“Insourcing” of Cataloging in a Consortial Environment: The UC Santa Barbara–UC San Diego Music Copy Cataloging Project

A collaborative cataloging project for music sound recordings between two University of California campuses matches available staffing at UC San Diego with the need for better access to a high-priority collection of audio CDs at UC Santa Barbara, with promising results. This article discusses the decision to collaborate, the project planning process, cataloging standards and workflow issues, network level cataloging within an international database (OCLC), communication between personnel on the two campuses, managing cataloging review, an assessment of the project's achievements to date, and implications and future directions for similar cooperative projects.

"Insourcing" of Cataloging in a Consortial Environment

INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE SCENE
Since the mid-twentieth century, the University of California Libraries have had a strong history of building collections consortially. Over the past decade or two, individual University of California libraries have also increased efficiencies in the acquisition, cataloging, processing, and storage of library materials. System-wide storage efficiencies were addressed beginning in the 1980s with the construction of the Northern and Southern Regional Library Facilities. In 2000, the UC System developed a model shared cataloging and record distribution program, the Shared Cataloging Program (SCP), based at UC San Diego, to provide records for electronic serials and monographs purchased for the System by the California Digital Library. 1 In 2002, the University's Collection Development Committee formed a task force charged with planning workflows for a pilot project to explore centralizing the cataloging of system-wide shared print materials. 2 Later, in 2005, the Bibliographic Services Task Force (BSTF) report, Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California, 3 proposed that UC library cataloging should be viewed and organized as a system-wide enterprise. In 2007, UC library administrators began work with OCLC on a next-generation consortial catalog on the WorldCat Local platform; it is now the system-wide public access catalog interface. 4 In 2009, the Next Generation Technical Services (NGTS) initiative was launched with the objective of integrating collections and technical services functions across the system. Included in the initiative are proposals for a system-wide shelf-ready approval plan, enterprise-level financial mechanisms, and system-wide cataloging standards for consortial and collaborative cataloging. 5 In addition to the formal University-wide initiatives, several smaller cataloging arrangements have been developed in recent years among members of the ten UC campuses. An outgrowth of a 2008 survey of system-wide cataloging format and language expertise conducted by the University's Heads of Technical Services (HOTS) group, these arrangements typically involve two or three campuses, with one campus providing foreign language cataloging or support to another lacking the necessary expertise. These initiatives and arrangements form the backdrop against which the collaborative music cataloging project described in this article was initiated.
At the end of 2010, UC San Diego's Associate University Librarian for Collection Services forwarded an open call offering music cataloging support to her counterparts across the system. The offer was quite broad-cataloging of scores, sound recordings, and video materials were all possibilities-and stipulated that the San Diego catalogers would prefer working with surrogates in order to avoid the necessity of transporting library materials back and forth. UC Santa Barbara's Head of Technical Services, aware of the Library's sizeable music backlog, forwarded the offer to the Head of UC Santa Barbara's Music Library who, welcoming the opportunity, agreed that the offer should be pursued.
In the discussion that follows, the authors will place this undertaking in the context of published accounts of collaborative cataloging projects. We will follow with discussions of our project planning, implementation, and management, as well as a consideration of the shared cataloging standards used for the project. Finally, we will share some of the lessons we have learned from this project, and delineate potential issues that might arise in other shared cataloging projects.
Throughout our discussion, we have opted to use the term "insourcing" to characterize the nature of this project. The word stands in contrast to the well-established term "outsourcing," in which a business or other organization contracts out work (e.g., to an external vendor) that would previously have been carried out internally. The emerging term, insourcing, describes a business practice that the Oxford English Dictionary describes simply as "the action or process of obtaining goods or services in-house, esp[ecially] by using existing resources or employees." 6 In calling the project an example of insourcing, we emphasize the project's alignment with UC's Next Generation Technical Services vision of moving from separate library operations at each campus towards one large operation with pooled resources.

