Zine Catalogue Blogue

This blog is now being continued on the Anchor Archive website, plus I copied all of the older posts over.  It makes sense to have it on there now.  We’ll keep this one up for now, though.

The new issue of Zine Librarian Zine is out!  In case you can’t tell from the title, it’s an awesome zine about zines and libraries.  I wrote an article for the new issue about subject cataloguing and making a thesaurus for the Anchor Archive Zine Library.  The PDF is available for viewing and printing.  For a quick read, here is my article:

Adventures in Zine Subject Cataloguing

Last year we started cataloguing the zine collection at the Anchor Archive Zine Library, a small zine library run by volunteers out of a rented house in the North End of Halifax, Nova Scotia. I had just graduated from library school and had made an electronic catalogue for the Anchor Archive as a school project with my friend Zac using the open source content management system Drupal. The biggest challenge has been to create a catalogue that is easy to use, makes sense to Anchor Archive patrons, and fits the DIY ethic of zines, yet incorporates enough library standards to function as an effective tool for searching and managing content.

One of the most difficult aspects of the catalogue that we continue to struggle with is subject terms. The first question was whether we should even include a field for subject terms in our zine catalogue records. Some zine libraries do not, most likely because of the extensive time it takes to assign subject terms to zines and the control systems that are usually needed to standardize subject terms. Many zine libraries use a free-form description or abstract field instead of a subject field. Even public and academic libraries with zine collections often assign all zines a generic subject term for zines rather than performing subject analysis on individual zines. The Salt Lake City Public Library, on the other hand, has a separate catalogue for zines and incorporates user tagging instead of subjects. This cuts down on the time spent cataloguing each zine and hands authority over to the patrons to attach their own subject terms to zines, which keeps with the DIY spirit of zines.

Despite the popularity of not using subject terms, we decided to use them in the Anchor Archive catalogue. I felt that it would make search and retrieval of content more effective. As well, I’m kind of a cataloguing nerd and I thought it would be fun to subject catalogue and create a thesaurus of zine subject terms. I think I also underestimated the size of the collection and the time it would take to catalogue all the zines. We decided to have user tagging in the catalogue too, so that if zine library patrons were unhappy with the subject terms chosen by cataloguers they could add their own.

When you decide to use subject terms, you also have to decide if you’re going to use a controlled vocabulary (predefined set of terms usually collected in a thesaurus, which also shows the relationships between terms) or natural language. If you decide to use a controlled vocabulary, you have to decide which one to use. Unfortunately, there aren’t many to choose from. Most libraries use Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) but I ruled these out right away because they collection is huge and unwieldy, many are outdated and problematic, and I don’t think hierarchical subject terms (e.g. “travel – Arizona”) are necessary in an electronic catalogue. I searched madly for an alternative thesaurus of subject terms that would work for zines but found nothing. So I decided to make my own thesaurus.

It hasn’t been easy choosing preferred terms and determining relationships between terms for the zine thesaurus, especially when I want to be both culturally sensitive and colloquial. Questions like, “Is ‘gender politics’ the same concept as ‘gender?’” will plague me for days. Sometimes I think I should have just stuck with user tagging, but luckily I have over twenty volunteers who enthusiastically attend weekly cataloguing parties and choose most of the terms themselves as they catalogue zines, as well as provide criticism and feedback on the thesaurus as it progresses.

I would love to make this thesaurus even more collaborative and invite others to contribute, but I haven’t thought of a good way to do this without creating chaos yet. For now, I’ve made the thesaurus available online at http://robertsstreet.org/n/thesaurus/out.htm and I invite you to send me criticism and feedback at amandastevens@zenbe.com. You can get to the Anchor Archive catalogue from this location too and check out our awesome collection.

I apologize for my long absence from the Catalogue Blogue.  A lot has happened since I last wrote.

