Episode 621: The Fifth Floor But Also Everywhere

If you're cornered at a party full of non-library people--

[LAUGHTER]

And someone says, technical services-- what's that? What would you say?

I would say that we are the backbone of the library. We buy, we order, we describe, we make available the resources that our users are looking for.

And then one more question, and you only get a single sentence to answer. Do you have any idea why introversion and technical services seem to go together?

Introverts tend to want to be quiet, and technical services is generally a quiet place. Sorry, that was two sentences.

No, I heard the semicolon. You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with a crowd. I got Fred. I got Marlee. I got Alex. I got Cody. I got a guest to be named later. And there's an infant in here too, so be quiet. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it.

Our show today is called "The Fifth Floor, But Also Everywhere." It's Part 4 in our series, the Georgia Tech Library guidebook.

On the first Friday of each month, we visit a site in the guidebook and talk about a space or a service at the Georgia Tech Library.

Well, that explains the first part of our title, "The Fifth Floor." But I'm going to need more to understand the second part, "But Also Everywhere."

The fifth floor of the library's Crosland Tower is the staff only floor, and while multiple services and departments are represented on that floor, the most thoroughly represented, and perhaps most important--

Ooh.

Although don't tell the dean I said so-- is Technical Services.

The Technical Services Department is essential to the library, but they aren't front of house. They take care of infrastructure, processing, maintenance-- and I don't mean building maintenance. I mean maintaining the systems that make the library go. Vendor interactions, which I will never do, and a whole lot more. They are not as visible as some services, but their effect is everywhere in the library.

And now I get it.

Cool.

And our guest is the head of Technical Services here to tell us about what happens on the fifth floor and how it impacts everywhere else.

And our songs today are about getting important things ready for others, making sure those things get into the right hands, and providing access to those things on every level of the library, top to bottom. But of course, in our library, Technical Services is on the fifth floor. So let's take the elevator straight there to kick things off. This is "Fifth Floor" by Mystery Girl right here on Lost in the Stacks.

That was "Fifth Floor" by Mystery Girl. This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called "The Fifth Floor, But Also Everywhere." It's all about the Technical Services Department. It's the fourth in our Georgia Tech Library guidebook series.

On the first Friday of each month, we visit a site from the guidebook, featuring a space or service in the Georgia Tech Library.

Our guide today is Martin Patrick, head of Technical Services at the Georgia Tech Library and past guest. Welcome back to the show, Martin. We are delighted to get you out of the virtual studio and on the mic. I guess last time you were here, we did a Zoom interview.

We did do it via Zoom. I'm glad to be here in person with you all though.

Right. Yeah. It's nice to be back in the studio after so many years--

I've almost forgotten how things used to be.

Yeah. It was disruptive.

CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, so moving on. Martin, welcome back to the show. You are head of Technical Services. And so the first thing you're going to have to do is explain to us what do you do.

Well, Technical Services is the team where we make sure that our students, our faculty, and our staff can find, discover, access the materials they need. Whether that's a textbook for a course that they don't have to purchase, or the latest research articles in their field so that they can do their research. We make that happen.

Yeah. And as we mentioned in the intro, you make it happen without interacting with the students or the patrons usually. Right?

We interact with students and faculty quite a bit through--

Oh my gosh. I can't believe I said that. I'm so sorry.

No, that's OK.

It's a common misconception. And that's what we're here to do today, right? Talk about how we're everywhere. No, we--

So I started to step over you. What are the interactions that you wanted to talk about?

Yeah, so we get, when something's not working on the website, we get that through a ticket and we fix it. If somebody needs something for their course, we take that request, and we go out and we buy it. If somebody wants something for the Popular Reading Collection, we get that and we go out and we buy that. And then we get it, we catalog it, we process it, we put it on a shelf or we make the link available on the website.

I feel like you all run the library.

And that we just surround you all.

We do run the library, actually. I mean, to be honest.

Mhm.