LITERATURE REVIEW
The genesis of the insourcing project proposed by UC San Diego's Associate University Librarian for Collection Services can be found in the UC Bibliographic Services Task Force report mentioned above. 7 Included in this rethinking is a recommendation that the UC System "rearchitect" its cataloging workflow on a system-wide basis: To maximize the effectiveness of our metadata creation, University of California cataloging should be viewed as a single enterprise. We need to move beyond a practice of shared cataloging to a practice of integrated cataloging, in which the system adopts a single set of cataloging standards and policy, eliminates duplication of effort and local variability in practice, provides system wide access to language, format, and subject expertise, and creates a single copy of each bibliographic record for the entire system [emphasis ours]. 8 While the University of California has not yet adopted a single systemwide cataloging practice and may never entirely succeed in doing so, the UC San Diego Library's offer to "lend" its music copy cataloging expertise to other UC Libraries without expectation of reciprocation certainly appears to represent an experiment in the possibility of system-wide cataloging integration. Thus, while UC San Diego may appear to derive little immediate benefit from the arrangement discussed in this article, it nevertheless has "Insourcing" of Cataloging in a Consortial Environment 85 the potential to benefit from any future system-wide integration, a point to which we will return in our conclusion.
The literature on cooperative and shared cataloging arrangements that bear similarity to the San Diego-Santa Barbara insourcing project is extensive. 9 The arrangements generally described, however, differ from the project being discussed here in at least two important ways: first, the institution is sharing work done for its own benefit-that is, cataloging materials that it owns-and sharing the resulting records with other institutions that also own those materials. In the present case, as it turns out, UC San Diego owns copies of only a small percentage of the items its staff is copy cataloging for UC Santa Barbara. Second, and related to the first, in a cooperative or shared arrangement, both institutions apply shared cataloging standards. This will not necessarily be the case in an arrangement such as San Diego-Santa Barbara's, forcing the catalogers performing the work to modify their standards and practices to a greater or lesser extent in order to conform with the requirements of the institution for which they are performing this service.
The literature discussing small-scale cooperative or insourcing arrangements of this nature is rather sparse and generally speculative. It tends to focus on foreign language materials and involves, or has an expectation of, reciprocity of expertise or exchange of money for services. One of the first such accounts, by Joseph Kiegel and Merry Schellinger, describes a cooperative exchange between the Universities of Minnesota and Washington in which the former provided Scandinavian language expertise, and the latter, Arabic. 10 Not long thereafter, noting that vendor-supplied cataloging was too expensive for many libraries with foreign language cataloging backlogs, James Chervinko published a study on the then-current state of, and possibilities for, cooperative exchanges between or among libraries with complementary language expertise, or of arrangements similar to outsourcing, in which a library with a particular language expertise would charge a fee for cataloging another library's materials. 11 Chervinko's study reports in detail what he found, but he does not provide a summary of its results or draw any overall conclusions other than that these arrangements, though not a complete solution to the problem of foreign language backlogs, could substantially reduce them.
The most extensive study of this subject is Magda El-Sherbini's largely theoretical examination of possibilities for sharing cataloging expertise as an alternative to outsourcing 12 (on which see below), bolstered by her long experience with the outsourcing of Slavic language materials at Ohio State University. 13 Pointing to the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control's report On the Record, 14 as well as similar reports from the Indiana University Task Force on the Future of Cataloging 15 and that of the University of California Libraries Bibliographic Services Task Force mentioned above, El-Sherbini writes, "Libraries have to think beyond their walls and go beyond sharing bibliographic records through OCLC, [by] also sharing unique expertise among them." 16 To this end, she presents five models, three for bibliographic records and two for authority control, and expresses the hope that her study will generate other models and ideas.
Insourcing bears a good deal of resemblance to outsourcing as a solution to the reduction of cataloging backlogs, particularly in the absence of specific cataloging expertise, and as an attempt at cost savings or a rational distribution of expenses. There are a number of studies and essays on outsourcing besides the one by El-Sherbini mentioned above. Among these are Sheila Ayers's essay on the effect on libraries of outsourcing their cataloging, 17 which provides an overview of the practice, including the reasons for it, and its advantages and disadvantages. Rebecca Lubas's chapter in a book on practical cataloging discusses how to approach and manage outsourcing, as well as its rationale. 18 Kenneth Bierman and Judith Carter describe the University of Nevada Las Vegas's generally positive experience with shelf-ready books. 19 On the other hand, there is Faye Leibowitz's 2007 North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) conference presentation on the outsourcing of a retrospective cataloging project involving a special collection of serials at the University of Pittsburgh. 20 In her presentation, which is entitled "Risky Business," Leibowitz, like El-Sherbini, suggests that an alternative to outsourcing-in this case, hiring project staff-might have been preferable, had that alternative been possible.
