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Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians: A History
Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians: A History Angel Clemons and Tyler Goldberg
The Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians (OVGTSL), a member of the American Library Association’s Council of Regional Groups, became a formal organization in 1924 and continues to meet to this day. This article provides a history of this group, and, in doing so, traces trends and issues in library technical services for cataloging, acquisitions, serials, and many other topics of interest to librarians for more than eight decades. Serials Review 2007; 33:103–113. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services (OVGTSL) has a long history dating to 1924. The organization was founded originally as an initiative of the Catalog Section of the American Library Association (ALA). The goal was to establish a regional group to disseminate information from ALA meetings. The region was originally Indiana, south of Lafayette, Kentucky, north of Frankfort, and the southwest quarter of Ohio. The group now includes the entire states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, and the annual meeting rotates from state to state and is held primarily in May. Throughout its history one meeting was to be held annually for librarians to gather and discuss trends, innovations, and challenges in acquisitions, cataloging, and serials. The early meetings were held on Saturdays usually, but sometimes on Fridays. Today the meetings are typically held over a Thursday–Friday. An examination of the organization’s archival materials clearly shows the evolution of technical services, from cards to automation and from print to electronic. Many of the speakers throughout the years have been or still are influential in the world of library technical services. What follows is the first comprehensive history of this group as it has evolved and sustained interest and members for more than eight decades.
1920s In 1922, ALA’s Chairman of the Committee on the Reorganization of the Catalog Section suggested regional meetings of catalogers and put out a call to librarians in New York to assemble. According to the Chairman, the goal of catalogers should be not only to “make our work more alive and interesting” but to also “make our work and its importance known to executives.”1 Meetings ensued in St. Paul, New Haven, New York, Cincinnati, Boston, Ann Arbor, and Washington. These meetings resulted in the recommendation and adoption in 1923 of a revision to the constitution of the ALA Catalog Section to provide for the formation of regional groups. Catalogers in the Indianapolis–Cincinnati–Louisville district assembled in 1923 but were unsuccessful in establishing a formal organization. A second attempt was made in Indianapolis in March 1924 when “even as the conference was being conducted backstage a committee was meeting to formulate a set of bylaws.”2 The bylaws were read, a nominating committee was formed, members were signed up and reported on by the nominating committee, all in the course of this second meeting of the group. No copies of these original bylaws exist in the organization’s archives. The Ohio Valley Regional Group of Catalogers (OVRGC), the original name of this organization, was quite active that year and held a second meeting in October 1924 in conjunction with the Western Reserve Group of Catalogers at the Ohio Library Association (OLA) annual conference. By the end of 1924, the Ohio Valley region, along with the Twin Cities and Western Reserve Groups, as well as cataloging groups from New York, Boston, and Chicago, was formed. The remainder
Clemons is Assistant Professor and Government Publications Librarian, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. Goldberg is Professor and Head of Technical Services, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. 0098-7913/$–see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2007.03.001
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of the decade saw meetings of the OVRGC in Louisville (1925), Berea (1926), and Cincinnati (1929). No meetings were held in 1927 and 1928. Meetings typically followed the format of a business meeting followed by presentations on various aspects of cataloging. Presentations ranged from the very general, “Special Problems in Cataloging” (1924), to the very specific, “The Cataloger in Relation to the Adult Education Movement” (1926). Many of the topics discussed in the 1920s echo those still being discussed today: “The Teaching of Cataloging: What Shall We Teach and How Shall We Teach It?” (1926), “Shortcuts in Cataloging That Are Safe” (1929), “Cataloging Serials and Continuations” (1929), and “Special Methods Used in the Binding and Cataloging of Music” (1929). From the beginning, the group drew on the experiences of its membership when conducting each program. In her 1924 paper on “Selective Cataloging for High School Libraries,” a Cincinnati school librarian made a plea for others to “not build the catalogue down to the pupil, but rather educate the pupil up to the catalogue … The catalogue is the key to the library and if properly made and used, can help the library to really become an active teaching organism.”3 This statement, along with the other topics presented throughout the 1920s, proved the need for the existence of a forum such as OVRGC and other regional cataloging groups. Even at the first meeting, the group’s interests went beyond cataloging rules and processes.
Code rules was too large a topic to discuss” at that meeting, it was moved “that the [OVRGC] Secretary be instructed to assure the Secretary of the American Library Association Catalog Section that we [OVRGC] approve of the revision” and were glad to give their support to the work.7 The Chair of the ALA Regional Catalogers Group gave a brief report on the revision of the A.L.A. Catalog rules at the 1934 OVRGC meeting. The 1936 meeting “had been planned to provide opportunity for small libraries to suggest changes and additions which they wished to have made in the A.L.A. Catalog Code.”8 A short questionnaire had been mailed to members prior to the meeting and posed the following questions: 1. Do you use L.C. subject headings? (36—Yes) 2. Would your library pay reasonable fee (amount not yet determined) to print the L.C. “Refer froms” [i.e., the heading from which one is referred]? (25—Yes, 6—No, 5—?) 3. Do you favor a separate abridged A.L.A. Code for small libraries? (17—Yes, 18—No)9 In addition to discussing the questionnaire results, group members also listened to presentations on “The A.L.A. Catalog Code: Changes and Additions We’d Like Made” and “The Definitions of Terms as Used in the Rules” and participated in a discussion about terms proposed for inclusion in the revised Code. Discussion of the A.L.A. Catalog Code did not surface again until the early 1940s. A 1937 presentation on “Regional Cooperation in Bibliography: The Field and Its Possibilities” led to the formation of committees in each of the three states represented by the organization to explore this topic further. The committees were short-lived, however. In 1938 the group determined that it was “not feasible to undertake such a work at present. The W.P.A. [Works Progress Administration], by means of its library projects, is covering some phases of this work.”10 Members of OVRGC did have an interest in regional cooperation despite their rejection of a regional bibliography project. At the 1938 meeting one of the speakers read a letter from the Executive Committee of the ALA Catalog Section proposing tasks in which cooperation of regional groups was needed. The speaker then gave a presentation on other topics that the group might undertake and distributed a survey on “Problems in Cataloging and Related Processing of Materials.” Based on the survey results, the group approved a motion “that the Chairman of the Ohio Valley Regional Group of Catalogers appoint a committee to propose and initiate a plan to compile a list of author headings for the state publications of Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio.”11 In October 1938 members of the OVRGC again found themselves meeting jointly with the OLA. The president of OVRGC made two key proposals that year: (1) that the then defined boundaries of OVRGC be extended to include areas which had active ALA members, and (2) that OVRGC send a portion of their dues to the ALA Catalog section as affiliation dues. Both motions passed.
1930s As the new decade began, fifty OVRGC members convened in Indianapolis in April 1930 to discuss the timeless question of “Catalog Costs and How to Reduce Them” and focus on the development of bibliographic aids to assist in the cataloging of United States and foreign government publications. The 1930 meeting was the first time that the OVRGC divided itself into groups to discuss issues relating to large public libraries and college and university libraries. The OVRGC annual meeting of 1932 was held in October in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Ohio Library Association. The program provided “the viewpoint of the users of the card catalog” with presentations ranging from subject headings in school library catalogs to papers on the expectations of circulation and reference librarians of the library catalog.4 The oldest copy of bylaws that the authors were able to find was dated 1932. Membership dues were 25 cents. The American Library Association and the British Library Association formed committees in the early 1930s to discuss revisions to the first international cataloging code, Catalog Rules, Author and Title Entries. 5 Published in both British and American editions, the code consisted of 174 rules. Areas of disagreement between the two editions included author entries and title changes.6 Revisions to the catalog code were first mentioned by OVRGC in 1933. Although “it was felt that the discussion of the Revision of A.L.A.
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At the next meeting in 1939, the Chairman of the Committee on the Revision of the Constitution of the OVRGC reported on the revisions to the OVRGC constitution which included the adopted amendments.
Two agenda items originally proposed for the cancelled 1944 meeting were on the agenda in 1946: (1) the Division of Cataloging and Classification’s proposed Quarterly Review, and (2) the 15th edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). The ALA Committee on a Quarterly Review requested the Group’s opinion on the proposal to replace the Catalogers and Classifiers Yearbook with a more up-to-date Quarterly Review. The general consensus was support for the Review. The Library of Congress’ Director of DDC led the discussion of the second agenda item, the 15th edition of DDC and provided highlights of the upcoming edition. The director expressed hope that “the proposed Quarterly would be started, and in it the Dewey Decimal notes on definitions, decisions, etc. could be printed.”19 In 1948, the group changed its name back to OVRGC (dropping Classifiers), according to the heading on the meeting minutes. Whether or not the short-lived name change was ever official is not known because no further documentation was ever recorded in the minutes or bylaws. A panel on “L.C. Descriptive Cataloging Rules” convened at the 1948 meeting with panelists representing large and small public libraries, college and research libraries, and the National Archives. From that discussion two opposing viewpoints emerged: “1) that simplification of rules had more adequately met the needs of public libraries than of college and university libraries, and 2) that serious problems had resulted from simplification in large college and university libraries.”20 The following year ALA published its A.L.A. Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries21 and adopted Library of Congress’ Rules for Descriptive Cataloging in the Library of Congress.22
1940s Over the next five years, only three meetings were held— 1941 (Indianapolis), 1942 (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio), and 1943 (Cincinnati). Since the preliminary second edition of the American version of the 1908 Catalog Rules, Author and Title Entries12 was published by the American Library Association in 1941, the group revisited the ALA catalog code discussion at the 1942 meeting. Representatives from each state presented the opinions of catalogers in their state. The group “agreed that the committee had done an excellent piece of work. The only general adverse criticism was that L.C. [Library of Congress] procedure had frequently been ignored … and it would make for more general uniformity if A.L.A. were to follow L.C. [Library of Congress]. Specific rules were commented upon and suggestions made which summarized their reactions.”13 The 1943 meeting had originally been cancelled “because of wartime restrictions on travel” with that information conveyed to members in a letter dated April 20, 1943, from the OVRGC president.14 It appears, though, that the group did meet later in 1943. Seventy persons, including three from the Library of Congress, met on November 19, 1943, in Cincinnati to discuss “certain of the cataloging problems troubling both Library of Congress and catalogers.”15 The Director of the Processing Department and the Chief of the Descriptive Cataloging Division at the Library of Congress, whose “primary reason for the meeting was their interest in pushing forward the study of the descriptive catalog code and to gather the critical comments of a representative group,” led the discussion.16 In response, the group’s discussion focused on the costs of cataloging, improvements made by Library of Congress in the distribution of printed cards, and cooperative cataloging. Unlike previous years, the heading of the 1943 minutes referred to the group as the Ohio Valley Regional Group of Catalogers and Classifiers. No reason exists in the minutes for this name change. The group did not meet again until 1946, when they reconvened in April of that year in Berea, Kentucky. No documentation exists to explain the absence of meetings in 1944 and 1945. One can assume, however, that the hiatus was due to the ending of World War II. In a letter to the membership of the organization, one member suggested that the group “meet with the state library associations every other year, while continuing to meet alone in the years between.”17 The majority opinion was that this arrangement might lead to “loss of identity in the three larger organizations” which would not be worth any gain “from the broadening influence of the various state associations.”18 The group continued to be referred to as the Ohio Valley Regional Group of Catalogers and Classifiers in the 1946 and 1947 minutes.