Part of the thing of Technical Services is that we're all introverts. We're all a little shy, we're all a little modest. But the reality is, if you strip a library down to its core functions, it's putting materials into the hands of users. And that's what we do. CHARLIE BENNETT: So it's cataloging, acquisitions, interlibrary loan, course reserves. And what am I missing? Electronic resources management.

Electronic resources management, which is really important.

It is vital to our society. CHARLIE BENNETT: And so have you-- how does it feel to be over all of that and trying to make it all work together? It's a little overwhelming because it's so many different fields within one department. But the reality is we have a fantastic team of experts who know what they're doing. And I've been able to slide in and sort of shepherd them along, but they can run themselves. So it's a good feeling for me right now to get my hands on things.

Nice. You said slide in, but I think since we had on the show last, you've kind of slid up--

--the organizational ladder a little bit.

That's fair. I did slide up the ladder. I climbed up the ladder. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps.

That's right.

MARTIN PATRICK: No, that's right. I was the systems librarian here for about 18 months before I became the head of Technical Services.

And before you got to Georgia Tech, and then comparing that experience to when you got to Georgia Tech, were there any unique problems-- or I won't say problems, but unique situations--

We call them challenges.

Challenges.

Sure. Opportunities.

Opportunities. Yes.

Well, I think the biggest opportunity for systems and Technical Services is that while we have a lot of great people, we don't have enough great people. Especially for electronic resources, for the volume that we need to process and deal with, we don't have enough people to handle it. So that's a huge opportunity for us to build our team, and grow, and find efficiencies.

And I guess we're working on that right now.

We are. We're actively working on that. Yeah.

You're hiring some future Lost in the Stacks guests as we speak.

Yeah.

Exactly. CHARLIE BENNETT: We're actually going to talk to a Technical Services person next week too. Oh. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, Danielle's coming on to talk about her job. So we're calling this "The Fifth Floor, But Also Everywhere." Real quick, let's talk about the fifth floor. Are you all up there? I haven't been on the fifth floor, except to dodge the dean, in a while. That's where the dean is, though.

Yeah, that's--

That's the wrong place to dodge the dean.

I'm there, and then I'm like, why am I here? And then I go.

Got it.

What's the fifth floor like?

Yeah. Everyone in Technical Services is on the fifth floor, and it's pretty quiet. Like I said, we're a bunch of introverts. But we also rely on each other a lot. Everything we do is interconnected and interdependent. And so, whether it's via email, or talking face to face, we're constantly communicating with each other some way, usually via spreadsheets. But that's our own little shtick. CHARLIE BENNETT: By spreadsheets.

Is it just satisfying to get everything in order and then step away from it? MARLEE GIVENS: Charlie, that presumes that everything is in order. CHARLIE BENNETT: It sounds like it. Martin sounds like he's got everything in hand.

We've got everything in order. Yeah. It is very satisfying to get things in order. I'm personally not super tidy.

And so I take that need to organize out on Technical Services work.

Yeah. And we've been talking about hiring, and fifth floor, and all that. Are you all going to have to move if you get any more people? Do you have some space to expand?

We have several cubicles that are still open. So we've got room to grow.

All right. Good enough.

This is Lost in the Stacks, and we will be back with more from Martin Patrick, head of Technical Services at the Georgia Tech Library, after our music set.

File this set under TJ1370.E398. (SINGING) Down in the basement Yeah Down in the basement Yeah

That was "99th Floor" by the Moving Sidewalks, some '60s Texas garage there featuring, on guitar.

Billy Gibbons?

It is indeed Billy Gibbons.

That's right. Don't test me, Fred.

Before that, "Elevator Hopper" by Kid Koala. And we started off with "Down in the Basement" by King Coleman. Songs about the bottom floor, the top floor, and getting to every floor in between.

This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called "The Fifth Floor, But Also Everywhere." It's another episode for our Georgia Tech Library guidebook.

Our guest is Martin Patrick, head of Technical Services at the library. His office is on the fifth floor, along with his department, but their influence is everywhere. All right. We tried to break down some of the stuff that you all do. Let's go ahead and get granular here.

