Behind the Scenes
Catalog librarian Felicia Uhden

By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times book critic

DEAN RUTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES The work is never-ending for Felicia Uhden and her Seattle Public Library staff, who are preparing to move into the new Central Library building this week.

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What does that mean? She and her staff of six catalog every item in the library, following guidelines suggested by the Library of Congress, American Library Association and OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). Each item, whether a book, CD, DVD or video, is assigned "access points" that will lead library users to it as they search for it in the online catalog. These include title, author, subject matter, keywords and publisher's name.

Uhden's background: She has been manager of the library's bibliographic services department since 1999, and has worked as a professional catalog librarian since 1990. Before that, she worked in libraries as a para-professional.

Early on, Uhden made the choice to work in public libraries rather than academic or private libraries: "At public libraries you really do encounter everything. And your users are everybody."

How does an item get catalogued?

An item is first entered into the online catalog when it's ordered by the library's acquisitions department.

Acquisitions personnel usually draw their information about the item from OCLC's database. The decision to order an item can be prompted by a library patron's request, a perusal of publishers' catalogs or a look through advance reviews in such book-trade publications as Publishers Weekly or Library Journal.

The work of Uhden and her staff begins when the item physically arrives and is compared with the preliminary entry for it in the online catalog. Has the title changed? Are the subject "access points" accurate? (The rule of thumb is that a book has to be at least 20 percent about a certain subject to get an entry.)

Cataloguers follow a procedure much like that in any bookstore's shipping-and-receiving room. Uhden says cataloguers can process roughly 10 books an hour.

Other items take longer. A video, for instance, will be catalogued by its principal actors as well as its director.
 
The work, Uhden emphasizes, is "very detail-oriented. We work under a lot of rules about how a record is done." That's because those records are shared throughout the world, making consistency of record-entry essential.

Does Uhden ever lament the disappearance of physical card catalogs the way that author Nicholson Baker does?

"There's a part of me that understands very well what he's talking about," she says, adding that she has fond memories of old handwritten catalog cards, penned in an elegant "library hand."

"You would have the sense," she recalls, "that you were traveling back in time, and you'd feel connected to those librarians who had gone before you."

But the intellectual work of her predecessors, she insists, is still present in the online catalog: "It's just much harder to see. I can tell, because they worked under earlier rules!"

Uhden adds that she doesn't miss the fact that under the old system you had to know the first word of a title in order to find it: "I am really happy to have keyword searching that lets me find it when I only remember a couple of important words in a title."

Will the move to the new library change the way the computer catalog operates?

"There are some things that will affect the computer catalog," Uhden says, "but we hope you won't notice them."

Each item's new location in the new library has to be identified. Some new collections will be established. Items that have long been kept in storage facilities will be placed on shelves accessible to the public.

Each catalog entry has to reflect these changes, and Uhden and her team are hard at work making sure the transition goes seamlessly.

Is cataloguing the sort of job you bring home with you?

"My husband would probably tell you I do a little too much thinking about the library after-hours. But it's not the kind of job where I get paged in the middle of the night for a cataloguing emergency."

Is there anything about cataloguing that you think would surprise a non-cataloguer?

Two things come to mind, says Uhden. The first: "I frequently find myself trying to visualize the person on the other end of the screen — as if my terminal is sitting back to back with someone's home computer." When she holds an item in her hand, she asks herself, "What am I going to remember about this that I want to be in the record somewhere that's retrievable?'"

The second thing: "I have thought for a while that if we do our job perfectly, you won't notice us at all. If you sit down at your computer, for instance, and type in the three things you remember about the work, and are brought right to it and can quickly retrieve it from where it is, you won't have thought of me at all, I hope."

She adds: "One of the things about technical services is that you tend to hear from people when something went wrong. But your success," she says with a strangely satisfied smile, "really is invisible."

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com