I spent about 4 months working as a paid “Cataloguing Coordinator” for the Anchor Archive (my dream job!).  When I started I had high aspirations of getting almost all of the zines in the library catalogued by the end of my contract, but after awhile I become more realistic and decided my focus would be to teach cataloguing to as many people as possible and establish the necessary infrastructure for cataloguing to continue after my contract ended.  In this regard I was very successful.

I started training volunteer cataloguers at the end of the summer and hosted “cataloguing parties” 2 or 3 times a week when anyone was invited to come catalogue at the Zine Library.  I recruited volunteer cataloguers from current Anchor Archive volunteers, recipients of the Anchor Archive newsletter, folks who stopped by the Zine Library during open hours, students in the local Master of Library Studies program, and pretty much everyone I knew and met.  There was a huge amount of interest and I trained around 25 people over 2 months.  A lot of those people only came to 1-3 cataloguing parties, but at least 10 became regular cataloguers who would catalogue once a week or so.  I invited people to catalogue in whatever subjects they were interested in.  Our cataloguing parties were always fun and I met some awesome people.

Our volunteers are diverse and bring different strengths to cataloguing.  Some have a library background.  Some know the collection really well.  Some have special knowledge or high interest in a specific category.  Some are really fast.  Some are thorough and detailed.

I catalogued quite a few zines myself, but I also spent time editing catalogue records and transferring subject terms to the Zine Thesaurus I was making.  Coming up with good subject terms continues to be the most challenging part of cataloguing for all the volunteers, but building the thesaurus has been fun.

I created an instruction booklet for zine cataloguing that includes step-by-step instructions for filling out fields, tips for choosing good subject terms, and directions for using other aspects of the catalogue.  I will attach it to this post at some point.  I also worked on some instructions for general users of the catalogue and administrators but those haven’t been finalized yet because we keep redesigning the user interface.

By the end of my contract we had catalogued over 500 zines!  We figure there are around 3000 zines in the collection, but we’re not totally sure, so we made a good dent.

I went away on a holiday for November and December.  Since I got back to Halifax in January I’ve been hosting cataloguing parties every Sunday afternoon during Zine Library open hours.  Sarah (a more “senior” cataloguer) has hosted a couple of parties during the week too, to accommodate those with different schedules.  Sometimes only 1 cataloguer comes, but most of the time I have 3 or 4, and last weekend I had 6.  We keep getting new people who want to learn too.

Since November we’ve actually catalogued another 500 zines, so I’m pretty confident that the momentum will continue and we’ll most of the collection catalogued by the end of the year.

The catalogue is online and some people use it, but we haven’t officially launched it yet.  I need to give regular open hours volunteers some training on the catalogue first, and I’m waiting until we’ve finalized the user interface for the website before I do that, which should be in April.  When we do launch the catalogue we’re going to have a big party. 

As we’ve written about in detail elsewhere on this blog, we use the Taxonomy module in Drupal for the Subject field.  It’s set up so that every time we enter a new subject term the term gets added to a controlled vocabulary that’s stored in Drupal.  It is possible to then go into this controlled vocabulary and create a hierarchical thesaurus by setting up relationships between terms.  Drupal allows you to assign related terms, broader terms, narrower terms, and “synonyms” or use for terms.  However, I have not been doing this in Drupal and instead I’ve been creating a thesaurus in a separate thesaurus software program.  Yes, it means entering the terms twice, but I do it because I find the taxonomy module in Drupal to be limited in the following ways:

1. When you enter a non-preferred term (which in Drupal is called a synonym), the non-preferred term is only noted under the preferred term as a synonym and does not have a separate entry in the vocabulary list.  This means that if a person wants to look up the term “contraception” and we’ve used the term “birth control,” the person will not find “contraception” in the alphabetical list of terms but instead only by finding “birth control” first and seeing the other term below it or through using the Find (Control F) feature, which I think a lot of people won’t think to do.  In other words, Drupal has “use for” terms but not “use” terms.

