Six Steps to LCC
by Kendall Grant Clark |

3. Gather

Summary: Gather item-labeling materials—including a variety of labels, stickers, and pens of various kinds—taking into consideration any special requirements presented by unusual items in your collection.

What you need to do to here depends entirely on how you want to complete the next step, (4). I chose to use sticky labels and felt tip pens to label the items of my collection. You may choose to tape or loosely place a 3x5 card into each item. Or you may have a fancy barcode printer and a reader, though this can be a tricky choice.

Rather than give specific advice about labeling items, I'll mention some of the issues that aren't obvious at first glance:

• Choose a labeling technique appropriate for both the items of your collection and your domestic space. For example, if you have mostly mass-market books, then labels are a good choice. But if you have rare or valuable books, or you cultivate a particular aesthetic sensibility in your living space, you should choose a labeling technique that will not harm books, their resale value, or negatively affect your aesthetic sensibility. Of course you can always choose more than one labeling technique.
• Even if your books are not valuable in the rare book sense, you don't want to mar them unnecessarily. I regret not doing more research before choosing ordinary mailing labels for my books. I should have chosen a non-acidic, archival quality label and ink. Unless there's a fire or flood, I'm going to own the bulk of my library for the rest of my life, and it will very likely outlast me. Choosing an archival quality labeling technique is smart.
• Given that XML.com's audience is full of geeks, I want to say a few words about barcodes. It's a sexy solution: it makes certain automation tasks easier, including building a computerized index of only your collection. But it has significant labor costs, in addition to the equipment costs (you need at least one barcode reader and printer setup). The labor costs include keying-in rather than writing the LC catalog identifiers for each item, affixing them to each book, and then figuring out an alternative labeling technique for rare or valuable books. You also should ensure that, if you choose to barcode your collection, the alphanumeric LC catalog number is included on the barcode label. It's impossible to scan one's shelves rapidly if the only identifier on each item is machine but not humanly readable.
• If I were writing this article in, say, 10 years, I'd be talking about RFID tags instead of barcodes. I think it's likely that in 10 years books will include active RFID tags, which will largely obviate the need to label them in order to manage your collection. Ubiquitous RFID tags in books seems more likely to me than the pure digital lifestyle scenario about the future of books, namely, that we'll all be reading books on some electronic paper device in 10 years, having foregone a 500 year old tradition of relishing the tactile pleasures of books as physical objects.

4. Label

Summary: For each item in your collection, find its unique LCC identifier and affix that identifier to the item, using the techniques and materials from (3).

(4) is the most interesting step because it's the simplest, conceptually, but also the step that represents 90% of the required work. Labeling the item, however, is what I have come to call a dijalog inflection point—the point at which the actual correlation between physical and virtual space is made concrete. Once labeled, a physical item, a book, has a unique identifier in a namespace, the Library of Congress Classification scheme, that can be manipulated by a computer.

There are some practical issues here. How do you find the LCC identifier for an item in your collection? The first step is to look at the verso of the book's title page, that is, the page opposite the title page. If you're lucky, you'll find a bit of the copyright page called the "Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data". The LC Cataloging in Publication (CIP) Data is the third of my LCC@Home tricks. (In some books you may want to look at the back of the book for the CIP if it's not on the verso of the title page.) Figure 3 is the CIP block for one of my favorite books, Arthur Danto's The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, among the most important philosophies of art from the contemporary analytic school.

Figure 3: CIP Data block

Not every book has a CIP Data block. Older books often don't. Nearly all books sold within the past 10 years will have one, as well as just about every book published by a university press. More and more these days it's hard to find a book published by houses other than small, boutique, or certain trade publishing houses that doesn't have a CIP Data block.

So why is the CIP Data block so important? Because, as you can see in the part of Figure 3 circled in red, the CIP Data block includes the unique LCC identifier for that book. That means that you don't have to do anything to find the identifier. It also means that labeling the book is as simple as copying that identifier onto a label, then affixing that label to, say, the book's spine. It also means you don't have to label the book explicitly, though having to open every book and find the CIP Data block is vastly less efficient than reading a label on the spine.

Most of the work of step (4) consists of locating the CIP Data block, writing the LCC identifier onto a label, and affixing the label to the book's spine. Fun? Not really? Rote? Yes, a bit. Able to be done while watching TV or listening to the radio? You bet. Complex? Not in the least.

But what about books, like the one in Figure 4, that don't have a CIP Data block? Vanity presses, some kinds of trade or corporate presses, or presses that publish only one or two authors aren't eligible to participate in the CIP program. And, obviously, books that are older than the CIP program won't have benefited from it.