Finally, little has been written specifically in regard to the insourcing, outsourcing, or collaborative cataloging of music materials, although music is sometimes mentioned along with foreign language materials as something that requires special cataloging expertise that may not be available or otherwise sufficient to a particular library's needs. Ruth Tucker's discussion of a cooperative cataloging project in a quasi-consortial environment that involved the retrospective conversion of music scores at the University of California, Berkeley 21 is useful in pointing out some of the specific issues and requirements pertinent to the cataloging of music materials, as well as its sheer expense. Tucker concludes that the project's cooperative approach was gratifyingly cost effective. More recently, Nancy Lorimer discusses a joint project, funded by a Mellon grant, to catalog 78 rpm recordings held by sound archives at Stanford and Yale Universities and the New York Public Library. Discussed in particular were the goals of the participating institutions, decisions taken in common regarding cataloging standards, a division of labor aimed at avoiding duplication of work, and especially Stanford's development for the project of a methodology for efficient batch searching and processing of cataloging copy in OCLC. 22

BACKGROUND
The Music & Media Cataloging Unit of the Metadata Services Department at UC San Diego consists of two full-time and two part-time staff whose "Insourcing" of Cataloging in a Consortial Environment 87 hours add up to 3.5 FTE (full-time equivalents), a number that has proven stable over the last decade. Two catalogers (1.7 FTE) concentrate on copy cataloging of sound recordings, scores, and moving image material. Another part-time cataloger (.8 FTE) serves as the unit's primary original cataloger of scores and sound recordings. A full-time unit head is dedicated to administration of the unit, occasional original cataloging in most formats, and participation in metadata projects and committees in the Metadata Services Department and University Library. Three staff members hold advanced music degrees, and the fourth has strong generalist music knowledge and a doctorate in library science. This level of staffing had served well through a period of strong purchasing and the presence of a large backlog, primarily the result of a major gift of approximately 27,000 compact disc titles, out of which nearly 20,000 were retained. As the unit neared completion of the copy cataloging component of the backlog, however, it became clear that cataloging capacity would soon exceed the incoming and deferred workload.
In contrast, cataloging resources at UC Santa Barbara had dwindled since the mid-1990s, from two full-time music catalogers plus student assistants, to one full-time music cataloger with occasional help from other cataloging staff. In 2009, upon the music cataloger's retirement, this dwindled to approximately one FTE with no occasional help, as that help-UC Santa Barbara's then-Special Formats Cataloger-added responsibility for the Music Library's original cataloging to her duties; and shortly thereafter, the Music Library's administrative assistant took on the copy cataloging of scores and eventually sound recordings on a half-time basis. Both of these individuals hold advanced degrees in music; the subsequently designated Music, Media, and Slavic 23 Materials Cataloger also holds a Master's degree in Library and Information Studies and a doctorate in ethnomusicology.