Let's do it. CHARLIE BENNETT: So acquisitions-- probably a good place to start. You all get the stuff that people need. We do. We order it. We receive it. So the way it works for us is we have two sources. The content management group makes all the decisions about databases and big packages like that. But then we get a lot of requests from students and faculty for individual titles.

Is that an overwhelming flow of requests?

Yes.

Yeah.

We get a lot, which is great. I mean, people want to use the library. CHARLIE BENNETT: How do you decide between a lot of different requests that are so individual? I'm not talking about content management group stuff, but I assume that students and faculty are always asking for, there's a volume that I need from 1972, which has one piece of information that I require. What's the process of prioritizing? Well, it depends partially on, if it's a volume from 1972.

In which case, we'll probably turn to interlibrary loan, which we can talk about later. I mean, the process is mostly about how much it costs.

Yeah.

I mean, to be blunt. If it's under a certain amount, we in the department can make that decision on our own initiative. If it's over a certain amount, then the content management group has to make that decision.

Budgets.

But by and large, we buy almost everything that people request.

Is the criteria ever-- obviously, budget is a big criteria. But is there a subcriteria of evaluating how the resource can be accessed, like can we open this up to the entire Georgia Tech community? Is it a subset of that, or are there other restrictions? Does that come into it?

We do make decisions about what format we buy it in. Our preference is for unlimited user ebooks, if it's a book title, because then anybody can use it at any time. But oftentimes, we have to buy a print copy. For course reserves, we tend to buy print copies of textbooks because that's usually the only way you can get it. But for popular reading stuff, we can purchase that through OverDrive, or we can purchase that in hard copy.

Yeah. And students often come to not just Technical Services, but anybody in the library and say, hey, is the library able to get me a copy of that textbook?

Yes.

And often, the answer is no.

The one thing that we won't buy is textbooks for students. We will buy textbooks for courses, but we don't buy textbooks for student requests. CHARLIE BENNETT: So acquisitions, which is constantly assessing a bunch of requests-- and might even say directives from content management. Hm. And then moving on to cataloging. MARTIN PATRICK: Yeah, your favorite.

My absolute favorite because it is like Moby Dick. It is a rhizomatic archive that I cannot pull anything from.

Rhizomatic?

I don't even know what that word means. CHARLIE BENNETT: I really was just trying to get out of being the center of attention here. Tell us about cataloging.

Yeah, cataloging is the subteam of our department that focuses on describing the resource when it comes in. So when you are searching the public catalog online, you come across these records. All of that data that's in that record is driven by our cataloging team. So what the goal is to make it findable and discoverable using subject headings, keyword searching.

Yeah, well, so the library community has been trying to kill MARC for years and adopt something else. But, we've got all this legacy "meta-data," "meta-data" in certain formats. Well, so now it's all mostly a matter of, you can choose a format that works, but you have to make it talk to the other formats. It all has to be integrated in one place so people don't have to search one way for this kind of item, and another way for this other kind of item.

Right. And we can handle multiple kinds of metadata in our catalog if we wanted to. Currently, we choose to focus on MARC, which stands for machine-readable cataloging. No--

It is. Machine-readable cataloging. MARTIN PATRICK: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. It was this system that was designed for printing catalog cards for the card catalog. And so everything in there is kind of driven toward that goal, even though nobody uses a card catalog hardly anymore.

Today, you can still see the legacies of that because there are certain places where you have to have a period in just the right place.

Mhm.

Do you all have to make decisions about which schema we use, or do you have to protect using MARC or?

For cataloging purposes in Technical Services here, we just use MARC.

OK. Are there things coming at you? Are there suggestions from outside?

The great thing about our library software platform that we use is that it actually can translate the MARC into what's coming, which is called BIBFRAME.

Oh, nice.

--on the fly. So it can actually push out that data into the catalog, if that's what we want it to do.

And how many catalogers are there?

We have three.

It really-- I made a joke, obviously, at the beginning, but cataloging is such a precise and almost monolithic kind of practice. Have you done cataloging yourself? MARTIN PATRICK: I have, actually. I was a cataloger for almost four years. Yeah. And what did you think of that?