2. When you add a term as a narrower term of another term, the narrower term only gets listed under the broader term and does not have its own entry.  Thus, a similar situation arises as above when someone tries to find the narrower term in the alphabetical list. 

One solution to this would be to alter the program code so that synonyms and narrower terms have their own entries in the list, but apparently this is complicated.  Another solution would be to build a feature into our Drupal system that would allow you to search terms only on the thesaurus page.  We haven’t tried this yet.  We’ve also discussed not having broader and narrower terms and only related terms, which I think would work for our purposes.  There would still be the problem of the synonyms, though.

One day I would like to be able to use Drupal to construct the zine thesaurus, but for now I’ll keep using the thesaurus software program THEW32.  It allows me to export the thesaurus in HTML, so I’ve been posting it as a separate page in the catalogue with the terms hyperlinked.  The interface for setting up relationships between terms and editing terms in THEW32 is better than Drupal, so perhaps it would take me just as long to make my thesaurus in Drupal as it takes to transfer subject terms to my thesaurus in THEW32.

Here is the thesaurus I’m creating in THEW32 and here is the flat list of subject terms in Drupal.  You can see where I set up a few relationships in Drupal to see how they displayed.

So much more could be done with the Drupal Taxonomy module, and if I were a Drupal developer I would do it!  It would be wonderful if when a cataloguer or searcher entered a non-preferred term, the preferred term was automatically suggested to them.  It would be awesome if you could easily search a single controlled vocabulary.  I imagine it will be improved in the future.

I’ve found a couple of resources for alternative subject headings since my last post:

• The Salt Lake City Public Library has a zine collection that is catalogued separately from the rest of the library’s collection. They decided to not assign subject terms while cataloguing but rather have invited users to tag records with their own subject terms. Thus, the vocabulary is not controlled or hierarchical, but it’s a good resource in looking for subject terms to use, especially subject terms that patrons will use when searching.

• The subscription database from Proquest called CSA Sociological Abstracts has a good thesaurus of sociological subject terms, which is helpful for more academic subject areas like feminism and environmentalism. Of course, you need to be affiliated with a library that has a subscription to this database in order to use it. I’m still technically a student until September 2008 so I can access the database through my university’s library.

• TemaTres, an open source thesaurus software program, hosts some free thesauri on its site on specific subjects and developed by specific organizations, such as General Subject Headings for Film Archives, and Thesaurus for Graphic Materials: Subject Terms. You can see the whole list of vocabularies here. These could be helpful for cataloguing in specific subject areas.

• Wikipedia is by far what I use the most, though!

I spent quite a bit of time searching on the internet for alternative bookstore catalogues in the hopes of finding a list of subject terms to use, but no luck. Most bookstores don’t index their content by subject, which I guess is smart since it’s so time-consuming. I put my question out to the Zine Librarians Yahoo Group and got 1 response so far:

On a side note, while searching for alternative thesauri, I discovered a new book that looks amazing: Radical Cataloging. I feel that it may have a list of resources that includes alternative thesauri, but the book is too new to be at any libraries in my region so I ordered it.

I started making a thesaurus for the zine library catalogue.  I initially decided to do this simply because it will make cataloguing the Anchor Archive’s collection easier.  But, as I’ve searched in vain for alternative thesauri to use for guidance, I’ve realized there is a need for an alternative thesaurus or zine thesaurus, so now I’m also making it for the world.  Right now I’m making it on my own (and with input from volunteer zine cataloguers), but in the future I hope to invite my fellow zine librarians to collaborate on it.

So I guess I should define what a thesaurus is for all the non-librarians out there.   It’s essentially a list of subject terms that have been organized according to their relationships with each other.  The types of relationships that are shown are hierarchical ones (broader terms and narrower terms) and flat ones (related terms).  For example, in my thesaurus I have the word “animals” as a broader term, “frogs” and “horses” as narrower terms (because frogs and horses are kinds of animals), and “animal communication” as a related term.  You can also add “use for” terms, which refer users to the preferred term to use.  For example, you might add “mammals” as a use for term for “animals,” so that when a cataloguer wants to use the subject term “mammals,” she will instead be directed to the preferred term “animals.”  The thesaurus I’m making will be a standalone document that cataloguers can refer to when choosing subject terms for a zine, to find out which terms they should use and get ideas of other terms in the same subject area.

