved, others are cataloged from scratch according to the system of Anglo- American Cataloging Rules, with the information punctuated in a way that has meaning for the computer. When the work is done, Dartmouth puts the information in the computer file to be shared by the other participating libraries. Meredith explained that "it takes a high-caliber person to do this sort of cataloging," someone with a college degree, knowledge of two foreign languages, and the ability to find out enough about a book to describe and classify it accurately.

Most American books, and a high percentage of those published in Britain, include a page with all the necessary Library of Congress cataloging information, but books in English are only a portion of the library's collection. Even when the cataloging information can be copied directly from the book, it still is less expensive - and faster - to order the cards from the computer. Meredith estimated that it costs about $2.50 per volume to get the cards from the OCLC (about one- fourth the cost of preparing the cards at Dartmouth) and that it takes about one- tenth the amount of time. Once a catalog card is obtained the book goes to the Binding Department, where it receives a charge card, spine label, and bookplate. Then, finally, the volume is shelved and the catalog card is filed - manually.

With the information that goes on the catalog cards already stored in computer files, the librarians are considering the next step: computerizing the card catalog system itself. The advantage to the library would be that the process of filing new cards and amending bibliographic information would be simplified. Instead of hunting through the card file, a handsome but cumbersome collection of cabinets that cost $1,200 apiece, a clerk could make additions or deletions at a computer terminal. The main advantage to users would be access to the entire catalog from computer terminals scattered throughout the campus. The major problems are high initial costs, conversion of catalog records filed before 1972 (when the College joined the OCLC) into machine-readable form, and making the proposed system simple enough for English majors as well as physics majors to use.

The change, if it occurs, won't happen overnight. The first stage would be a pilot project with the present system and the computerized version operating side-by- side. That's a comfort. Despite the obvious practical value of the proposal, there are some aesthetic drawbacks. We always thought the best part of writing a term paper was the time spent perched on a stool in one of the aisles of the catalog, thumbing through cards, making long lists of books that might never be consulted. Would the view out the window be the same from a terminal? Sitting down at a computer keyboard right from the start seems too much like sitting down at a typewriter.

One of the card catalogs in Baker Library:more complicated than we ever imagined.