Which is why I'm not a cataloger anymore.

Actually, I really enjoy it because you see all the stuff that's coming in, and you get to interact with it. You have to look at it to catalog it. And so you get to see all of the new purchases that are coming in, or all of the new e-books that we're ordering, and really think about what it is and how to tell the book's story to a user is really what cataloging is.

Tell me a little more about that. What are the first things you think of when you're looking at a resource and trying to come up with a story?

If it's a book that has a back cover with a blurb on it, you start there. If it has it on the inside, on the book flaps, you can start there. Otherwise you start looking at the table of contents to try to get a sense of what it's actually about, or if there's an introduction that's easily readable. Or sometimes, if you can't figure it out, you go look on Amazon and see what they say. [LAUGHTER] Dirty secret of catalog.

Yeah, you always have to know what it's about, but you also have to know what it is. Because it will behave a certain way, depending on what kind of resource it is.

That's true. And the physical description is a big part of it because how tall it is matters for picking the right version. If it's a book that has multiple editions, the editions might be different sizes, and the sizing data in the catalog can help indicate if that's the correct copy or not.

Are there still lines of book carts around cataloging, filled with books, or have we moved close enough to e-books now that we don't have that stack overflow of books?

We don't really have an overflow anymore, but we do still have a lot of books that are always waiting to be cataloged.

I can remember going into cataloging before, in the before times, when it was in the basement, not the fifth floor. Walking in, and there'd be like, which book carts can I move to walk through this space, and which are in a very particular place? And I've been yelled at a few times about moving a book cart.

Yeah. Book carts are sacred objects to catalogers.

They really are. Yeah.

And so acquisitions and then to cataloging. Is there anything about those that you think probably we've never thought of? I mean, as library professionals, we certainly have a sense of what's happening. But is there anything that we clearly don't know about because we don't do it? Tell me about the magic, wizard.

I'm sure there is, right? I think the thing about cataloging and acquisitions, in particular, is that you don't think about it unless something's wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, Technical Services is either magic or something's happened.

Yeah.

I guess no one contacts you and says, yeah, the database is working perfectly.

And I just want to thank you for that.

I would love to get those tickets, but we don't. We don't generally get that.

You are listening to Lost in the stacks, and we're going to hear more about the fifth floor on the left side of the hour. All right. Bring it on home, Jessica.

All right. Can you hear me? Hi, y'all. I'm Jessica Meyerson, one of the co-directors of The Maintainers, and you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.

Today's show is called "The Fifth Floor, But Also Everywhere." Our guidebook site is the fifth floor of the Crosland Tower, where the Georgia Tech Library's Technical Services Department performs feats of strength and practical magic. As I tried to write this mid-show break, I went through a set of metaphors for Technical Services. They are the kitchen to the library's restaurant. They are the plumbers, carpenters, and masons of the library's house.

This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is part of the Georgia Tech Library guidebook. This episode is called "The Fifth Floor, But Also Everywhere."

We're speaking with Martin Patrick, the head of Technical Services at the Georgia Tech Library, about what happens on the fifth floor and why it's important everywhere. So we talked about cataloging and acquisitions in the last segment. And then there's a few other things to talk about in this one. Let's do electronic resource management.

Let's do it.

What is that?

That is a fantastic question that everyone has been trying to find an answer to for years. It's everything. It touches acquisitions, it's cataloging, it's interlibrary loan, it's course reserves, it's working with users on the stuff that they encounter in the catalog that's not working right. It's all of that, and then it's also sometimes not any of that. Sometimes it's looking at license agreements.

So is the definition slippery because things keep changing in technology and what we do, or because some sort of inherent vice to understanding it? It's not really any one thing, and so we call a whole bunch of things electronic resource management?

I think it's because we don't have someone called the print book management person.

Oh, we should though.

And their responsibility then would be to encompass all of these various things that everyone's doing. But we have electronic resources management positions because of the history of the position. When the transition from physical serials to electronic serials started, somebody needed to manage those electronic serials. CHARLIE BENNETT: That's the first step-- And then since then, now it encompasses everything.