Figure 4: A book without a CIP Data block

For a book like the one in Figure 4, you have a few options. You can try to find the book in the Library of Congress Online Catalog or in another large online catalog. And you may want to use the LCC identifier of a more recent edition of an older book. That's utterly anathema to real library science, but it's a perfectly legitimate shortcut for LCC@Home. It's also possible to use the ISBN in a book without a CIP Data block, such as in Figure 4, to find the LCC identifier. As that's the subject of next month's column, I won't say much more about it here.

More About CIP

Large publishers which handle lots of titles, lots of authors, and whose books are widely acquired by libraries are eligible to participate in the CIP program. This includes all university presses and most, if not all large commercial publishers. I suspect that about two-thirds of the new titles published each year and available for purchase in retail outlets contain a CIP Data block. As for the number of new books actually purchased each year, I suspect something like 90% or higher contain a CIP Data block.

The CIP process goes something like this: publishers send CIP data applications for each eligible title to the LC, which assigns an LC Control Number. Catalogers do descriptive cataloging, assign subject headings, and assign full LC and Dewey classification identifiers. This complete CIP data is sent back to the publisher, which puts some or all of this cataloging data onto the verso of the title page. A MARC record for the book is also sent to the large libraries, consortiums, and bibliographic vendors. Finally, the publisher sends a copy of the book to the LC, which then adds some final metadata— the number of pages and book's size—to the book's MARC record. After the records are updated and checked for consistency and accuracy, the new MARC records are redistributed.

5. Punt

Summary: Depending on the number and type of items in your collection that are not LCC cataloged, apply some other classification scheme, leave the items unidentified, or consider cataloging the item yourself.

Okay, this is where things get hard and the Martha Stewart strategy comes unraveled. What if you have items in your collection that haven't been assigned an LC identifier? You have four choices:

First, you can do your own LC cataloging, which is practically impossible and not a very good choice anyway. Second, you can see if the item has been assigned an identifier in some other classification scheme. That's unlikely but possible; it doesn't buy you a whole lot, practically. Third, you can do your own cataloging using a scheme other than LC. One of the modern synthetic schemes would be a good choice. Probably UDC would be best. Last, you can leave the item uncatalogued, which isn't a bad choice.

Which choice you make depends in part on the number of uncatalogued items in your collection. If it's fewer than the maximum number you can easily search through by hand, I would leave them uncatalogued. If it's the bulk of your collection and more than you can manage by hand, then LCC@Home isn't a very good choice for you. I'll leave you with a bit of advice: consider doing your own cataloging with UDC, but then be prepared to build your own computerized database of items. I'll have more to say about this case in a future column later this year, but for now you're on your own.

6. Arrange

Summary: Physically arrange the distribution of items matching LCC categories according to some locally-derived, sensible plan.

Now that you've labeled all of the items in your collection, it's time to place them on your shelves in a way that corresponds to the plan you developed in step (2). I did this in two steps: first, I put all the books that belonged to a top-level category near the shelves that were meant to house that category. Call that the gross sort. Then I did a fine sort. For each top-level category I sorted the books in order of their LCC identifier, which was now on a label on each book's spine.

Next to step (4), this is the most work, but it's not that hard. Now the only thing left to do is to maintain your LCC@Home implementation by repeating steps (4) through (6) for each new item you acquire.

Conclusion

What do I really want next? I want Amazon.com to include, for every book it sells, a label containing the LCC and Dewey identifiers so that I can easily maintain my LCC@Home collection. That would cost almost nothing for Amazon.com to do, since every book it ships already includes a print-out with various bits of data, on paper that is readily usable as a sticky label. I wonder if anyone at Amazon.com is thinking about that level or kind of customization?

If you decide you don't want to "copy catalog", which is the term for the technique I've described here, you should know about the LC's Cataloging Directorate. And if you do catalog yourself, then you'll need a subscription to the LC's Classification Web service, which is insanely expensive. In other words, you really don't want to do LC cataloging yourself, but there are some really fascinating issues and resources to explore here.

What's the biggest limitation of LCC@Home? In addition to having to do the work, when you're done you don't have a computerized database or index of your collection only. Your collection is, ignoring uncatalogued items, a subset of the universe of LC cataloged items. So you can use computerized databases of that universe to search your subset of it. But those search results will often include items not in your collection. The only way to verify whether items are in your collection is to remember your collection or go to your shelves and look. I'll address this issue in a future column when we look at some open source projects, most of which are XML-powered web applications, that can be used to build databases of your collection.

What's coming next month? Code. Actual live, running, working code. Well, maybe. My goal for the May column is to write a bit of Python script, deployable as a web application or as a command-line tool, to turn ISBN numbers into LC catalog numbers.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the very talented designer and illustrator, Kate Krizan, who cooked up the clever illustrations in this column. She's projects.

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