The author interviewed Kathryn Mendenhall, whose appointment as chief of the Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS) became effective in January 2004. Mendenhall talked about the digital future of cataloging.
Kathryn Mendenhall - Michaela McNichol
Kathryn Mendenhall, the new chief of the Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS), is no stranger to this small division of 32 staff that is part of the National Services Directorate of Library Services. Operating as one of the Library's earliest cost-recovery operations since 1902, CDS serves 8,000 customers in more than 80 countries.
Over a span of 21 years at the Library, Mendenhall became well acquainted with CDS operations, having begun her career there, worked for CDS for much of that period and served as its acting chief more than once.
When Beacher Wiggins, acting deputy associate librarian for Library Services, announced her appointment as chief, he said: "Kathryn Mendenhall brings a wealth of experience to this position. She has served in varied roles within the Library of Congress, as well as in other organizations. Ms. Mendenhall has demonstrated excellent skills in planning, marketing and working with a divergent customer base. These exceptional skills will be invaluable to the Cataloging Distribution Service as it makes the transition to Web-based products and services."
Mendenhall served as acting chief of CDS from 1997 to 2000; acting assistant chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division from 2000 to 2001; and acting chief of CDS again from 2001 to 2004. For the past 15 years, Mendenhall has overseen the development of all CDS products and services. Most recently she provided leadership in the transition of the division to a smaller, more cost-effective business.
Shortly after Mendenhall came to the Library in 1977 as a member of the Intern Program, she was employed as a customer service analyst in CDS. She left the Library in 1980 to work in systems development at Battelle Columbus Laboratories in Washington, D.C. In 1984, she became head of Systems and Research Services at the University of North Carolina. She rejoined the staff of CDS in 1985, working as a project leader and user liaison on the development and marketing of new MARC distribution services and electronically produced print products.
Mendenhall holds a bachelor's degree in French from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and master's degrees in library and information science from the University of North Carolina and in French from Middlebury College in Vermont.
The new CDS chief agreed to the following interview to discuss present-day CDS operations and strategic planning.
Kinney: In your opinion, what are the greatest challenges CDS currently faces?
Mendenhall: CDS' challenges reflect the challenges faced by the Library's cataloging operations and by the cataloging profession as a whole. The standards and modes of bibliographic control used so effectively in the 20th century are too costly and labor-intensive to apply in the same way to the burgeoning world of digital and electronic resources.
The enormous challenges of bibliographic control in the digital environment were taken up by cataloging leaders in a Library-sponsored conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium in November 2000. An ambitious action plan resulted from the conference. CDS is a partner in the implementation of several initiatives in this action plan.
The greatest challenge for CDS will be to sustain cost-recovery operations in a hybrid print and electronic world, while at the same time evolving its products and services to incorporate new standards and modes of bibliographic control. As a national library, the Library of Congress has a major role to play in assisting other libraries with the transition to new cataloging and metadata standards.
CDS' statutory authority to recover distribution costs through the assessment of fees is a tool for providing the broader library community with access to certain Library products and services that may not otherwise be possible. Used selectively and appropriately, this statutory cost-recovery authority offers a way to extend and enhance access to some of the Library's bibliographic resources. In the longer term, it may be desirable to transition certain other products and services to direct funding by appropriations as a way to broaden and extend access. An increasing challenge in the Internet environment is determining when to exercise CDS' statutory cost-recovery authority and when to forgo it.
Kinney: What milestones do you hope to achieve as chief of CDS?
Mendenhall: I hope to increase the ease and convenience of access to CDS products and speed content delivery. Within the next two years, I hope it will be significantly easier and faster for customers to order and receive the Library's cataloging products from CDS.
Planning is under way in CDS, as well as in the other cost-recovery areas of the Library, to implement Web-enabled business and customer information management systems. Once these integrated systems are implemented, customers will be able to place orders online and receive access to electronic products immediately.
Other milestones focus on adapting CDS' distribution models to incorporate new cataloging models and modes of bibliographic control. For the foreseeable future, I expect that CDS will continue to provide the library community with traditional print-based services, while at the same time developing and introducing new Web-based services.
Kinney: How do you see CDS' partnerships with its clients and other organizations evolving over the next decade?
Mendenhall: I see these partnerships increasing in number and depth as national-level organizations in both the public and private sectors seek to achieve greater impact by combining their efforts to achieve common goals. This is happening now in the area of continuing education for cataloging professionals.
The Library and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, in collaboration with the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) of the American Library Association, are launching plans to develop and implement a series of courses to help prepare practicing catalogers for the 21st century digital environment. CDS will be distributing these courses initially in PDF format and later in other formats according to customer demand.
Another area of collaboration is the packaging and linking of metadata tools and standards. Cataloger's Desktop is becoming a portal, not only to resources developed under the auspices of the Library of Congress, but also to resources developed in other communities. Agreements with ALA Publishing, the Society of American Archivists and OCLC provide CDS with the rights to incorporate and distribute value-added content in its electronic services. The benefit to catalogers is one-stop access to a broad array of cataloging and metadata resources.
Kinney: Are there other products you would like to see CDS market that are cutting-edge innovations not yet seen in the library industry?
Mendenhall: One area of product development, which is a pipe dream at this point but that could have a transforming effect on cataloging and resource discovery if it were fully developed and successful, is automatic metadata generation. Currently Cataloger's Desktop is used by human catalogers to create cataloging records and other metadata. In the longer term, the potential exists for the cataloging rules and standards that are contained in Cataloger's Desktop to be used by computers to process electronic texts and create certain types of metadata records automatically. If such a software tool were available, think of the potential.
The Library invests hundreds of staff and tens of millions of dollars in the cataloging of materials. The cataloging workforce is aging. There are a limited number of new catalogers on the horizon. A metadata generation tool could potentially be used by catalogers to create metadata records from digital content submitted to the Library for pre-publication cataloging or for copyright deposit. In combination with the human processes that are required for the intellectual work of authority control and subject analysis, a tool for the automatic generation of metadata could increase cataloger productivity in the future.
Although automatic metadata generation is still a pipe dream, it is important to ask the question, "What is it that is impossible today, but if it were possible would make all the difference?" The answer to that question 10 years ago is the World Wide Web of today. Asking and answering that question is one way to focus and direct our energies to the future.