1950s The 1950s brought many changes to the OVRGC. A committee appointed in 1947 studied “the provisional draft of the new constitution of the Cataloging and Classification Division of ALA which will apply to regional groups.”23 The draft constitution stated that “membership shall be open to anyone within the region of the group, who is interested in problems of cataloging and classification or related fields.”24 This likely set off a red flag for committee members who, in response, issued the following proposed changes to the OVRGC constitution: • That the geographic boundaries be extended to include
Ohio, south of and including Columbus; Kentucky, north of and including Berea; Indiana, south of and including Lafayette • That dues be increased from twenty-five cents to fifty cents per annum • That the position of Vice-President, President-Elect be added to the list of officers.25 These proposed amendments were adopted May 6, 1950. The 1950 Bylaws further stated that “a copy of each paper presented at the meeting shall be mailed to the
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Chairman of the Council of Regional Groups [CRG],” an activity mandated by CRG in 1947.26 Attendance at the annual meeting reached an all-time high in 1951 when 100 librarians met at the University of Cincinnati to discuss such issues as “Are Catalogers Becoming Extinct?” and “Some Frustrations of MidCentury Cataloging.” Despite the group’s vote in 1946 not to meet annually in conjunction with state library organizations, OVRGC members held an extra meeting in October 1951 at the OLA annual conference. The first Ohio Valley Library dinner was held April 27, 1951, at the Sheraton-Gibson Hotel in Cincinnati. The group also chose to break with tradition by voting to allow another institution within the state to host the conference the following year instead of rotating to Indiana or Kentucky. In 1952 the group experimented with a two-day meeting covering Friday and Saturday. The ninety-nine participants listened to presentations on the use of mass media (including television) in education, “Present Problems in Subject Cataloging,” and “Catalogers Then and Now—Their Availability and Opportunities.” The latter presentation, by the Chairman of the Department of Library Science at the University of Michigan, inflated the egoes of the catalogers with such remarks as, “The field of cataloging would not seem to be a dead end, but one which might prepare for a variety of other positions.… This predominance of the scholarly libraries in the attraction of catalogers suggests that it is the students with scholarly tastes and equipment who are drawn to cataloging.… The mediocre or merely average student does not go into cataloging.” 27 Whatever euphoria those in attendance experienced with those remarks was quickly deflated at that evening’s dinner meeting when the speaker, a professor of Bibliographic History at the University of Chicago, “began by saying that ‘Nobody loves a cataloger.’ He then said that some envied us and some blamed us; but we are not always blameless.”28 Discussion groups focusing on subject headings met the morning of the second day and then reconvened for a summary of each discussion for the whole group. At the April 1953 meeting, the group approved a motion by the Executive Committee to begin charging a registration fee in order to have more money for conference expenses, a decision which was subsequently reversed the following year. Programs that year focused on cataloging special formats and included discussions on microfilm, microcards, archives, records, and recordings. Two papers on the use of the card catalog were also presented. The focus of the 1954 meeting was the Lubetzky Report. In 1951, ALA asked Seymour Lubetzky, Library of Congress’ Consultant on Bibliographic and Cataloging Policy, to analyze the American Library Association Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries.29 In 1953 Lubetzky published his report Cataloging Rules and Principles. 30 As the 1954 OVRGC guest speaker, Lubetzky pointed out that “in undertaking the study it was not his objective to find out whether any individual rules were in need of revision, but rather to study the
code as a whole as a system of cataloging and to determine whether it was sound in principle and structure … [he was] of the opinion that revision of the rules must start from the beginning.”31 Mr. Lubetzky would later get his wish when, in 1956, he was appointed editor of the revised code. Another two-day meeting was held in 1956 in Berea, Kentucky, to discuss “Cataloging Trends in Large and Small Libraries.” Five discussion groups met to address topics ranging from cataloger training to handling nonbook materials. Despite the reversal of the group’s approval to charge a registration fee, the dues doubled that year from fifty cents to $1.00. 1956 was also the first year that a survey on “Proposed Topics for Workshop Discussion” was sent out to members. In 1957, the Nominating Committee “departed from tradition in divorcing the office of the Vice President from the place of meeting. This was done in recognition of the hardship imposed on the staffs of some smaller libraries when one person had to play the dual roles of Vice President, Program Chairman, and Hostess.”32 A discussion about the Council of Regional Group’s ALA midwinter meeting report on the effects of the reorganization of ALA on regional groups also occurred at the 1957 meeting. Regional groups had been transferred from the Division of Cataloging and Classification to the newly formed Resources and Technical Services Division (RTSD). In response to this change, OVRGC passed a motion to “broaden its field of interest to include serials and acquisitions personnel.”33 The payment of dues by the regional groups was eliminated in the reorganization, but the regional groups felt that it was necessary and continued to do so. A committee was appointed to revise the bylaws to include the expansion of the membership, payment of dues to ALA, and the 1956 dues increase. In an undated letter to the membership, the 1957 Bylaws Revision Committee suggested several additional organizational changes: (1) to change the officer titles of President and Vice-President to Chairman and ViceChairman, (2) to divide the duties of the SecretaryTreasurer into two positions, and (3) an unspecified change in the duties of the Vice-Chairman. The letter also states that “as a result of [the] vote to enlarge the scope of [the] group, it has seemed advisable to suggest a change of name.”34 However, they did not suggest a new name and the Archives provide no trace of how the name “Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians” was chosen. Although no formal discussion of a name change for the organization was recorded in the 1958 minutes, the bylaws adopted that year reflect the change. In addition, the scope of the group’s interest changed from cataloging and classification to resources and technical services, changes in officer titles noted above were made, and officer duties were also outlined in the 1958 Bylaws.
1960s The 1960s continued the format of previous years’ meetings. The group has met primarily in May since
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the 1960s, avoiding the Kentucky Derby and the Indy 500 events when meeting in Kentucky and Indiana. Tours of local libraries and library-related organizations, a tradition begun in the 1950s, were offered. The program allowed time for librarians to have group discussions on cataloging, serials, and acquisitions. The first meeting of the 1960s was held at Wittenberg University (Springfield, Ohio). Reminiscent of one of the speakers at the 1952 meeting, one speaker’s topic was “Making Cataloging a More Appealing Profession.” In 1960, the Past Chairman of the Council of Regional Groups returned the papers from that year’s meeting to the Chairman-Elect of OVGTSL because “The RTSD Board recommended the return of papers in order to curtail the growth of the archives.”35 She further noted, “In many ways I have found it an embarrassing procedure.”36 The OVGTSL Chairman subsequently wrote to Jean Scherr, an OVGTSL member, asking her to chair the Program Committee for the 1961 meeting. The chair penned: “I am trying to get the RTSD by-law changed which requires that we submit to the chairman of the Council of Regional Groups a copy of each paper presented at our regional meeting.… However, I understand that regional groups are not literal in complying with this by-law.”37 The next year, at Ball State Teachers College (Muncie, Indiana), the main speaker presented a paper on the “New Cataloging Code,” presumably referring to the draft Code of Cataloging Rules.38 Interestingly, for the next two years librarians spoke about libraries in foreign countries. One librarian talked about being an American librarian in Africa (1961), while the next year the luncheon speaker talked about Italian university libraries. In Dayton, Ohio, the following year at Wright State, 155 librarians listened to a talk entitled “The Book, the Cataloger, and the Machine.” At this same meeting, the bylaws were amended “to meet changes made in the RTSD constitution,” since affiliation dues no longer had to be sent to RTSD.39 There are no details in the minutes from this meeting on the exact changes made to the bylaws, but it could be speculated that at least one change was to delete the wording from previous bylaws concerning the payment of affiliation dues to RTSD. The 1964 meeting at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana) concerned the relationship between libraries and library-oriented businesses. The dinner speaker from IBM talked about the use of electronic processing in libraries. The attendees also toured a MPATI (Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction) plane in its hangar. The group met in 1965 at Keeneland, a thoroughbred racing course in Lexington, Kentucky. The meeting focused on special libraries, with one speaker giving an overview of the library at Keeneland, and the other featured speaker talking about the history of the Hunt Botanical Library at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1966, following a panel about “A Comprehensive List of Periodicals for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering,” the meeting at Ohio State adjourned so that members of
OVGTSL could lunch with the Midwest Academic Librarians group. This happened again in 1969 at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, when these two groups had dinner together. In 1967, attendees in Terre Haute, Indiana, learned about the history and intent of the new shared cataloging program from the Assistant Director of the Processing Department of the Library of Congress. The next morning there was a panel discussion on the local implications of this program. In 1968, concerns about the cataloging profession again came to the fore, and the Executive Secretary of RTSD, Elizabeth Rodell, spoke about the “difficulty of securing catalogers; [and that] catalogers should be given good working conditions.”40 At this same meeting the Chief of the Descriptive Cataloging Division of the Library of Congress outlined the implementation of the AngloAmerican Cataloging Rules at the Library of Congress.41 At the last annual meeting of the 1960s, a senior programmer and analyst from OCLC talked about MARCII and how this would affect shared cataloging.
