Learning more about Texas Tech Library and Cataloguing

Student: Austen Esch

Supervisor: Shelley Barba

February 7, 2025, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

I am temporarily at my workstation for the day before Mrs. Barba takes me on a tour of Texas Tech Library. She thinks it is a good idea for me to become familiar with the space and to meet other librarians.

              I was beginning to feel a lot better about my responsibilities and the tasks required of me for the subject headings. However, Mrs. Barba had noticed from our previous sessions that I was pretty stressed out about the situation. She decided that we would tour the Texas Tech Library so that I would be familiar with the space. She told me that I could get back to working on the subject heading later. She also wanted to introduce me to some of her fellow librarians who work in different departments. I was also surprised to learn that there are a lot of other things at the library that do not have any specific affiliation with the place housing them. For example, there was a 3D printing room, a virtual reality room, and a music recording studio. These were all housed within the Texas Tech Library in various rooms off of the main area. All of these were set up by departments outside of the library that did not have room to house them in their main buildings. Also, she showed me and explained that a lot of the library has been converted into a study hall/computer space for Texas Tech students to use. Mrs. Barba explained that that was the direction that many academic libraries were going now that digitalization has made it so that huge collections of books that take up a lot of space are no longer necessary. We took a look at the fifth floor, where they were in the process of clearing an area for tables and computers. There were several large boxes that were full of physical books that were to be placed in storage.

We met with the digitalization librarian, whose job it is to digitalize books and documents. He and Mrs. Barba had worked together in this department many years ago. I also met with a woman who had graduated two years ago and was now working in the digitalization department. Mrs. Barba also took me to see the IT people who are specifically in charge of technology for the library and are separate from the IT that overlooks the whole school. She explained that this was necessary because the tech needs of a library are different than those of the school as a whole. We then looked at the meeting rooms all the library staff met in for important meetings. Even after all of this, we did not visit every part of Texas Tech’s library, and before I left, Mrs. Barba told me that she forgot to take me to the cataloging department. Considering what I’m working on for her is related to cataloging, she wanted to make sure that I got to see that department.

 

February 10, 2025, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

I am at my workstation making good progress on fixing the subject headings. Mrs. Barba tells me that we are going to work on writing a journal article for my project.

              As I worked on the subject headings of the Excel documents, I became more familiar with the process and less stressed. In order to do the work, I open one of the Excel documents and move it to the left side of the computer screen. I then opened the Library of Congress Subject Heading website to check the terms and move it to the right side of the computer screen. Fixing the headings involves going through each of the already existing headings and checking if the terms present are represented in the LCSH term list. After working on this for a while, I met with Mrs. Barba to discuss my ongoing work with the subject headings. We have decided that she will meet with me every Monday to discuss how everything is going and to make sure that I’m still confident in my work. However, I can easily ask her a question at any time.

              Mrs. Barba told me she had the idea for me to record and publish my work. This would involve me creating a separate Excel list where I record the level to which I have had to alter each dissertation's subject headings. With this information, I can write about my process and determine whether or not it is worth Texas Tech's time and money to hire someone to go through all 25,000 dissertations and alter their subject headings. As a result, I will need to go through the subject headings I have already completed and begin indicating how much I had to alter them in order to make them LCSH-compliant. Mrs. Barba said that she would help me in the writing process for this new project. The alternative would be to create a poster. However, this would involve going to a convention and presenting my findings to an audience, which I decided I did not want to do.