I’ve found that my zine thesaurus is not very hierarchical.  There are some hierarchical relationships, such as with the “animals” example above, but most of the relationships are flat and most terms have a lot of related terms but few broader or narrower terms.  It would probably be equally useful with related terms only and no broader or narrower terms.

I’m using a free thesaurus software program called THEW32.  There is an open source program called TemaTres but I haven’t tried it yet because it needs to be installed on a server.  THEW32 doesn’t look all that exciting but it does what I want it to do and allows you to export the thesaurus in HTML or text format.

I posted a link on the blog to the Anchor Archive catalogue that we created. It’s still not “done,” as only a portion of the collection has been catalogued and the library itself is not using it yet, and it’s going to be moving to another server soon. We’re also in the process of turning the catalogue into the general Anchor Archive website. But I wanted to post the link so that people can look at it if they’re interested. If anyone would like to be given permissions to see more of the administrative side, contact us and we’ll see what we can do.

Now that we have this awesome catalogue, our next task is to fill it with data, or catalogue the collection of the Anchor Archive Zine Library. There are about 2000 zines in the collection, plus books and other items, but we’re just focusing on the zine collection for now. We hope to have most of the cataloguing done by September or October of 2008.

We just found out last week that we got a grant to do this part of the project. Yay! The Halifax Regional Municipality awarded us a Community Grant in Arts, Culture, and Heritage for $4,800. This funding will mainly be used to pay wages to me to coordinate the cataloguing project. However, I decided a couple of months ago, when we were still waiting to hear about funding, that I was going to coordinate the cataloguing project whether I got paid or not, and so I’ve been working pretty steadily on it since the beginning of June.

The plan is to recruit as many people as possible to help us catalogue the collection, so my job is to get those people together, train them, supervise them as needed, and put together a user guide that can be used by future cataloguers. I’m also responsible for training Anchor Archive folks on other aspects of using the catalogue, such as checking zines in and out, and creating a user guide on how to do these other tasks as well.

But I decided that before I get a bunch of other people involved, I should catalogue about 1/5 of the collection on my own so that I can work out any bugs in the system, get a really good understanding of the cataloguing process, and put together a thesaurus of subject terms. In order to get a good cross-representation of subject terms for the thesaurus, I’m cataloguing approximately 5 zines from each box (each box represents a category, such as Bicycles or Anarchism) in this initial stage. This will also allow people later on to catalogue zines in areas they’re interested in, which would be harder if I worked through entire boxes at this point. I have been getting help from Skye, an MLIS student who’s working at the Anchor Archive this summer, and a couple of my librarian friends, because they’re all familiar with the concept and process of cataloguing in general. It’s actually way better to catalogue with other people because I find that I’m constantly questioning which subject terms to use and it helps to be able to get someone else’s input. It’s also good to have help with subjects I know almost nothing about, such as anarchism (thanks Braden!)

I don’t think it will be too hard to recruit other folks to help out once I’m ready for them because there are a few Anchor Archive volunteers who ask me when they can start cataloguing every time they see me, and often when I mention the project to other people, they say they’d like to catalogue too. I can understand their interest because cataloguing zines is really fun - if you like zines. You don’t necessarily have time to read through the zines you catalogue, but just to look through piles of zines and see what’s out there is absolutely fascinating.

Definitely the hardest part about cataloguing is coming up with good subject terms that will be used by other people while searching the catalogue. I think this is always a challenge in cataloguing, but what makes it even harder is that we don’t have a thesaurus or list of subject terms to use as a guide. Library of Congress Subject Headings are what most libraries use, but they’re not very useful to us because they use compound subject terms (e.g., dogs–breeding) whereas we’ve decided not to, and a lot of zines deal with alternative content that’s not well represented by Library of Congress. I would really like to find some other thesauri out there that I can refer to for guidance. I’ve looked online a bit and haven’t found anything. Most zine libraries don’t have catalogues online, or if they do, they don’t index their zines by subject. I’ve tried to think of other types of libraries or resource collections that might have thesauri that would work for us, like women’s centre libraries, but I haven’t had much luck yet. Maybe I just need to be more creative. If anyone has any suggestions, please send them my way!

Another thing we’ve found challenging is determining the difference between the field “physical description” and “subject.” Some things are obvious, but there are grey areas. For example, we’ve been putting “comics” in physical description because we feel this describes the format of the content rather than the intellectual content itself. Same with “interviews.” But it’s confusing and we often question ourselves.

I’m going to start putting together a thesaurus this week, as the list of subject terms has become quite large and unwieldy. At first I thought I wouldn’t make a hierarchical thesaurus, because a hierarchy seemed to go against the spirit of zines, but I’ve realized that it will make things way easier. For example, if you’re cataloguing a feminist zine, if you’re using a non-hierarchical thesaurus you have to look through the whole list of subject terms to find terms that may apply to your zine. But if you’re using a hierarchical thesaurus you can look up the broader term “feminism” and see a whole bunch of narrower and related terms that could apply to your zine. I’m kind of excited about making a thesaurus, but I also know it’s going to make my brain hurt.

In the spirit of zine-making, Amanda and I intend to reformat and publish our final report for this project as a zine. However, for those who might be following our progress online and also for review by our instructor before we can format, publish and distribute our paper-based report, we’re pre-publishing it electronically to this blog. Enjoy. There’s also a PDF version here.

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Circulation functionality is now working in our system. I’m not completely sure of all of the workflows, but the functionality to check items in and out is working. The circulation module also hooks into the display of item records to provide links to circulation functions for those items (including an option to view circulation history, and a link to begin the check-out or check-in procedure for that item).

First I made the general circulation form, which outputs a table view of all items currently checked out of the library. Each item in this table is followed by history and check-in links.

The circulation history form requires an item’s node-id as an argument in the URI, and outputs a history of all loans for that item.

Building the check-in form was fairly simple: again, a node-id is given as an argument in the URI, meaning that check-in links can be easily generated whenever an item’s node-id is known (which is anytime we’re dealing with item records). An additional URI argument is used for confirmation. If the confirmation argument is missing, a check-in confirmation link is output.

Building the check-out form was more complicated. It required the ability to take node- and user-ids as arguments, as well as autocomplete-based text fields for selecting the item being checked-out and the user the item is being issued to. The user module already contains AJAX autocomplete functions for usernames, but I wanted to extend this functionality to allow lookup based not only on the user->name field, but also based on the name fields which we have included in user’s profiles using nodeprofile module. I included this new autocomplete function in the circulation module. At present, I have hardcoded a complex, three-way join statement to link the ‘users’ table with the ‘content_type_user’ table via the ‘node’ table (this will be changed). Now, if our system has a user with username ‘big_genie’ but with the name ‘James Woods’ in their user profile, the username autocomplete function will retrieve ‘big_genie’ even when ‘James’ is typed into the username field. I think this greatly increases functionality.

I also needed to build a new autocomplete function, this time for item codes. Using the user-autocomplete function as an example this was not too difficult. As with the new user-autocomplete function, I wanted to allow item codes to be loaded even when a zine title was entered. A similar three-way-join statement accomplishes this. Now, if the issuing librarian types the name of a zine into the item-code field, a dynamic list of items related to that zine (that is, all of the copies of the zine) will be output. This provides more points of access to the volunteer librarians while still remaining passively instructive.

What remains is to hook circulation into the display of user records, in order to display a table of current loans for that user. Following this, secondary functions (various circulation reports) can be implemented.