1970s As in previous decades, the group enjoyed a variety of tours of local libraries and other interesting places. Not surprisingly, automation and closing the card catalog were major issues of the 1970s. In 1970, a program entitled “Automation in Action” was followed by a panel entitled “Coping or Not: Traditional Methods vs. Changing Demands.” Librarians were urged to learn systems analysis so that manual procedures could be upgraded. At Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1970, 200 attendees heard a speaker from the Library of Congress talk about recent activities there. Panelists that year discussed problems connected with the handling and cataloging of serials, the attempts to automate some aspects of serials processing, and the need for a standardized code for cataloging non-book materials. At the next meeting at Berea College in Kentucky, automation took a backseat to the history of the reprinting business. By 1972, however, automation returned as the primary focus as librarians saw a demonstration of OCLC terminals given by the University of Cincinnati staff and a presentation on “OCLC: What It Is, What It Does, What It Plans To Do.” Interestingly, at this meeting, Wright State (Ohio) librarians gave a presentation entitled, “One Use of OCLC: A Retrospective Conversion Project.” Anyone who used OCLC, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, regularly encountered Wright State records. Barbara Markuson spoke in 1973 on the progress in forming networks for bibliographic information in Indiana. The Library of Congress continued to send speakers, and this year’s topic was the Cataloging in Publication program, which “has grown rapidly since its beginning in July of 1971 on a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.”42 The 1974 meeting
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centered on publishing and featured a dinner speaker from the Association of American Publishers. Wright State hosted the 1975 annual meeting and treated librarians not only to a tour of the local library, but also a tour of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum. The opening speaker talked about how librarians should cope with the technological and sociological advancements in the profession. In 1975 the first conference theme was recorded in the minutes; however, themes were not commonly used until the early 1980s. (For a list of conference themes, see appendix A.) In 1976 at Ball State University, the Assistant Director of Technical Services at Ohio State University (OSU) discussed the project of closing the card catalog at OSU in July 1976 and shifting to “online terminal accessing of bibliographic information by author, title, subject, … to be used with their automated circulation system which already affords search by author–title on a total of 111 terminals in the main library and special libraries.”43 The Deputy Librarian of Congress spoke about the national leadership role of the Library of Congress and its plans to have all current cataloging in machine readable form by 1979. At the 1976 business meeting two proposals were made: (1) that a scholarship to send a beginning technical services librarian from a school in the host state of the conference be established, and (2) that a committee be formed to find an archive for the records of OVGTSL.44 No scholarship was established at that time. With the illness of the chairperson, the decision on the archives was delayed, but in 1978 archives were to be located at Ohio State University. The 1977 meeting was held at Western Kentucky University (WKU) in Bowling Green, and a speaker from OCLC discussed “Cooperation in Acquisition— OCLC Style.” In 1979, automation was still the focus and Michael Gorman, then Director of Technical Services, University of Illinois, presented “Closing the Card Catalog … the Implications of AACR2.”
At the 1981 meeting, the luncheon speaker talked about book preservation and conservation. Budgeting was the dinner topic, and Saturday morning sessions covered book repair, staffing patterns, budgeting, and time management. In 1982, 141 registrants listened to Ben Tucker talk about the Library of Congress’ process for cataloging a book. He also answered questions about Library of Congress general cataloging practices following the lunch meeting. The Chairman of OVGTSL participated in an electronic mail project that year with the other chairs of the thirty-one groups affiliated with ALA/ RTSD. In a letter concerning this effort, he wrote, “The age of electronic mail is certainly here, and I believe in the future we’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the library world.”47 At the next annual meeting, the featured speaker began to look to the millennium with “Issues in Libraries to the Year 2000.” Also in 1983 the organization’s bylaws were extensively revised. Annual dues were raised to $5.00, and the titles of the officers changed from Chairman and Vice-Chairman to Chairperson and Vice-Chairperson. The Treasurer duties were expanded so that he or she “shall also serve as Chairperson of the Registration Committee.”48 Members voted to move the archives from OSU to the University of Kentucky. For the 1984 conference, planners decided to host a workshop conducted by CompuTech, which marketed a product to allow library managers to monitor library operations. The workshop was not well-received by attendees, and the minutes note that “many of the workshop attendees did not stay for the further activities of the conference.”49 The theme of the following year’s conference at Purdue was “Library Leadership: A Quest for Excellence,” with the keynote address given by the Director of the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1986, the meeting days changed to Thursday and Friday, a tradition which still persists. The theme of this meeting in Berea, Kentucky, was “Technical Services: A Look at What’s New.” The keynote speaker addressed automation and technical services, and there were four afternoon breakout sessions held simultaneously to discuss the keynote session. The 1987 conference was in Athens, Ohio, but there is no information in the archives on this meeting. In 1988 the theme was “Library Technology in the 90s,” with Richard Boss as the keynote speaker. There was also a presentation on “The Impact of Technology on Technical Services: Will You Have the Same Job?” The first annual newsletter was launched in 1988, and it was noted that “OVGTSL was able to provide financial assistance for attendance at the 1988 conference in the form of grant awards to two library science students…”50 While student scholarships had first been proposed in 1976, there are no notes in the extant minutes between 1976 and 1988 to indicate that any scholarships were offered until the 1988 conference. In 1989, two students each from Indiana University, Kent State University, and the University of Kentucky were given awards to attend the meeting.
1980s Automation and integrated library systems were still the topics of interest in the 1980s. Saturday morning sessions concerned all aspects of technical services. Host libraries often demonstrated their automated systems. Some of these were OCLC’s Acquisitions Subsystem, Faxon’s Online Serials Management System, and Northwestern University’s NOTIS. At the 1980 meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, the cataloging discussion group talked about problems in adopting AACR2. The serials discussion group listened to speakers from Indiana and Purdue Universities discuss projects to develop online serials files. The acquisitions librarians foresaw many problems with the OCLC Acquisitions Subsystem and concluded that “OCLC appears to be counting heavily on revenues from the subsystem in its further development plans.”45 At this meeting the secretary presented a brief history of the organization that she had compiled.46
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The final meeting of the 1980s focused on online database maintenance and the Linked Systems Project (LSP) which was under development by Library of Congress, the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN), and the Western Library Network (WLN). There was discussion about OCLC’s database maintenance, and several panelists described automated systems in their libraries, their effectiveness, and ease of database maintenance.
truth of the matter is technical services, as we know it, is disappearing.… We must all come to the realization that the golden age of cataloging is over.”55 The Newsletter Committee successfully obtained an ISSN for the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Newsletter in 1994. Reorganization was the common theme of the speakers at the 1995 meeting, including reorganization based on continuous quality improvement principles, and retraining technical and public services staff to make better use of personnel. The future again figured into the theme of the 1997 meeting, with sessions predicting technical services at the Millennium, as well as more specific topics like subject access and the Internet, using focus groups to match user expectations, and managing and delivering electronic journals. The 1998 theme was “Color Us Bold: The Spectrum of Library Technical Services.” There were multiple sessions focusing on topics such as approval vendor selection, database maintenance, outsourcing, and subject headings. This meeting was held at Western Kentucky University (WKU) in Bowling Green. For this meeting WKU created a Web site for OVGTSL. Deana Groves, a librarian there, created the Web site at www. wku.edu/Library/ovgtsl/home/html. There were three scholarship students in 1998, but the number of scholarship students has varied over the years, with six winners being the most in any given year. As the Millennium approached, the last meeting of the decade saw presentations on acquiring, licensing, and cataloging electronic resources, authority control from paper to online, and even a session on Eastern Michigan’s automated storage system. In 1999, the bylaws were again amended, using the 1983 bylaws as the basis, despite the small bylaws change made in 1991 to change RTSD to ALCTS. The geographical area was changed to: Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. Dues increased to $10.00. The Web site hosted at WKU was added to the bylaws under Article VI “Affiliations.” Additionally, for each annual meeting the host site was required “to maintain a web page at their institution for current annual meeting information and to provide the URL to the web page contact at Western Kentucky University for a link to be added to the organization’s web site.”56
1990s With the approach of the Millennium in the 1990s, librarians focused on the future. Keynote speakers remained an important program feature, but an increasing number of concurrent sessions enriched the meeting and provided good networking opportunities. Student scholarships were awarded yearly. In 1990, the theme was “Back to the Future,” and technical services librarians were urged to keep up with new technologies and current trends. At the meeting at Columbus, Ohio, attendees spent Friday afternoon at OCLC, where they attended demonstrations of OCLC’s PRISM Service and took tours of the facility. One of the sessions introduced the SISAC code,51 and the speaker assured the audience that “… the SISAC code can automatically generate data for that field for predicted check-in and claims.”52 Speakers from OCLC discussed issues related to format integration which would be implemented at the end of 1993. Keeping with the theme of the future, the 1991 meeting invited proposals for “The Once and Future Catalog: Enhancing User Access,” and all the speakers at the Indianapolis site focused on different types of users, what they wanted in accessing information, and how access could be enhanced. The first poster session was presented at this meeting. The bylaws were also amended so that all appearances of the name “Resources and Technical Services Division” were replaced by the “Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS).”53 The following year’s meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, returned to the present with “Managing Our Collections: Views From the Basement.” Topics covered all aspects of collections, from acquisition to weeding. Over 100 people attended the 1993 conference in Oxford, Ohio, where speakers gave brief histories and reported on the status of the current work at OCLC, OhioLink, Greater Cincinnati Library Consortium, Kentucky Library Network, INCOLSA, OHIONET, and SOLINET. The theme of the 1994 meeting was “Technical Services in the Library Without Walls,” which dealt with changes in technical services in the automated environment. This conference was held in Bloomington, and the planners expected only eighty-five people, but registration reached 150. Arnold Hirshon, the keynote speaker, focused on the challenges libraries, and particularly technical services librarians, faced in a virtual world.54 As the final speaker noted, “Arnold’s right.… We can agree or disagree with him … but the
2000s Not surprisingly, the current decade of the OVGTSL meetings reflects the change in libraries from ownership to access of resources and the ways that technical services continue to respond to change. Preservation, collection development, XML, the open archive initiative, FRBR, and metadata have been session topics at several meetings. While the bylaws call for the archives to be housed at the University of Kentucky, the records of OVGTSL for this decade are, instead, found primarily on the World Wide Web. In 2001, the theme of the conference was “The Evolution of Technical Services, Alexandria to Virtual: Problems to Solutions.” Sessions focused on union
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listing, Dublin Core, state documents, and librarians becoming publishers. The conference newsletter became available in electronic format only and can be found at the OVGTSL Web site. At this conference a motion was passed to appoint a task force to submit a recommendation to OCLC that a MARC version of the Dublin Core be developed. At the 2003 meeting the minutes reflected that this motion “proved to be unnecessary because it has already been developed and is available through OCLC Connexion.”57 There was no meeting held in 2002. XML was the subject of the keynote address in 2003, with other sessions concerning adding table of contents to bibliographic records, integrating Web sites into the OPAC, preservation, metadata, getting published, and even inventing the new technical services librarian. The minutes of 2003 also show that a correction was made to a proposal regarding the college affiliation of students eligible to apply for OVGTSL scholarships. Those eligible “would include full- and part-time students, at the graduate or undergraduate level, enrolled in either on-campus or distance learning classes.”58 Also at this meeting the Chair announced that an OVGTSL listserv was set up in 2002 by a library support staff member at the University of Kentucky. Members can sign up through the OVGTSL Web site. The keynote session of the 2004 conference in Louisville, Kentucky, exemplified the theme of the conference by stressing that technical services and public services both share the common aim of serving users. Cataloging digital resources, scholarly communication, Internet booksellers, and electronic journals were some of the topics of the concurrent sessions. The College Libraries of CONSORT in Ohio organized the 2005 conference, with sessions typical of the interests of the Millennium—examination of technical services workflows, automated collection development, AACR3 and, as always, presentations on the current status of specific projects, like the OhioLINK Digital Media Center Application Profile and the Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium. The 2006 conference, “Crossroads to the Future,” at Indiana State University, focused on the idea that technical services personnel must continue to process traditional, as well as virtual, materials which will require changes in processing and organization. But, as has been the case for decades, technical services librarians will face these new challenges and adjust accordingly.
has been held most often in Cincinnati, Louisville, and Berea. There were six times in eighty-three years that the conference was not held (1927–1928, 1940, 1944–1945, and 2002). (For a complete list of dates and places hosting the conference, see appendix B.) Luckily, many of the early records have been preserved, but the authors think it is important to continue to preserve the history of this group. The archives at the University of Kentucky reveal that minutes and programs were sent fairly consistently to the archives from the group’s inception through the 1970s. The minutes of the early years of the organization contain a wealth of information, though some are much more descriptive than others because some of the recorders were just more verbose than others. In many of the years prior to the 1970s, one cannot only find papers that were actually presented, but also tapes of the proceedings. However, there are gaps in the archives. Minutes of the business meetings can be found in most, but not all, of the print newsletters, and this is also true for the electronic newsletters. In the last two decades, the records have become incomplete or sketchy, and researchers cannot get as clear a picture of the meetings as offered from the past detailed records. Electronic access does not help with preservation in the archives, and some records that exist only in electronic format are not being sent to the archives in paper form. In addition, it appears that there has been some inconsistency in reporting meeting activities to the Council of Regional Groups. There are no online conference newsletters for 2005 or 2006, though there are programs for both of these years. The fact that this meeting moves from year to year has very likely contributed to the incomplete records that are being preserved. Like other regional organizations, OVGTSL has a long history. It is one of ALA’s original regional groups. It relies solely on a loose organizational structure and volunteers to host each conference, plan programs, and arrange special events from a Wednesday evening or Thursday morning through Friday. Those who have attended these meetings have heard many well-known (and not so well-known) speakers in the library world who have provided much food for thought about issues that were germane to their profession. To follow this history through minutes, bylaws, conference programs and themes, and organizational changes is to see the trends, concerns, and complexities of all aspects of library technical services and to study the impact of national standards, projects, and professional associations on workflow and management responsibilities. The history of OVGTSL is a history of library technical services.
Conclusion The annual conference of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians has rotated among three states, with Indiana and Ohio having hosted the conference twenty-seven times each and Kentucky twenty-five times. Approximately forty meetings were held on college campuses, seventeen in hotels, three at public libraries, and the remainder in other miscellaneous venues. The conference was held in eight cities only once—Athens (OH), Covington (KY), Greencastle (IN), Madison (IN), Newark (OH), Notre Dame (IN), Toledo (OH), and Yellow Springs (OH). The conference
Notes 1.
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American Library Association Division of Cataloging and Classification, In Retrospect: A History of the Division of Cataloging and Classification of the American Library Association, 1900–1950 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1950), p. 19.
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2.
3.
Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians: A History
Patricia T. Rine, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians: Historical Glimpses, Paper presented at Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Annual Conference (May 1980).
28. Papers, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1952. 29.
Minutes of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Annual Conference, 1924–2004, Special Collections and Digital Programs, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky (hereafter cited as Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians), 1932.
Clara Beetle, A.L.A. Cataloging Rules (Chicago: American Library Association, 1949).
30. Seymour Lubetzky, Cataloging Rules and Principles (Washington: Library of Congress, 1953). 31. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1954.
4. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1932.
32. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1957.
5.
J.C.M. Hanson, Catalog Rules; Author and Title Entries (Chicago: American Library Association Pub. Board, 1908).
33. Ibid.
6.
Joint Steering Committee for Revision of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. “A Brief History of AACR: Early English Language Cataloguing Codes,” http://www.collectionscanada.ca/ jsc/history.html (accessed January 4, 2007).
34. Miscellaneous Correspondence, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, undated. 35. Miscellaneous Correspondence, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1960. 36. Ibid.
7. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1933.
37. Ibid.
8. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1936.
38. Seymour Lubetzky, Code of Cataloging Rules: Author and Title Entry (Chicago: American Library Association, 1960).
9. Ibid.
39. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1963.
10. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1938.
40. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1968.
11. Ibid.
41. Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (Chicago: American Library Association, 1967).
12. American Library Association, Catalog Rules; Author and Title Entries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1941).
42. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1973.
13. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1942.
43. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1976.
14. Miscellaneous Correspondence of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1924–2004, Special Collections and Digital Programs, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky (hereafter cited as Miscellaneous Correspondence, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians), 1943.
44. Ibid. 45. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1980. 46. Rine, “Ohio Valley … Historical Glimpses.”
15. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1943.
47. Miscellaneous Correspondence, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1982.
16. Ibid.
48. Bylaws, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1983.
17. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1946.
49. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1984.
18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.
50. Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Newsletter, 1 (1988): 1.
20. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1948.
51. “Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI),” http://www. niso.org/standards/resources/Z39-56.pdf (accessed January 8, 2007).
21. Clara Beetle, A.L.A. Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1949).
52. Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Newsletter, 3 (1990): 3.
22. Library of Congress, Rules for Descriptive Cataloging in the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress, 1949).
53. Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Newsletter, 4 (1991): 6.
23. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1947.
54. Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Newsletter, 7 (1994): 1–2.
24. Miscellaneous Correspondence, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1947.
55. Ibid., 7.
25. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1950.
56.
26. Bylaws, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1950. 27. Papers of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Annual Conference, 1924–2004, Special Collections and Digital Programs, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky (hereafter cited as Papers, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians), 1952.
“Bylaws of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians,” http://www.wku.edu/Library/ovgtsl/Bylaws.htm (accessed January 8, 2007).
57. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 2003, http://panther.indstate.edu/ovgtsl/minutes2003.html (accessed December 19, 2006). 58. Ibid.
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Appendix A OVGTSL Conference Themes, 1975–Present “Continuing Education for Technical Service Librarians” “Technical Service—Today and Tomorrow” “Cooperation in Processing—Regional, National, International” Theme unknown Theme unknown Theme unknown “Library Conservation: Resources, Staff, Budget” No theme “I Don’t Care What the Future Holds, But How Do I Deal With It” “Microcomputers in Libraries – Management Information Systems” (workshop) “Library Leadership: A Quest for Excellence” “Technical Services: A Look at What’s New” Theme unknown “Library Technology in the 90’s” “Links: Within and Without” “Back to the Future?” “The Once and Future Catalog: Enhancing User Access” “Managing Our Collections: Views From the Basement” “Technical Services in the Cooperative Network Environment” “Technical Services in the Library Without Walls” “Library Re_organization: Its Impact on Technical Services” “Technical Services Librarians: Leaders For Change” “Tradition and Innovation: Technical Services in the 21st Century” “Color Us Bold: The Spectrum of Library Technical Services” “Library Technical Services Is…” “The Brave New World of Technical Services” "The Evolution of Technical Services, Alexandria to Virtual: Problems to Solutions" No meeting “Racing to a Bright Future” “Technical Services=User Services: Making the Connection” “Technical Services: Rethink, Retool, Risk” “Crossroads to the Future” “Mapping Our Way: New Formations in Technical Services”
1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Appendix B OVGTSL Conference Dates and Locations, 1923–Present Date
City
State
Date
City
State
1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938
Cincinnati Indianapolis Louisville Berea No meeting held No meeting held Cincinnati Indianapolis Dayton Columbus Lexington Madison Cincinnati Berea Bloomington Cincinnati
OH IN KY KY
1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954
Richmond No meeting held Indianapolis Oxford Cincinnati No meeting held No meeting held Berea Indianapolis Yellow Springs Louisville Richmond Cincinnati Muncie Lexington Columbus
IN
OH IN OH OH KY IN OH KY IN OH
112
IN OH OH
KY IN OH KY IN OH IN KY OH
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Date 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981
City Bloomington Berea Cincinnati Greencastle Louisville Springfield Muncie Berea Dayton West Lafayette Lexington Columbus Terre Haute Louisville Oxford Bloomington Berea Cincinnati West Lafayette Richmond Dayton Muncie Bowling Green Columbus Bloomington Lexington Cincinnati
Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians: A History
State
Date
City
State
IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH
1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Terre Haute Louisville Dayton West Lafayette Berea Athens Muncie Lexington Columbus Indianapolis Louisville Oxford Bloomington Covington Toledo Notre Dame Bowling Green Springfield Indianapolis Lexington No meeting held Terre Haute Louisville Newark Bloomington Bowling Green
IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY
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IN KY OH IN KY
The Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians (OVGTSL), a member of the American Library Association’s Council of Regional Groups, became a formal organization in 1924 and continues to meet to this day. This article provides a history of this group, and, in doing so, traces trends and issues in library technical services for cataloging, acquisitions, serials, and many other topics of interest to librarians for more than eight decades. Serials Review 2007; 33:103–113. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services (OVGTSL) has a long history dating to 1924. The organization was founded originally as an initiative of the Catalog Section of the American Library Association (ALA). The goal was to establish a regional group to disseminate information from ALA meetings. The region was originally Indiana, south of Lafayette, Kentucky, north of Frankfort, and the southwest quarter of Ohio. The group now includes the entire states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, and the annual meeting rotates from state to state and is held primarily in May. Throughout its history one meeting was to be held annually for librarians to gather and discuss trends, innovations, and challenges in acquisitions, cataloging, and serials. The early meetings were held on Saturdays usually, but sometimes on Fridays. Today the meetings are typically held over a Thursday–Friday. An examination of the organization’s archival materials clearly shows the evolution of technical services, from cards to automation and from print to electronic. Many of the speakers throughout the years have been or still are influential in the world of library technical services. What follows is the first comprehensive history of this group as it has evolved and sustained interest and members for more than eight decades.
1920s In 1922, ALA’s Chairman of the Committee on the Reorganization of the Catalog Section suggested regional meetings of catalogers and put out a call to librarians in New York to assemble. According to the Chairman, the goal of catalogers should be not only to “make our work more alive and interesting” but to also “make our work and its importance known to executives.”1 Meetings ensued in St. Paul, New Haven, New York, Cincinnati, Boston, Ann Arbor, and Washington. These meetings resulted in the recommendation and adoption in 1923 of a revision to the constitution of the ALA Catalog Section to provide for the formation of regional groups. Catalogers in the Indianapolis–Cincinnati–Louisville district assembled in 1923 but were unsuccessful in establishing a formal organization. A second attempt was made in Indianapolis in March 1924 when “even as the conference was being conducted backstage a committee was meeting to formulate a set of bylaws.”2 The bylaws were read, a nominating committee was formed, members were signed up and reported on by the nominating committee, all in the course of this second meeting of the group. No copies of these original bylaws exist in the organization’s archives. The Ohio Valley Regional Group of Catalogers (OVRGC), the original name of this organization, was quite active that year and held a second meeting in October 1924 in conjunction with the Western Reserve Group of Catalogers at the Ohio Library Association (OLA) annual conference. By the end of 1924, the Ohio Valley region, along with the Twin Cities and Western Reserve Groups, as well as cataloging groups from New York, Boston, and Chicago, was formed. The remainder
Clemons is Assistant Professor and Government Publications Librarian, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. Goldberg is Professor and Head of Technical Services, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. 0098-7913/$–see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2007.03.001
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of the decade saw meetings of the OVRGC in Louisville (1925), Berea (1926), and Cincinnati (1929). No meetings were held in 1927 and 1928. Meetings typically followed the format of a business meeting followed by presentations on various aspects of cataloging. Presentations ranged from the very general, “Special Problems in Cataloging” (1924), to the very specific, “The Cataloger in Relation to the Adult Education Movement” (1926). Many of the topics discussed in the 1920s echo those still being discussed today: “The Teaching of Cataloging: What Shall We Teach and How Shall We Teach It?” (1926), “Shortcuts in Cataloging That Are Safe” (1929), “Cataloging Serials and Continuations” (1929), and “Special Methods Used in the Binding and Cataloging of Music” (1929). From the beginning, the group drew on the experiences of its membership when conducting each program. In her 1924 paper on “Selective Cataloging for High School Libraries,” a Cincinnati school librarian made a plea for others to “not build the catalogue down to the pupil, but rather educate the pupil up to the catalogue … The catalogue is the key to the library and if properly made and used, can help the library to really become an active teaching organism.”3 This statement, along with the other topics presented throughout the 1920s, proved the need for the existence of a forum such as OVRGC and other regional cataloging groups. Even at the first meeting, the group’s interests went beyond cataloging rules and processes.
Code rules was too large a topic to discuss” at that meeting, it was moved “that the [OVRGC] Secretary be instructed to assure the Secretary of the American Library Association Catalog Section that we [OVRGC] approve of the revision” and were glad to give their support to the work.7 The Chair of the ALA Regional Catalogers Group gave a brief report on the revision of the A.L.A. Catalog rules at the 1934 OVRGC meeting. The 1936 meeting “had been planned to provide opportunity for small libraries to suggest changes and additions which they wished to have made in the A.L.A. Catalog Code.”8 A short questionnaire had been mailed to members prior to the meeting and posed the following questions: 1. Do you use L.C. subject headings? (36—Yes) 2. Would your library pay reasonable fee (amount not yet determined) to print the L.C. “Refer froms” [i.e., the heading from which one is referred]? (25—Yes, 6—No, 5—?) 3. Do you favor a separate abridged A.L.A. Code for small libraries? (17—Yes, 18—No)9 In addition to discussing the questionnaire results, group members also listened to presentations on “The A.L.A. Catalog Code: Changes and Additions We’d Like Made” and “The Definitions of Terms as Used in the Rules” and participated in a discussion about terms proposed for inclusion in the revised Code. Discussion of the A.L.A. Catalog Code did not surface again until the early 1940s. A 1937 presentation on “Regional Cooperation in Bibliography: The Field and Its Possibilities” led to the formation of committees in each of the three states represented by the organization to explore this topic further. The committees were short-lived, however. In 1938 the group determined that it was “not feasible to undertake such a work at present. The W.P.A. [Works Progress Administration], by means of its library projects, is covering some phases of this work.”10 Members of OVRGC did have an interest in regional cooperation despite their rejection of a regional bibliography project. At the 1938 meeting one of the speakers read a letter from the Executive Committee of the ALA Catalog Section proposing tasks in which cooperation of regional groups was needed. The speaker then gave a presentation on other topics that the group might undertake and distributed a survey on “Problems in Cataloging and Related Processing of Materials.” Based on the survey results, the group approved a motion “that the Chairman of the Ohio Valley Regional Group of Catalogers appoint a committee to propose and initiate a plan to compile a list of author headings for the state publications of Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio.”11 In October 1938 members of the OVRGC again found themselves meeting jointly with the OLA. The president of OVRGC made two key proposals that year: (1) that the then defined boundaries of OVRGC be extended to include areas which had active ALA members, and (2) that OVRGC send a portion of their dues to the ALA Catalog section as affiliation dues. Both motions passed.
1930s As the new decade began, fifty OVRGC members convened in Indianapolis in April 1930 to discuss the timeless question of “Catalog Costs and How to Reduce Them” and focus on the development of bibliographic aids to assist in the cataloging of United States and foreign government publications. The 1930 meeting was the first time that the OVRGC divided itself into groups to discuss issues relating to large public libraries and college and university libraries. The OVRGC annual meeting of 1932 was held in October in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Ohio Library Association. The program provided “the viewpoint of the users of the card catalog” with presentations ranging from subject headings in school library catalogs to papers on the expectations of circulation and reference librarians of the library catalog.4 The oldest copy of bylaws that the authors were able to find was dated 1932. Membership dues were 25 cents. The American Library Association and the British Library Association formed committees in the early 1930s to discuss revisions to the first international cataloging code, Catalog Rules, Author and Title Entries. 5 Published in both British and American editions, the code consisted of 174 rules. Areas of disagreement between the two editions included author entries and title changes.6 Revisions to the catalog code were first mentioned by OVRGC in 1933. Although “it was felt that the discussion of the Revision of A.L.A.
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At the next meeting in 1939, the Chairman of the Committee on the Revision of the Constitution of the OVRGC reported on the revisions to the OVRGC constitution which included the adopted amendments.
Two agenda items originally proposed for the cancelled 1944 meeting were on the agenda in 1946: (1) the Division of Cataloging and Classification’s proposed Quarterly Review, and (2) the 15th edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). The ALA Committee on a Quarterly Review requested the Group’s opinion on the proposal to replace the Catalogers and Classifiers Yearbook with a more up-to-date Quarterly Review. The general consensus was support for the Review. The Library of Congress’ Director of DDC led the discussion of the second agenda item, the 15th edition of DDC and provided highlights of the upcoming edition. The director expressed hope that “the proposed Quarterly would be started, and in it the Dewey Decimal notes on definitions, decisions, etc. could be printed.”19 In 1948, the group changed its name back to OVRGC (dropping Classifiers), according to the heading on the meeting minutes. Whether or not the short-lived name change was ever official is not known because no further documentation was ever recorded in the minutes or bylaws. A panel on “L.C. Descriptive Cataloging Rules” convened at the 1948 meeting with panelists representing large and small public libraries, college and research libraries, and the National Archives. From that discussion two opposing viewpoints emerged: “1) that simplification of rules had more adequately met the needs of public libraries than of college and university libraries, and 2) that serious problems had resulted from simplification in large college and university libraries.”20 The following year ALA published its A.L.A. Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries21 and adopted Library of Congress’ Rules for Descriptive Cataloging in the Library of Congress.22
1940s Over the next five years, only three meetings were held— 1941 (Indianapolis), 1942 (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio), and 1943 (Cincinnati). Since the preliminary second edition of the American version of the 1908 Catalog Rules, Author and Title Entries12 was published by the American Library Association in 1941, the group revisited the ALA catalog code discussion at the 1942 meeting. Representatives from each state presented the opinions of catalogers in their state. The group “agreed that the committee had done an excellent piece of work. The only general adverse criticism was that L.C. [Library of Congress] procedure had frequently been ignored … and it would make for more general uniformity if A.L.A. were to follow L.C. [Library of Congress]. Specific rules were commented upon and suggestions made which summarized their reactions.”13 The 1943 meeting had originally been cancelled “because of wartime restrictions on travel” with that information conveyed to members in a letter dated April 20, 1943, from the OVRGC president.14 It appears, though, that the group did meet later in 1943. Seventy persons, including three from the Library of Congress, met on November 19, 1943, in Cincinnati to discuss “certain of the cataloging problems troubling both Library of Congress and catalogers.”15 The Director of the Processing Department and the Chief of the Descriptive Cataloging Division at the Library of Congress, whose “primary reason for the meeting was their interest in pushing forward the study of the descriptive catalog code and to gather the critical comments of a representative group,” led the discussion.16 In response, the group’s discussion focused on the costs of cataloging, improvements made by Library of Congress in the distribution of printed cards, and cooperative cataloging. Unlike previous years, the heading of the 1943 minutes referred to the group as the Ohio Valley Regional Group of Catalogers and Classifiers. No reason exists in the minutes for this name change. The group did not meet again until 1946, when they reconvened in April of that year in Berea, Kentucky. No documentation exists to explain the absence of meetings in 1944 and 1945. One can assume, however, that the hiatus was due to the ending of World War II. In a letter to the membership of the organization, one member suggested that the group “meet with the state library associations every other year, while continuing to meet alone in the years between.”17 The majority opinion was that this arrangement might lead to “loss of identity in the three larger organizations” which would not be worth any gain “from the broadening influence of the various state associations.”18 The group continued to be referred to as the Ohio Valley Regional Group of Catalogers and Classifiers in the 1946 and 1947 minutes.
1950s The 1950s brought many changes to the OVRGC. A committee appointed in 1947 studied “the provisional draft of the new constitution of the Cataloging and Classification Division of ALA which will apply to regional groups.”23 The draft constitution stated that “membership shall be open to anyone within the region of the group, who is interested in problems of cataloging and classification or related fields.”24 This likely set off a red flag for committee members who, in response, issued the following proposed changes to the OVRGC constitution: • That the geographic boundaries be extended to include
Ohio, south of and including Columbus; Kentucky, north of and including Berea; Indiana, south of and including Lafayette • That dues be increased from twenty-five cents to fifty cents per annum • That the position of Vice-President, President-Elect be added to the list of officers.25 These proposed amendments were adopted May 6, 1950. The 1950 Bylaws further stated that “a copy of each paper presented at the meeting shall be mailed to the
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Chairman of the Council of Regional Groups [CRG],” an activity mandated by CRG in 1947.26 Attendance at the annual meeting reached an all-time high in 1951 when 100 librarians met at the University of Cincinnati to discuss such issues as “Are Catalogers Becoming Extinct?” and “Some Frustrations of MidCentury Cataloging.” Despite the group’s vote in 1946 not to meet annually in conjunction with state library organizations, OVRGC members held an extra meeting in October 1951 at the OLA annual conference. The first Ohio Valley Library dinner was held April 27, 1951, at the Sheraton-Gibson Hotel in Cincinnati. The group also chose to break with tradition by voting to allow another institution within the state to host the conference the following year instead of rotating to Indiana or Kentucky. In 1952 the group experimented with a two-day meeting covering Friday and Saturday. The ninety-nine participants listened to presentations on the use of mass media (including television) in education, “Present Problems in Subject Cataloging,” and “Catalogers Then and Now—Their Availability and Opportunities.” The latter presentation, by the Chairman of the Department of Library Science at the University of Michigan, inflated the egoes of the catalogers with such remarks as, “The field of cataloging would not seem to be a dead end, but one which might prepare for a variety of other positions.… This predominance of the scholarly libraries in the attraction of catalogers suggests that it is the students with scholarly tastes and equipment who are drawn to cataloging.… The mediocre or merely average student does not go into cataloging.” 27 Whatever euphoria those in attendance experienced with those remarks was quickly deflated at that evening’s dinner meeting when the speaker, a professor of Bibliographic History at the University of Chicago, “began by saying that ‘Nobody loves a cataloger.’ He then said that some envied us and some blamed us; but we are not always blameless.”28 Discussion groups focusing on subject headings met the morning of the second day and then reconvened for a summary of each discussion for the whole group. At the April 1953 meeting, the group approved a motion by the Executive Committee to begin charging a registration fee in order to have more money for conference expenses, a decision which was subsequently reversed the following year. Programs that year focused on cataloging special formats and included discussions on microfilm, microcards, archives, records, and recordings. Two papers on the use of the card catalog were also presented. The focus of the 1954 meeting was the Lubetzky Report. In 1951, ALA asked Seymour Lubetzky, Library of Congress’ Consultant on Bibliographic and Cataloging Policy, to analyze the American Library Association Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries.29 In 1953 Lubetzky published his report Cataloging Rules and Principles. 30 As the 1954 OVRGC guest speaker, Lubetzky pointed out that “in undertaking the study it was not his objective to find out whether any individual rules were in need of revision, but rather to study the
code as a whole as a system of cataloging and to determine whether it was sound in principle and structure … [he was] of the opinion that revision of the rules must start from the beginning.”31 Mr. Lubetzky would later get his wish when, in 1956, he was appointed editor of the revised code. Another two-day meeting was held in 1956 in Berea, Kentucky, to discuss “Cataloging Trends in Large and Small Libraries.” Five discussion groups met to address topics ranging from cataloger training to handling nonbook materials. Despite the reversal of the group’s approval to charge a registration fee, the dues doubled that year from fifty cents to $1.00. 1956 was also the first year that a survey on “Proposed Topics for Workshop Discussion” was sent out to members. In 1957, the Nominating Committee “departed from tradition in divorcing the office of the Vice President from the place of meeting. This was done in recognition of the hardship imposed on the staffs of some smaller libraries when one person had to play the dual roles of Vice President, Program Chairman, and Hostess.”32 A discussion about the Council of Regional Group’s ALA midwinter meeting report on the effects of the reorganization of ALA on regional groups also occurred at the 1957 meeting. Regional groups had been transferred from the Division of Cataloging and Classification to the newly formed Resources and Technical Services Division (RTSD). In response to this change, OVRGC passed a motion to “broaden its field of interest to include serials and acquisitions personnel.”33 The payment of dues by the regional groups was eliminated in the reorganization, but the regional groups felt that it was necessary and continued to do so. A committee was appointed to revise the bylaws to include the expansion of the membership, payment of dues to ALA, and the 1956 dues increase. In an undated letter to the membership, the 1957 Bylaws Revision Committee suggested several additional organizational changes: (1) to change the officer titles of President and Vice-President to Chairman and ViceChairman, (2) to divide the duties of the SecretaryTreasurer into two positions, and (3) an unspecified change in the duties of the Vice-Chairman. The letter also states that “as a result of [the] vote to enlarge the scope of [the] group, it has seemed advisable to suggest a change of name.”34 However, they did not suggest a new name and the Archives provide no trace of how the name “Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians” was chosen. Although no formal discussion of a name change for the organization was recorded in the 1958 minutes, the bylaws adopted that year reflect the change. In addition, the scope of the group’s interest changed from cataloging and classification to resources and technical services, changes in officer titles noted above were made, and officer duties were also outlined in the 1958 Bylaws.
1960s The 1960s continued the format of previous years’ meetings. The group has met primarily in May since
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the 1960s, avoiding the Kentucky Derby and the Indy 500 events when meeting in Kentucky and Indiana. Tours of local libraries and library-related organizations, a tradition begun in the 1950s, were offered. The program allowed time for librarians to have group discussions on cataloging, serials, and acquisitions. The first meeting of the 1960s was held at Wittenberg University (Springfield, Ohio). Reminiscent of one of the speakers at the 1952 meeting, one speaker’s topic was “Making Cataloging a More Appealing Profession.” In 1960, the Past Chairman of the Council of Regional Groups returned the papers from that year’s meeting to the Chairman-Elect of OVGTSL because “The RTSD Board recommended the return of papers in order to curtail the growth of the archives.”35 She further noted, “In many ways I have found it an embarrassing procedure.”36 The OVGTSL Chairman subsequently wrote to Jean Scherr, an OVGTSL member, asking her to chair the Program Committee for the 1961 meeting. The chair penned: “I am trying to get the RTSD by-law changed which requires that we submit to the chairman of the Council of Regional Groups a copy of each paper presented at our regional meeting.… However, I understand that regional groups are not literal in complying with this by-law.”37 The next year, at Ball State Teachers College (Muncie, Indiana), the main speaker presented a paper on the “New Cataloging Code,” presumably referring to the draft Code of Cataloging Rules.38 Interestingly, for the next two years librarians spoke about libraries in foreign countries. One librarian talked about being an American librarian in Africa (1961), while the next year the luncheon speaker talked about Italian university libraries. In Dayton, Ohio, the following year at Wright State, 155 librarians listened to a talk entitled “The Book, the Cataloger, and the Machine.” At this same meeting, the bylaws were amended “to meet changes made in the RTSD constitution,” since affiliation dues no longer had to be sent to RTSD.39 There are no details in the minutes from this meeting on the exact changes made to the bylaws, but it could be speculated that at least one change was to delete the wording from previous bylaws concerning the payment of affiliation dues to RTSD. The 1964 meeting at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana) concerned the relationship between libraries and library-oriented businesses. The dinner speaker from IBM talked about the use of electronic processing in libraries. The attendees also toured a MPATI (Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction) plane in its hangar. The group met in 1965 at Keeneland, a thoroughbred racing course in Lexington, Kentucky. The meeting focused on special libraries, with one speaker giving an overview of the library at Keeneland, and the other featured speaker talking about the history of the Hunt Botanical Library at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1966, following a panel about “A Comprehensive List of Periodicals for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering,” the meeting at Ohio State adjourned so that members of
OVGTSL could lunch with the Midwest Academic Librarians group. This happened again in 1969 at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, when these two groups had dinner together. In 1967, attendees in Terre Haute, Indiana, learned about the history and intent of the new shared cataloging program from the Assistant Director of the Processing Department of the Library of Congress. The next morning there was a panel discussion on the local implications of this program. In 1968, concerns about the cataloging profession again came to the fore, and the Executive Secretary of RTSD, Elizabeth Rodell, spoke about the “difficulty of securing catalogers; [and that] catalogers should be given good working conditions.”40 At this same meeting the Chief of the Descriptive Cataloging Division of the Library of Congress outlined the implementation of the AngloAmerican Cataloging Rules at the Library of Congress.41 At the last annual meeting of the 1960s, a senior programmer and analyst from OCLC talked about MARCII and how this would affect shared cataloging.
1970s As in previous decades, the group enjoyed a variety of tours of local libraries and other interesting places. Not surprisingly, automation and closing the card catalog were major issues of the 1970s. In 1970, a program entitled “Automation in Action” was followed by a panel entitled “Coping or Not: Traditional Methods vs. Changing Demands.” Librarians were urged to learn systems analysis so that manual procedures could be upgraded. At Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1970, 200 attendees heard a speaker from the Library of Congress talk about recent activities there. Panelists that year discussed problems connected with the handling and cataloging of serials, the attempts to automate some aspects of serials processing, and the need for a standardized code for cataloging non-book materials. At the next meeting at Berea College in Kentucky, automation took a backseat to the history of the reprinting business. By 1972, however, automation returned as the primary focus as librarians saw a demonstration of OCLC terminals given by the University of Cincinnati staff and a presentation on “OCLC: What It Is, What It Does, What It Plans To Do.” Interestingly, at this meeting, Wright State (Ohio) librarians gave a presentation entitled, “One Use of OCLC: A Retrospective Conversion Project.” Anyone who used OCLC, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, regularly encountered Wright State records. Barbara Markuson spoke in 1973 on the progress in forming networks for bibliographic information in Indiana. The Library of Congress continued to send speakers, and this year’s topic was the Cataloging in Publication program, which “has grown rapidly since its beginning in July of 1971 on a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.”42 The 1974 meeting
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centered on publishing and featured a dinner speaker from the Association of American Publishers. Wright State hosted the 1975 annual meeting and treated librarians not only to a tour of the local library, but also a tour of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum. The opening speaker talked about how librarians should cope with the technological and sociological advancements in the profession. In 1975 the first conference theme was recorded in the minutes; however, themes were not commonly used until the early 1980s. (For a list of conference themes, see appendix A.) In 1976 at Ball State University, the Assistant Director of Technical Services at Ohio State University (OSU) discussed the project of closing the card catalog at OSU in July 1976 and shifting to “online terminal accessing of bibliographic information by author, title, subject, … to be used with their automated circulation system which already affords search by author–title on a total of 111 terminals in the main library and special libraries.”43 The Deputy Librarian of Congress spoke about the national leadership role of the Library of Congress and its plans to have all current cataloging in machine readable form by 1979. At the 1976 business meeting two proposals were made: (1) that a scholarship to send a beginning technical services librarian from a school in the host state of the conference be established, and (2) that a committee be formed to find an archive for the records of OVGTSL.44 No scholarship was established at that time. With the illness of the chairperson, the decision on the archives was delayed, but in 1978 archives were to be located at Ohio State University. The 1977 meeting was held at Western Kentucky University (WKU) in Bowling Green, and a speaker from OCLC discussed “Cooperation in Acquisition— OCLC Style.” In 1979, automation was still the focus and Michael Gorman, then Director of Technical Services, University of Illinois, presented “Closing the Card Catalog … the Implications of AACR2.”
At the 1981 meeting, the luncheon speaker talked about book preservation and conservation. Budgeting was the dinner topic, and Saturday morning sessions covered book repair, staffing patterns, budgeting, and time management. In 1982, 141 registrants listened to Ben Tucker talk about the Library of Congress’ process for cataloging a book. He also answered questions about Library of Congress general cataloging practices following the lunch meeting. The Chairman of OVGTSL participated in an electronic mail project that year with the other chairs of the thirty-one groups affiliated with ALA/ RTSD. In a letter concerning this effort, he wrote, “The age of electronic mail is certainly here, and I believe in the future we’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the library world.”47 At the next annual meeting, the featured speaker began to look to the millennium with “Issues in Libraries to the Year 2000.” Also in 1983 the organization’s bylaws were extensively revised. Annual dues were raised to $5.00, and the titles of the officers changed from Chairman and Vice-Chairman to Chairperson and Vice-Chairperson. The Treasurer duties were expanded so that he or she “shall also serve as Chairperson of the Registration Committee.”48 Members voted to move the archives from OSU to the University of Kentucky. For the 1984 conference, planners decided to host a workshop conducted by CompuTech, which marketed a product to allow library managers to monitor library operations. The workshop was not well-received by attendees, and the minutes note that “many of the workshop attendees did not stay for the further activities of the conference.”49 The theme of the following year’s conference at Purdue was “Library Leadership: A Quest for Excellence,” with the keynote address given by the Director of the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1986, the meeting days changed to Thursday and Friday, a tradition which still persists. The theme of this meeting in Berea, Kentucky, was “Technical Services: A Look at What’s New.” The keynote speaker addressed automation and technical services, and there were four afternoon breakout sessions held simultaneously to discuss the keynote session. The 1987 conference was in Athens, Ohio, but there is no information in the archives on this meeting. In 1988 the theme was “Library Technology in the 90s,” with Richard Boss as the keynote speaker. There was also a presentation on “The Impact of Technology on Technical Services: Will You Have the Same Job?” The first annual newsletter was launched in 1988, and it was noted that “OVGTSL was able to provide financial assistance for attendance at the 1988 conference in the form of grant awards to two library science students…”50 While student scholarships had first been proposed in 1976, there are no notes in the extant minutes between 1976 and 1988 to indicate that any scholarships were offered until the 1988 conference. In 1989, two students each from Indiana University, Kent State University, and the University of Kentucky were given awards to attend the meeting.
1980s Automation and integrated library systems were still the topics of interest in the 1980s. Saturday morning sessions concerned all aspects of technical services. Host libraries often demonstrated their automated systems. Some of these were OCLC’s Acquisitions Subsystem, Faxon’s Online Serials Management System, and Northwestern University’s NOTIS. At the 1980 meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, the cataloging discussion group talked about problems in adopting AACR2. The serials discussion group listened to speakers from Indiana and Purdue Universities discuss projects to develop online serials files. The acquisitions librarians foresaw many problems with the OCLC Acquisitions Subsystem and concluded that “OCLC appears to be counting heavily on revenues from the subsystem in its further development plans.”45 At this meeting the secretary presented a brief history of the organization that she had compiled.46
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The final meeting of the 1980s focused on online database maintenance and the Linked Systems Project (LSP) which was under development by Library of Congress, the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN), and the Western Library Network (WLN). There was discussion about OCLC’s database maintenance, and several panelists described automated systems in their libraries, their effectiveness, and ease of database maintenance.
truth of the matter is technical services, as we know it, is disappearing.… We must all come to the realization that the golden age of cataloging is over.”55 The Newsletter Committee successfully obtained an ISSN for the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Newsletter in 1994. Reorganization was the common theme of the speakers at the 1995 meeting, including reorganization based on continuous quality improvement principles, and retraining technical and public services staff to make better use of personnel. The future again figured into the theme of the 1997 meeting, with sessions predicting technical services at the Millennium, as well as more specific topics like subject access and the Internet, using focus groups to match user expectations, and managing and delivering electronic journals. The 1998 theme was “Color Us Bold: The Spectrum of Library Technical Services.” There were multiple sessions focusing on topics such as approval vendor selection, database maintenance, outsourcing, and subject headings. This meeting was held at Western Kentucky University (WKU) in Bowling Green. For this meeting WKU created a Web site for OVGTSL. Deana Groves, a librarian there, created the Web site at www. wku.edu/Library/ovgtsl/home/html. There were three scholarship students in 1998, but the number of scholarship students has varied over the years, with six winners being the most in any given year. As the Millennium approached, the last meeting of the decade saw presentations on acquiring, licensing, and cataloging electronic resources, authority control from paper to online, and even a session on Eastern Michigan’s automated storage system. In 1999, the bylaws were again amended, using the 1983 bylaws as the basis, despite the small bylaws change made in 1991 to change RTSD to ALCTS. The geographical area was changed to: Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. Dues increased to $10.00. The Web site hosted at WKU was added to the bylaws under Article VI “Affiliations.” Additionally, for each annual meeting the host site was required “to maintain a web page at their institution for current annual meeting information and to provide the URL to the web page contact at Western Kentucky University for a link to be added to the organization’s web site.”56
1990s With the approach of the Millennium in the 1990s, librarians focused on the future. Keynote speakers remained an important program feature, but an increasing number of concurrent sessions enriched the meeting and provided good networking opportunities. Student scholarships were awarded yearly. In 1990, the theme was “Back to the Future,” and technical services librarians were urged to keep up with new technologies and current trends. At the meeting at Columbus, Ohio, attendees spent Friday afternoon at OCLC, where they attended demonstrations of OCLC’s PRISM Service and took tours of the facility. One of the sessions introduced the SISAC code,51 and the speaker assured the audience that “… the SISAC code can automatically generate data for that field for predicted check-in and claims.”52 Speakers from OCLC discussed issues related to format integration which would be implemented at the end of 1993. Keeping with the theme of the future, the 1991 meeting invited proposals for “The Once and Future Catalog: Enhancing User Access,” and all the speakers at the Indianapolis site focused on different types of users, what they wanted in accessing information, and how access could be enhanced. The first poster session was presented at this meeting. The bylaws were also amended so that all appearances of the name “Resources and Technical Services Division” were replaced by the “Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS).”53 The following year’s meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, returned to the present with “Managing Our Collections: Views From the Basement.” Topics covered all aspects of collections, from acquisition to weeding. Over 100 people attended the 1993 conference in Oxford, Ohio, where speakers gave brief histories and reported on the status of the current work at OCLC, OhioLink, Greater Cincinnati Library Consortium, Kentucky Library Network, INCOLSA, OHIONET, and SOLINET. The theme of the 1994 meeting was “Technical Services in the Library Without Walls,” which dealt with changes in technical services in the automated environment. This conference was held in Bloomington, and the planners expected only eighty-five people, but registration reached 150. Arnold Hirshon, the keynote speaker, focused on the challenges libraries, and particularly technical services librarians, faced in a virtual world.54 As the final speaker noted, “Arnold’s right.… We can agree or disagree with him … but the
2000s Not surprisingly, the current decade of the OVGTSL meetings reflects the change in libraries from ownership to access of resources and the ways that technical services continue to respond to change. Preservation, collection development, XML, the open archive initiative, FRBR, and metadata have been session topics at several meetings. While the bylaws call for the archives to be housed at the University of Kentucky, the records of OVGTSL for this decade are, instead, found primarily on the World Wide Web. In 2001, the theme of the conference was “The Evolution of Technical Services, Alexandria to Virtual: Problems to Solutions.” Sessions focused on union
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listing, Dublin Core, state documents, and librarians becoming publishers. The conference newsletter became available in electronic format only and can be found at the OVGTSL Web site. At this conference a motion was passed to appoint a task force to submit a recommendation to OCLC that a MARC version of the Dublin Core be developed. At the 2003 meeting the minutes reflected that this motion “proved to be unnecessary because it has already been developed and is available through OCLC Connexion.”57 There was no meeting held in 2002. XML was the subject of the keynote address in 2003, with other sessions concerning adding table of contents to bibliographic records, integrating Web sites into the OPAC, preservation, metadata, getting published, and even inventing the new technical services librarian. The minutes of 2003 also show that a correction was made to a proposal regarding the college affiliation of students eligible to apply for OVGTSL scholarships. Those eligible “would include full- and part-time students, at the graduate or undergraduate level, enrolled in either on-campus or distance learning classes.”58 Also at this meeting the Chair announced that an OVGTSL listserv was set up in 2002 by a library support staff member at the University of Kentucky. Members can sign up through the OVGTSL Web site. The keynote session of the 2004 conference in Louisville, Kentucky, exemplified the theme of the conference by stressing that technical services and public services both share the common aim of serving users. Cataloging digital resources, scholarly communication, Internet booksellers, and electronic journals were some of the topics of the concurrent sessions. The College Libraries of CONSORT in Ohio organized the 2005 conference, with sessions typical of the interests of the Millennium—examination of technical services workflows, automated collection development, AACR3 and, as always, presentations on the current status of specific projects, like the OhioLINK Digital Media Center Application Profile and the Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium. The 2006 conference, “Crossroads to the Future,” at Indiana State University, focused on the idea that technical services personnel must continue to process traditional, as well as virtual, materials which will require changes in processing and organization. But, as has been the case for decades, technical services librarians will face these new challenges and adjust accordingly.