At the same time that UC Santa Barbara's music cataloging capacity was being gradually reduced, the collections in its Music Library were continuing to grow. The resulting backlog situation was exacerbated when the Library's heavily used CD collection was suddenly enlarged by a gift of over 2,000 titles with content that was of high interest to the Library's users. In order to provide potential users with at least minimal bibliographic access to materials in its backlogs, the practice at Santa Barbara is to import OCLC cataloging copy, if available, into its online catalog, from which expedited processing of these materials can be requested by patrons seeking access. In the Music Library, items such as CDs and DVDs that cannot be checked out are further provided with barcodes and call numbers, shelved in closed stacks, and made available for in-library use while awaiting the attention of cataloging staff-a necessity due to the wide range of quality and completeness represented in OCLC bibliographic records. 24 UC Santa Barbara Library is not unique in its music backlog. In the mid-1990s, Judy MacLeod and Kim Lloyd reported the findings of a survey in which 75% of their respondents reported backlogs of print and recorded music items; the percentage for academic libraries was slightly higher at 77%. The most important factors contributing to these backlogs included gifts and acquisitions in excess of staff and funding to process, and lack of catalogers with appropriate subject expertise. 25 It might also seem, however, that the library profession as a whole is not convinced of the necessity or desirability of fostering such expertise. At the turn of the millennium, A. Ralph Papakhian attributed this attitude to a rather paradoxical situation: on the one hand, the expense of cataloging music items relative to that of cataloging books had resulted, he believed, in "a prejudice against music in libraries." Regarding the expense, commercial recordings in particular often contain a number of different pieces of music recorded at different times and places, each of which may involve the participation of different creators and performers. In other words, the cataloging of a sound recording or score made up of a numerous pieces of music bears more resemblance to the cataloging of several books than to the cataloging of a single one-a situation that has become more acute as technological advances in media allow for the inclusion of increasing amounts of content on a single item. This expense, then, is the direct result of the provision of increased access to materials, something that the professional ethic of librarians would seem to valorize. 26 While it will ultimately be up to library administrators to determine whether they will continue to support the provision of detailed access to music materials, the music library profession clearly believes in the need for such provision. Recommended enhancements to WorldCat Local by the Reference Services Committee of the Music OCLC Users Group (MOUG) 27 and a Music Discovery Requirements document authored by the Emerging Technologies Committee of the Music Library Association 28 and endorsed by the Music Library Association Board of Directors on August 8, 2012 both indicate the importance to music users of "clear identification and display of information regarding the musical work," 29 as well as of particular versions (expressions and manifestations) of works; of the importance of persons and corporate bodies as access points to music scores and recordings; and of the resulting necessity of providing information sufficient to distinguish among similar or identical names and titles.

ESTABLISHING THE RELATIONSHIP AND DETERMINING THE MATERIALS TO BE CATALOGED
Once the Head of UC Santa Barbara's Music Library indicated her interest in pursuing UC San Diego's offer of music cataloging assistance, Santa Barbara's Head of Technical Services instructed two of this article's authors-UC Santa Barbara's primary monographs cataloger, and its (now former) Music, Media, and Slavic Materials Cataloger-to contact the third author, UC San Diego's Music & Media Cataloging Unit Head, in order to confirm the proposed project's feasibility and to work out the details of its implementation. In the course of the ensuing telephone conversation, the three of us established that our cataloging units shared similar philosophies and standards for music cataloging, and that the San Diego catalogers were well qualified for the work that Santa Barbara required. Shortly thereafter, the two Santa Barbara catalogers met with the Head of our Music Library to determine which materials would be most suitable for the project. Initially, at her suggestion, and with encouragement from our contact in San Diego, our discussion centered on Santa Barbara's music score backlog. At UC San Diego, experience with sending scans of parts of print monographs to a cataloging partner had demonstrated the feasibility of assembling a portable package of files that could serve as a basic cataloging surrogate for a print title. Scans of pertinent parts of a publication were sent to the remote cataloger, along with a simple form filled out with basic metadata such as size and pagination. As the project peaked in the days before the full blossoming of wikis and cloud file sharing resources, managing these file packages occasionally proved problematic. Additionally, creating the surrogates took some time, a situation mitigated somewhat by using student assistants to carry out the bulk of the work. These issues aside, the process ultimately proved to be a success for small batches of materials, and our current technological infrastructure would surely lessen some of these difficulties.
Scores can nevertheless prove more resistant than general monographs to the creation of effective digital or photocopied cataloging surrogates, and further pose multiple difficulties for a distance cataloging project that requires the catalogers to work from these surrogates. In general, scores as unique bibliographic entities can be difficult to distinguish from one another. Numerous issues, for example, may be printed from the same plates at very different points in time. As these issues carry the same plate number(s) and copyright date, but often lack a publication date, the cataloger may be forced to differentiate between them by evaluating factors such as condition, type or quality of paper, and size, and these differences may not be clearly reflected in a scan or photocopy. In addition, scores may be accompanied by individual parts that may or may not be the same size as the score-or each other. Finally, information important to an item's identification or description is not always found in the same location on every score: contents, dates and circumstances of creation, and editorial remarks, for example, may be found at or near the beginning or the end of a score. The situation requires the staff creating the surrogates to apply a level of care and judgment to each individual item that we did not initially envision for this project.