Yeah, the competencies live within the serials community. Right?

Yeah. Historically, it came out of serials librarians.

Yeah.

They're the closest thing to what we think of as e-resources because there's new stuff within the same journal, or database, or whatever. The content itself is always changing because new stuff is being added, like a journal.

Like a journal. Exactly.

And in your list of things that might be-- there was a section that sounded like putting out fires.

MARTIN PATRICK: It's opportunities to improve the integrity of our discovery records. Dude, we are on the radio. You can say whatever you want.

Now say that again. What did you-- you just said a very cool way of saying putting out fires.

I said it's opportunities to improve the integrity of our discovery records.

Wow.

Which is a phrase from the library's strategic plan.

I love it. Discovery records. What are those?

That's what you encounter when you search the catalog. You can call those discovery records as shorthand.

I've been calling them the wrong thing for years.

I mean, you can call them whatever you want. No one's listening. Well, I guess lots of people are listening to this.

And the integrity, meaning simply, correctness.

Exactly.

And whether it comes up--

They describe the thing that it's supposed to describe, and that the link goes to where it's supposed to go.

So of all those things that make up electronic resource management, which one are you the most familiar with and which one are you the least familiar with?

Well, the thing I'm probably least familiar with personally is license agreements and negotiations with vendors. I was an electronic resources librarian for a little while, but I was more focused on the discovery side of things, making sure things were working correctly, making sure that things were cataloged correctly. CHARLIE BENNETT: That's the thing that keeps coming back for me is the vendor and licensing agreement stuff. There's a whole extra level of complexity to what you all do.

Yeah, because it really feels like, when you buy a print book and you put it on the shelf, it's yours. It has left the vendor at that point. CHARLIE BENNETT: The object is yours. The object is yours, right? And it no longer-- it really literally no longer belongs to the vendor. But the e-resource is not like that at all. I mean, when you click on it, you're actually in somebody else's website. The vendor's name's all over it.

Yeah, I mean, the first sale doctrine applies to print books, which is why we can circulate them, but it does not apply to anything electronic. And so we're bound by the license terms, which governs what we can do with it, who can access it, if we can take a chapter out of an e-book and send it to another school as part of interlibrary loan. Sometimes we can't do that with e-books.

Do you have any lawyers on staff? MARTIN PATRICK: Well, Georgia Tech has a whole office for counsel, and all of our contracts have to go through them. Oh, man. It's just more and more complicated every time I ask a question.

I don't think Georgia Tech legal is versed in the intricacies of library vendor negotiation either. They're just wanting to follow a university system of Georgia policies and Georgia law.

Right. There's a lot of things that intersect around this-- law, policy, preference.

So that's a whole 'nother show. I feel like we got that going.

Many shows.

Yeah. We have a little bit of time left in the segment, and we have two more areas of Technical Services to get in on. So interlibrary loan, one of my absolute favorite services in the library.

I think interlibrary loan is the best service overall, actually.

How would you pitch it to someone who's never heard of it before?

If we don't have it, we'll get it.

Yeah. I love it. I also think of it kind of like a black box, as a user. Because I just send a request, and they say, we'll process that. And then a lot of stuff happens, and I keep seeing little updates like, we've contacted these people. They didn't answer. We contacted these people. They answered. Book's coming. Here it is. And that's it. I don't know half the stuff that goes on there.

I mean, it is very much a wizard behind the curtain situation with ILL, interlibrary loan. And we in Technical Services have several people who work on it, but we also work with the people at the library service center because so many of our actual books are held there. So when we're lending stuff out, a lot of it has to come from the library service center. So we have to work with them a lot.

And interlibrary loan departments everywhere kind of know each other. Right? Because things are going in and things are going out.

Yeah. It's very much a community.

Yeah, we're on somebody's list too.

Yeah.

Hopefully, the good list.

I think we're pretty good about it, I think. OK. And then we have two minutes. Last thing is course reserves, right?