has been held most often in Cincinnati, Louisville, and Berea. There were six times in eighty-three years that the conference was not held (1927–1928, 1940, 1944–1945, and 2002). (For a complete list of dates and places hosting the conference, see appendix B.) Luckily, many of the early records have been preserved, but the authors think it is important to continue to preserve the history of this group. The archives at the University of Kentucky reveal that minutes and programs were sent fairly consistently to the archives from the group’s inception through the 1970s. The minutes of the early years of the organization contain a wealth of information, though some are much more descriptive than others because some of the recorders were just more verbose than others. In many of the years prior to the 1970s, one cannot only find papers that were actually presented, but also tapes of the proceedings. However, there are gaps in the archives. Minutes of the business meetings can be found in most, but not all, of the print newsletters, and this is also true for the electronic newsletters. In the last two decades, the records have become incomplete or sketchy, and researchers cannot get as clear a picture of the meetings as offered from the past detailed records. Electronic access does not help with preservation in the archives, and some records that exist only in electronic format are not being sent to the archives in paper form. In addition, it appears that there has been some inconsistency in reporting meeting activities to the Council of Regional Groups. There are no online conference newsletters for 2005 or 2006, though there are programs for both of these years. The fact that this meeting moves from year to year has very likely contributed to the incomplete records that are being preserved. Like other regional organizations, OVGTSL has a long history. It is one of ALA’s original regional groups. It relies solely on a loose organizational structure and volunteers to host each conference, plan programs, and arrange special events from a Wednesday evening or Thursday morning through Friday. Those who have attended these meetings have heard many well-known (and not so well-known) speakers in the library world who have provided much food for thought about issues that were germane to their profession. To follow this history through minutes, bylaws, conference programs and themes, and organizational changes is to see the trends, concerns, and complexities of all aspects of library technical services and to study the impact of national standards, projects, and professional associations on workflow and management responsibilities. The history of OVGTSL is a history of library technical services.
Conclusion The annual conference of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians has rotated among three states, with Indiana and Ohio having hosted the conference twenty-seven times each and Kentucky twenty-five times. Approximately forty meetings were held on college campuses, seventeen in hotels, three at public libraries, and the remainder in other miscellaneous venues. The conference was held in eight cities only once—Athens (OH), Covington (KY), Greencastle (IN), Madison (IN), Newark (OH), Notre Dame (IN), Toledo (OH), and Yellow Springs (OH). The conference
Notes 1.
110
American Library Association Division of Cataloging and Classification, In Retrospect: A History of the Division of Cataloging and Classification of the American Library Association, 1900–1950 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1950), p. 19.
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2.
3.
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Patricia T. Rine, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians: Historical Glimpses, Paper presented at Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Annual Conference (May 1980).
28. Papers, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1952. 29.
Minutes of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Annual Conference, 1924–2004, Special Collections and Digital Programs, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky (hereafter cited as Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians), 1932.
Clara Beetle, A.L.A. Cataloging Rules (Chicago: American Library Association, 1949).
30. Seymour Lubetzky, Cataloging Rules and Principles (Washington: Library of Congress, 1953). 31. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1954.
4. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1932.
32. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1957.
5.
J.C.M. Hanson, Catalog Rules; Author and Title Entries (Chicago: American Library Association Pub. Board, 1908).
33. Ibid.
6.
Joint Steering Committee for Revision of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. “A Brief History of AACR: Early English Language Cataloguing Codes,” http://www.collectionscanada.ca/ jsc/history.html (accessed January 4, 2007).
34. Miscellaneous Correspondence, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, undated. 35. Miscellaneous Correspondence, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1960. 36. Ibid.
7. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1933.
37. Ibid.
8. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1936.
38. Seymour Lubetzky, Code of Cataloging Rules: Author and Title Entry (Chicago: American Library Association, 1960).
9. Ibid.
39. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1963.
10. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1938.
40. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1968.
11. Ibid.
41. Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (Chicago: American Library Association, 1967).
12. American Library Association, Catalog Rules; Author and Title Entries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1941).
42. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1973.
13. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1942.
43. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1976.
14. Miscellaneous Correspondence of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1924–2004, Special Collections and Digital Programs, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky (hereafter cited as Miscellaneous Correspondence, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians), 1943.
44. Ibid. 45. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1980. 46. Rine, “Ohio Valley … Historical Glimpses.”
15. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1943.
47. Miscellaneous Correspondence, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1982.
16. Ibid.
48. Bylaws, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1983.
17. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1946.
49. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1984.
18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.
50. Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Newsletter, 1 (1988): 1.
20. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1948.
51. “Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI),” http://www. niso.org/standards/resources/Z39-56.pdf (accessed January 8, 2007).
21. Clara Beetle, A.L.A. Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1949).
52. Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Newsletter, 3 (1990): 3.
22. Library of Congress, Rules for Descriptive Cataloging in the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress, 1949).
53. Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Newsletter, 4 (1991): 6.
23. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1947.
54. Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Newsletter, 7 (1994): 1–2.
24. Miscellaneous Correspondence, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1947.
55. Ibid., 7.
25. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1950.
56.
26. Bylaws, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 1950. 27. Papers of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Annual Conference, 1924–2004, Special Collections and Digital Programs, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky (hereafter cited as Papers, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians), 1952.
“Bylaws of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians,” http://www.wku.edu/Library/ovgtsl/Bylaws.htm (accessed January 8, 2007).
57. Minutes, Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians, 2003, http://panther.indstate.edu/ovgtsl/minutes2003.html (accessed December 19, 2006). 58. Ibid.
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Appendix A OVGTSL Conference Themes, 1975–Present “Continuing Education for Technical Service Librarians” “Technical Service—Today and Tomorrow” “Cooperation in Processing—Regional, National, International” Theme unknown Theme unknown Theme unknown “Library Conservation: Resources, Staff, Budget” No theme “I Don’t Care What the Future Holds, But How Do I Deal With It” “Microcomputers in Libraries – Management Information Systems” (workshop) “Library Leadership: A Quest for Excellence” “Technical Services: A Look at What’s New” Theme unknown “Library Technology in the 90’s” “Links: Within and Without” “Back to the Future?” “The Once and Future Catalog: Enhancing User Access” “Managing Our Collections: Views From the Basement” “Technical Services in the Cooperative Network Environment” “Technical Services in the Library Without Walls” “Library Re_organization: Its Impact on Technical Services” “Technical Services Librarians: Leaders For Change” “Tradition and Innovation: Technical Services in the 21st Century” “Color Us Bold: The Spectrum of Library Technical Services” “Library Technical Services Is…” “The Brave New World of Technical Services” "The Evolution of Technical Services, Alexandria to Virtual: Problems to Solutions" No meeting “Racing to a Bright Future” “Technical Services=User Services: Making the Connection” “Technical Services: Rethink, Retool, Risk” “Crossroads to the Future” “Mapping Our Way: New Formations in Technical Services”
1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Appendix B OVGTSL Conference Dates and Locations, 1923–Present Date
City
State
Date
City
State
1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938
Cincinnati Indianapolis Louisville Berea No meeting held No meeting held Cincinnati Indianapolis Dayton Columbus Lexington Madison Cincinnati Berea Bloomington Cincinnati
OH IN KY KY
1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954
Richmond No meeting held Indianapolis Oxford Cincinnati No meeting held No meeting held Berea Indianapolis Yellow Springs Louisville Richmond Cincinnati Muncie Lexington Columbus
IN
OH IN OH OH KY IN OH KY IN OH
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IN OH OH
KY IN OH KY IN OH IN KY OH
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Date 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981
City Bloomington Berea Cincinnati Greencastle Louisville Springfield Muncie Berea Dayton West Lafayette Lexington Columbus Terre Haute Louisville Oxford Bloomington Berea Cincinnati West Lafayette Richmond Dayton Muncie Bowling Green Columbus Bloomington Lexington Cincinnati
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State
Date
City
State
IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH
1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Terre Haute Louisville Dayton West Lafayette Berea Athens Muncie Lexington Columbus Indianapolis Louisville Oxford Bloomington Covington Toledo Notre Dame Bowling Green Springfield Indianapolis Lexington No meeting held Terre Haute Louisville Newark Bloomington Bowling Green
IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY OH IN KY
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IN KY OH IN KY