Dear all,

Here is a summary of today's excellent discussions.

Look forward to seeing you again today (Tuesday) at 10 am.

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CIG e-forum on reclassification, Summary of Day 1.

The day started with various participants sharing information about their own experiences of reclassification.  Nicky Ransom (University for the Creative Arts) brought up the topic of managing reclassification when a library is split over multiple sites, and this seemed to be shared by a number of other libraries.  This also brought up the problems of managing “local variations” of standard classification schemes, and reclassification as a method to unify the classification applied.

It was clear from a number of participants that out-sourcing reclassification was a very important topic to the reclassification debate. There was a common consensus that out-sourcing had not been considered previously by a number of participants, and after hearing about some very successful projects at the Cataloguing & indexing Group reclassification event last week, this was something to consider further.  Julie Eastcoe gave some really useful details about the reclassification project at the University of East Anglia, where the reclassification itself was outsourced to Backstage Library Works and the relabeling to Harrow Green.  Heather Jardine (City of London libraries) sounded a note of caution with the possibilities of out-sourcing, asking whether out-sourcing only works when you have a “well-classified and consistently-classified stock to start with … or if you are prepared to accept, uncritically, classification numbers already entered in MARC records by record suppliers”.

Heather Jardine brought up an interesting point concerning the difference between “reclassification” and “converting”; the former involves completely (re)considering the classification of an item, while the latter involves merely taking the carefully considered classmark that you have and mapping it from one version or scheme to another.  Debbie Lee (Courtauld Institute of Art) took this point further, suggesting that the original class scheme will likely determine whether you are “reclassifying” or “converting”.  Jackie Sumner (University of Birmingham) shared her thoughts about the conversion/reclassification issue: for example, the relative difficulties of converting an in-house Library of Congress (LCC) schedule to LCC as opposed to converting LCC for law to Moys confirm that “true” reclassification takes an awful lot longer than “conversion”.

Practical matters to do with the actual process of reclassification projects were also considered.  For instance, Lynne Dyer (De Montfort University) made an important point about reclassifying items where there are multiple copies: while only one item has been reclassified, physically fetching, updating holdings and relabelling multiple copies takes a lot of staff time. The sheer scale of this aspect to reclassification work was shown in sharp relief by Helen Garner (Sheffield Hallam University), who has a staggering 105 copies of one item in her library, a potential reclassification nightmare in its own right.  Lynn Corrigan (Edinburgh Napier University) shared her method to semi-automate the relabelling process: she uses a second call number status in order to run weekly reports of items which needed to be relabelled due to reclassification work.

Many participants shared useful ideas of different reclassification methodologies by giving a detailed account of the workflow used in their reclassification project(s); detailed accounts of various reclassification projects were given by Rosemary Stenson (University of Glasgow), Elize Rowan (Edinburgh University) and Jackie Sumner amongst others.  One particular concern shared by a number of participants was how to manage stock if you decide to receive shelf-ready materials for part of your collections, so that new materials uses a more up-to-date or more standardised version of the classification scheme than older stock.

There was also a brief discussion about the timing of reclassification projects, but these did seem to differ from library to library. While the summer vacation, for instance, was the obvious choice for reclassification at Nicky Ransom’s library, others suggested that the Christmas vacation was useful and a number of libraries reclassify all year around.  However, it seems that the communication and speed is as important as the time of year selected, as Birgit Fraser (Anglia Ruskin University) describes “… the main thing seems to be to communicate and focus - to ensure that our academic and customer services teams are aware and I can complete as quickly as possible”.

The e-forum then considered the impact of various non-metadata specialist staff on reclassification projects. There was a general consensus that library/information assistants should be utilised for at least fetching reclassification stock and relabelling; this type of work represents a considerable percentage of the reclassification project’s time, especially in cases of multiple copies as described above. Jackie Sumner described a “production-line system” where information assistants, classifiers and book processing assistants all worked together to complete their reclassification project on time.   However, Elize Rowan described a project where this was not the case; cataloguers were given individual label printers and relabelled their newly classified stock, as all the processing staff were focussed on labelling new acquisitions.

There was also a discussion about the role of subject librarians in the reclassification process, where their role involves some cataloguing or classification work.  In some cases, their involvement in this work delays reclassification projects; however, it was accepted that subject librarians always need to be consulted throughout the reclassification project’s planning and implementation.

It was agreed that senior management support was needed for reclassification projects.  Participants shared with the e-forum some of the arguments they used in order to garner management support: for example, Jackie Sumner suggested that they could receive more benefits from both shelf-ready and could source their classification from cataloguing records if they used a standard, up-to-date version of a classification scheme; Debbie Lee argued that too much staff time was wasted using a classification scheme  which was in a bad state, and that the classification problems were causing the library to accidentally duplicate stock; Sandra Cockburn (Oxford Brookes University) has persuaded her managers to always use the newest edition of Dewey, as moving through multiple editions at once is extremely time-consuming and traumatic.

Wendy Taylor (RNIB National Library Service) initiated an interesting discussion concerning running numbers, and whether areas of the library could be “de-classified” to this arrangement.  She suggested a cunning solution whereby the classmark would stay on the system to enable online classmark browsing but the material would be stored in a running number sequence.   Lynne Dyer described how their running-number sequence video stock was fully classified a few years ago, to meet the demand of readers who expected to find all formats of material on the same subject in the same place.  However, other participants described recent reclassification to move towards more running number sequences.

Reclassification doesn’t take place in a vacuum.  Jackie Sumner described how the major reclassification took place in her library via a retrospective cataloguing project.  There was also much discussion about reclassification being needed as the first stage in a move to shelf-ready acquisitions.  Many emphasised how critical it was to check that the material you are about to reclassify has been weeded and is not on the future disposals list.

Esther Arens (independent) asked about reclassification in public libraries, as most of the discussion up to this point had come from those working in academic libraries.  A number of participants responded to describe their reclassification projects in public libraries.  At Helen Paul’s (Guille-Alles Library, Guernsey) one-site library, they make small-scale changes with each new edition of Dewey; at Andrew Coburn’s (Essex County Council) 90-site library service, past changes to fiction classification were reclassified centrally, with data and new labels for stock distributed to the various sites.  However, technology changes and pressures on time for staff at the sites means that this method would be much more difficult today, and hence a change to DDC23 has not been mooted.
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