Yeah. So our course reserves is course reserves, right? So we have two flavors. We have regular course reserves and we have proactive course reserves. Regular course reserves is stuff that faculty or students submit, saying, this is in a course. Can we get a copy in the catalog, or can we get a print record? Can we get a print book? Proactive course reserves. We go through syllabi of courses and see what resources are on those, and whether or not we have it.

How are you getting those syllabi?

We ask faculty if we can look at them.

OK, nice.

Yeah. That's what Danielle's job is. So next week she can tell you all about it.

Martin, we've asked you a lot of different things that Technical Services do, and you can just sum them up in a single sentence. You've demonstrated that. That, to me, indicates a future in library administration.

: Fred is cursing you.

I told the team when I first started that we were definitely going to take over the library together. So here we go.

Maybe it's already happened.

Maybe it's already happened. CHARLIE BENNETT: I mean, I really do think you all are the library. Well, we have to finish. Obviously, we're going to come back and revisit all of these things in other shows. I hope that you'll be back again. Anytime.

But do you have a last thought about Technical Services? I know it's really important to you, especially important for people to know about it. So what do you want to say to finish this off?

I just want to say it's the best department in the library. Everybody is an expert. Everybody is great to work with. And I'm just really glad to be a part of it. And I'm really proud to be the head of Technical Services here.

I love the optimism, Fred.

This is Lost in the Stacks, and today we visited the fifth floor of Crosland Tower for the Georgia Tech Library guidebook. Our guest was Martin Patrick, the head of Technical Services at the Georgia Tech Library. And thank you, Martin, for being on the show. MARTIN PATRICK: Thanks for having me.

File this set under ZA4230.H35.

That was "It's All in your Hands by Nile Rodgers. And before that, "Find It" by Bass Drum of Death. Songs about making things findable and getting them into the right hands.

Alex, that was the nicest way to say Bass Drum of Death I've ever heard.

Today's show was called "The Fifth Floor, But Also Everywhere" and on our way to the credits, I want to ask, what's the most recent library task you completed that connected with Technical Services? Mine is finding an e-book of Sirens of Titan this morning and getting it onto a mobile device. How about you, Fred?

Well, I think this interview tells us that pretty much everything we do at the library--

Technical Services. But for me, a specific example, an aerospace faculty member contacted me last week looking for an original citation that he thought was from the 1920s. He was unsure. I was able to help him track down the right citation, thanks to the Technical Services work of other libraries in the US.

There we go.

And then, of course, his next question was, how can I get a copy? Only a couple of libraries in the country have this title. And at that point, I said, Georgia Tech's interlibrary loan has got you covered. And they covered it. Marley?

So I got an email from a psychology scholar who was alerting me to this new two-volume encyclopedia of emotions, and I thought it would make a good purchase for the Georgia Tech Library. And so from my initial email request to the books actually being in the catalog and available took only one week.

Nice.

So I'm going to cheat, and mine's actually something that's coming up-- surprise, Martin--

So we have our dean's papers that have been processed, and she has many, many boxes of books, would you believe. So those are going to go to cataloging. And they're hanging out waiting for us to send an email and alert you guys, basically.

I always feel just a little bit terrible when I send a box of books over for you all to sort out.

It's several boxes.

But I'm also glad that you all are doing it. OK, roll the credits.

Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by me, Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe and Marlee Givens.

Legal counsel and a box of Wrigley's excelled mints were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE BENNETT: Special thanks to Martin for being on the show, along with Glenna, Jackie, Nicholas, Presley, Danielle, Stephanie, Carolyn, Rick, Teresa, Wendy, and Will for their fifth floor shenanigans. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.

Our web page is library.gottech. edu/LostInTheStacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us.

Next week, we get another view of Technical Services when we talk to the affordable learning librarian.

It's time for our last song today, and listener, if you've ever found something you need in a library, whether it was a physical book, a digital book, a gadget, or anything else, then rest assured you were able to find it, access it, and enjoy it because of the Technical Services Department. Whatever it is that the library provides for the user, Tech Services goes above and beyond to make sure it's there for the community.

Oh yeah.

Right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody.