Resources

An opportunity to apply for project funding arose in the spring of 2014, which led me to somewhat naively believe we could have the project all neatly tied up by the end of that summer. What actually happened, of course, was that the funding was used for other projects but the gauntlet had been laid down; we would be digitizing the collection come what may, with existing staffing and minimal budget. Undeterred, we proceeded, albeit cautiously, determined to have the project completed by the start of the next academic year. Christmas at the latest, definitely. Possibly.

Planning

Considering the already stretched staffing I offered the project to qualified library assistants initially, as an opportunity to add digitization experience to their CVs. As one of them told me herself, digitization projects are 90% planning, so we started to have regular meetings to discuss every aspect we could think of relating to process, storage and cataloguing. We had to have quite realistic aims so despite discussing future possibilities, like online storage, we knew the transfer onto disk was our only option. Our biggest considerations were preservation and access; we required long-term archival copies as well as circulation copies that could be accessed by researchers. It was relatively simple to locate the right discs; gold coated archival grade DVD-R, as well as archival storage boxes for the long-term storage of the VHS copies. Despite us already owning what we thought was the correct equipment, upon closer inspection we found that it no longer worked, so completing the project in-house meant also purchasing a new recorder. The procurement process for that alone took at least a month. We had to conduct a thorough audit of the existing collection, both physical copies and online records. Each item had to be accounted for; examined, labelled, and entered onto an index. It was late summer by the time we were ready to start recording.

Technical process

Before we did anything we had to perform quality control on all our VHS copies, not only to ascertain whether they were recordable but also which copy was of the highest quality, it was not uncommon to find three or four copies of the same show, and we almost lost count of the number of Galliano show recordings. We simply didn't have the staff hours to sit and watch each recording in its entirety so had to compromise and spot check instead. Every recording was checked one minute in, 11 minutes in, 21 minutes in, and so on. This would inform which copy was selected to make the recordings.

Using our chosen recording equipment we decided to make three DVD copies of each show; two archival copies and one circulating copy. The process was as follows: the recording equipment was used to transfer the VHS onto the first archival disc. The recording is done in real time so would take anywhere between 30–90 minutes, depending on length of show. The resultant archival disc was then used to quickly burn a second archival copy using a computer. The first archival disc would be given an archival quality case, a cover (created using our standard DVD processing template) and placed into storage. They would all be accounted for using nothing more complicated than a paper index. The second archival copy was used to make a third copy, on a standard quality disc, then stored separately, to be used for making any future copies required. The third copy would serve as our circulation copy and was catalogued, processed and placed back in the filing cabinet. Although we had decided we would no longer loan out our VHS copies we intended to archive those as well. The simplest way forward seemed to be to remove them entirely from our online catalogue and place them into the archival storage boxes with their own paper index.

It was a multi-stage process which, given the staffing model in place (part-time staff fitting it in around their main duties), was challenging. With this in mind we had created one comprehensive spreadsheet with a column for each stage of the process. As items progressed through the selection, recording, cataloguing and processing stages, the spreadsheet was updated accordingly.

Cataloguing

As one can probably imagine the previous standard of cataloguing and classification that had been applied to the show collection was fairly erratic. Of course most of the duplicate copies were not to be found on the system, despite many of them having barcodes, but a significant number of sole VHS copies had also inexplicably dropped ‘offline’ over the years. Of the ones that were accessible on the catalogue, most of them did not conform to a recognizable standard of cataloguing. Some had the date of the show, some not, some even lacked the graduation year. The college naming convention differed radically from item to item, as did the classification; examples included ‘Fashion degree shows’, ‘Fashion show’ and 391.092 FAS.

Aside from the classification issue one of my biggest vexations was the title field. There was no set convention regarding titles, subtitles or parts. This was no big surprise as over the years the way the filming had taken place had differed. For the BA, for example, each year from 1998 onward has two shows, the assessment show; which includes the work of all graduates, and the press show; a shorter show made up of selected graduate work. In the past, for any given year, the library either received one or the other or both. For a brief period we even received separate recordings for each BA Fashion pathway. We needed a title structure that could deal with all these options and still look consistent.

Aside from the satisfaction of overhauling this very messy collection, one of the great reasons for doing the project in the first place was the staff development opportunities for the library assistants involved. They had contributed significantly to the technical workflow planning, thinking of potential issues I may not have considered, and I wanted them to take ownership of the whole project, including cataloguing. None of them were trained cataloguers per se (beyond performing basic catalogue amendments), but all of them had a good eye for detail and were interested. I needed to create a template that would enable them to catalogue this diverse collection of shows without having much prior experience themselves. At the time the library was using Voyager as its library management system (LMS). Voyager allowed us the option of creating MARC 21 cataloguing templates, which allowed us to create the BIB template, populating it with as much or little information as desired. This then eradicated the need to worry about potential tag and subfield confusion on the part of the less experienced cataloguers. The only information to be changed each time was the title, year and recording length (Fig. 2).

Image two_screenshot.jpg: A screenshot of the Voyager fashion show bibliographic template.

Deciding on the title format was more enjoyable than it should have been. It needed to encompass the name of the course, the year and what type of show it was. We decided the name of the course and year would make up the title proper, and the subtitle would indicate the type of show; usually assessment or press but other examples included one-offs such as an alternative show in 1984 and the ILEA (Inner London Educational Authority) show in 1986. With limited information regarding the context of these oddities it was a challenge to populate those bibliographic records with a helpful level of detail. For a ‘regular’ BA Fashion record the title statement would display as follows, ‘BA (Hons) Fashion 1999 [videorecording DVD] : press show’. MA Fashion was even simpler given they only ever filmed one type of show, ‘MA Fashion show 2011 [videorecording DVD]’.

The classification would be uniform for utmost simplicity. Each DVD would be given the same shelfmark of ‘Fashion degree shows’. There was no need for each item to have a unique identifier as they were all arranged by date, and it seemed more beneficial to use the classification as an obvious descriptor for the type of resource so it remained completely clear to the library user what they were looking at on the catalogue.

Even with the relatively straightforward template I would still be required to check each record, chiefly so I could index them with key designer names. I had thought it was a shame the records hadn't included any given the well-known names that have graduated from the fashion programme, but understandable; prominent names can only be added retrospectively. The other option of course would be to include the name of every student filmed but, although we could do that relatively easily going forward, by requesting the show programme each year, we didn't have the staff time to retrospectively go through each show in that level of detail. Although one of the library assistants was keen to aim for the highest level of detail possible I felt that, given our time and budget constraints, we had to be realistic. This was a useful exercise in compromise, it's important to know what you can achieve, and of course anything was a vast improvement on what was already there.

I was keen to at least include names of designers who are regularly researched in the library, so one of my own tasks upon quality checking each record was to then add personal names to the subject access fields. I had a good grasp on which CSM Fashion alumni researchers were interested in so proceeded in this vein, although some had to be indexed as uncontrolled names in the 720 field.

The unexpected

Of course there was a spanner in the works. In August 2015, when the project was perhaps 80% complete, UAL upgraded its LMS to Koha. Although we were well aware of the upheaval this would cause it was difficult to know exactly how it would affect the remainder of our project as we weren't directly involved in the planning for the cataloguing module, and had not come across Koha before.

In the event a number of unexpected changes were implemented. At the point at which UAL Library Services implemented Koha we also launched an inter-site reservations service between all six college libraries. Previous to this students could return items to any site but they were unable to request items to be sent to their home site on demand. Now they could, which was an incredibly popular service. CSM Library was now receiving up to 15 crates of books each day needing to be discharged, and running daily reports of over 100 items needing to be collected from our shelves and sent to other sites. This work had to be shared out amongst our existing team of library assistants, and unfortunately came at a time when we were one full-time post down, as a collections library assistant had recently left, unfortunately resulting in their post being frozen indefinitely. In January 2016 UAL Library Services were awarded funding by the UAL Executive Board to run an extended opening hours pilot, meaning extended weekend opening for all UAL libraries and 24/4 opening at CSM Library for 15 weeks. This was certainly uncharted territory for us and, although we had a dedicated night time of three security staff manning the space, there was inevitably a knock-on effect for day staff, meaning projects like ours were no longer priorities.

For our own sanity as much as anything else we paused the project for a few months, this also gave us time to take stock and I was able to think about how we would proceed with the final cataloguing. Since the move to Koha we were unsure how to deal with this. Our brilliant Central Bibliographic Services (CBS) team were working at maximum capacity just trying to get general acquisitions and cataloguing workflows in place, so now was not the time to pester them about special cataloguing projects. We did know that templates were not an option in Koha so it was looking more and more likely that each remaining DVD would need to be catalogued from scratch.

We were, thankfully, talking about a relatively small number of items, and not cataloguing each one to any great level of detail, so once I was more familiar with cataloguing in Koha, and the 24/4 pilot had ended, we produced the final records at last. Of course ‘final’ is open to interpretation as we receive new show recordings each year and have yet to decide on a long-term solution in terms of in-house cataloguing for these. Fewer and fewer members of college library staff are trained cataloguers and without the option of simple templates it looks likely that we will need to send those items to CBS to catalogue.

The scope of the project also slightly shifted as the filing cabinet tardis unearthed yet more college-related off-air recordings to digitize. In making general enquiries around the college, in the hopes of discovering earlier recordings we may not have, we also ended up offering to supply the CSM Museum and Study Collection with DVD copies of the years they didn't already hold. This, unlike most other tasks, would actually be relatively straightforward to complete as they would not require any cataloguing or processing at our end.