As a result, our discussion turned to the possibility that insourcing Santa Barbara's much larger CD backlog might be a more suitable project. Not only, as mentioned previously, were these materials of high interest to the Library's users, but the relatively small and uniform CD packaging format would, in most cases, permit a simple reproduction by staff of the disc surface and container back that could be then be transmitted by mail, together with the CDs' inserts or accompanying booklets, to San Diego's catalogers. All parties thus came to agree that UC Santa Barbara's CD copy cataloging backlog would be the focus of the San Diego-Santa Barbara insourcing project.

CATALOGING STANDARDS
At this point, the UC San Diego Unit Head developed a Scope of Work plan, modeled on contracts created for vendor cataloging projects, that outlined the cataloging services that the San Diego catalogers would provide for Santa Barbara (Appendix). In drafting the plan, he collaborated with the UC Santa Barbara music cataloger on determining the cataloging standards to be used. Both parties were committed to a fundamental principle of cataloging as much as possible at the network level. Using Santa Barbara's full-level OCLC cataloging authorization, the catalogers at UC San Diego would be directed to search for and catalog each item in the OCLC Connexion client, using the set of standards defined for the project. All edits and record enrichment appropriate for sharing at the network level were to be made to the OCLC master record under OCLC's Expert Community program; any further institution-specific changes would be applied after replacing the networklevel record. Cataloging for this project, then, balances the strengths and limitations of collaborative cataloging on a network level, permitting the use of available records and the provision of enriched access to the resources represented by the shared records, while at the same time, in the spirit of cooperation and the Expert Community program, respecting any previous catalogers' judgment.
The parties involved also agreed that, in general, work would progress more smoothly if UC Santa Barbara's requirements mirrored UC San Diego's practices whenever possible. In the very few cases where practices differed, if neither party felt strongly about the use of one practice over another, the Head of UC Santa Barbara's Music Library was asked for her preference.
Potentially the most difficult, but perhaps also the most interesting, part of these discussions centered on what one might call "standardizing the non-standard." Bibliographic records for sound recordings cataloged under the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2) can reflect different levels of completeness, ranging from concise descriptions that provide no more than the most basic information, to records that provide detailed access to all of a sound recording's content by means of a complete listing of its contents and the creation of controlled access points registering all performers, composers, titles, and genres/mediums of performance "Insourcing" of Cataloging in a Consortial Environment 91 represented. Both San Diego and Santa Barbara generally create or upgrade existing bibliographic records according to the latter standard for much of the material cataloged, believing such a level of access to be helpful to music users at both of our institutions. Such a level of access also aligns with the goals and standards expressed in OCLC's Expert Community guidelines, 30 as well as with the intent of the documents produced by the Reference Services Committee of the Music OCLC Users Group and the Emerging Technologies Committee of the Music Library Association referenced earlier. As a result, this is the level of access San Diego's catalogers agreed to provide for Santa Barbara in the Scope of Work document.
An example of the problems that can arise, however, when attempting to harmonize the practices of two or more cataloging institutions can be seen in questions regarding the application of relator codes 31 to the access points for performers, composers, and other individuals in MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) bibliographic records. Generally used by sound recording catalogers to identify the relationships of these individuals with the content of the item being cataloged, the list of codes invites inconsistency by providing similar codes that operate at different levels of granularity. There is, for example, a general code for "performer," as well as more granular codes for such roles as "instrumentalist," "vocalist," and "conductor." There are also different codes, such as those for "singer" and "vocalist," that might be used to signify the same relationship. While UC Santa Barbara's practice is generally to provide relator codes at a more granular level, OCLC's Expert Community guidelines would suggest that relator codes present in OCLC Master Records should not be changed to incorporate higher levels of granularity. The network-level restriction does not preclude a cataloging agency from making changes in its local catalog. The standards adopted for this project nevertheless direct San Diego's catalogers to leave relator codes in the records destined for Santa Barbara's catalog as found.
The use of relator codes may seem a fairly small point, but depending on how local online public access catalogs (OPACs) are implemented, different relator codes can index differently, causing split files; this is, in fact, the case with both of our institutions' OPACs. And even in cases where indexing is not an issue, the use of different codes for identical functions can lead to user confusion. The new cataloging code, RDA (Resource Description and Access), slated to be adopted by the Library of Congress on March 31, 2013, 32 places heightened importance on delineating relationships, and its Appendix I lays out a rich set of terms for them. 33 Our actions on the project in this regard align with the intent of the new cataloging code to develop a focus on relationships in bibliographic records: one of the overall goals of RDA is to enable catalogers and other metadata specialists to create bibliographic records that will function more effectively in the wider, and increasingly interconnected, data environment. 34 IMPLEMENTATION Having agreed on cataloging standards, our attention turned to implementation of the project. Tools that we had initially considered for use included such things as scanners and digital cameras for creating surrogates, wikis for sharing information, and project management software. After considering these possibilities, however-and in light of our decision that the project's focus should be CDs rather than scores-we decided that simpler tools such as e-mail, "snail" mail, photocopies, and spreadsheets were adequate for the project, and less time-and resource-intensive to manage than more "advanced" technologies.
Based on these decisions, UC Santa Barbara's music copy cataloger, who had been designated the project manager at his end, developed a provisional workflow. After testing Santa Barbara's part of the process, he created several implementation tools: procedures for processing the CDs for shipment to San Diego and upon their return; a simple tracking spreadsheet containing only two pieces of data-the UC Santa Barbara call number and the OCLC online save file number used by the UC San Diego catalogers; and a shipping form with spaces for insurance value, content description, approval signatures, and a tracking number.
The ongoing work of preparing shipments from Santa Barbara is done by a student assistant. This assistant selects the next group of CDs to be cataloged, checks the item record for each in the local Integrated Library System (ILS) (Ex Libris Aleph) to verify that it has not already been cataloged, and suppresses the record so that it does not display in the online public catalog. Each item record in Aleph is assigned a special item process status code to indicate that it is being sent to San Diego. The assistant then photocopies the disc surface of each CD (AACR2's chief source of information) and the back of the container when it contains pertinent information. The photocopies are placed in the CD booklet, creating the cataloging surrogate. The assistant records the call number for each title to be shipped on the tracking spreadsheet, and prints a copy to send to San Diego as a shipping manifest.
Booklets and photocopies, which are kept in call number order for shipping, are packaged in two overlapping file folders, rubber-banded together, and placed in a manila shipping envelope. This package, along with the custom shipping form, is shipped to UC San Diego inside a FedEx Tyvek envelope or box. Although the degree of packaging might be considered minimal, there has been no damage in the twenty-eight batches completed thus far. Safely packaging and transporting the actual CDs and their jewel cases would have required much more effort.
At the UC San Diego end, all project cataloging is handled by two advanced copy catalogers who have previously done most of the tasks associated with original cataloging. Both have been trained to evaluate and formulate access points, and one has been trained to supply original description for several formats, making their skill sets perfect for this project. In their workflow, incoming batches of work are divided between them in a ratio based on their incoming workloads and their official work assignments. Cataloging then commences based on the Scope of Work document. The San Diego catalogers, using Santa Barbara's OCLC authorization, make all changes appropriate for the OCLC master record and save the records in Santa Barbara's online save file after making any further edits needed for the UCSB local catalog. When completed, the catalogers record the save file number on the tracking spreadsheet. Each cataloger then sends their work to the other for a final review. Any questions are bounced to one of the two project managers: on San Diego's end, this is the Music & Media Cataloging Unit Head. Up to this point, the cataloging surrogates have proven altogether satisfactory in providing enough information for copy-searching the materials and the subsequent cataloging and enrichment of the OCLC master records. Before the project commenced, we predicted that discs would need to be shipped occasionally so that the cataloger could listen to the contents in order to answer certain questions not properly dealt with by the surrogate. Surprisingly, however, this has not proven necessary. Once the batch is reviewed, the surrogates are collected and shipped back to Santa Barbara.
When the completed materials are received by Santa Barbara, the student assistant completes the processing, using the tracking spreadsheet to cross match each CD's call number with the OCLC Connexion client online save file number. The assistant retrieves the bibliographic record cataloged by San Diego from the OCLC online save file and exports it into Santa Barbara's Aleph ILS, overlaying the existing record and completing or revising the holdings and items records in Aleph. Finally, the assistant reunites the disc, booklet, and case, recycles the photocopies, and reshelves the CDs.
To keep the affected parties informed, the project manager at UC San Diego provides periodic updates on the overall status of the project. These e-mail updates include such details as dates when batches are assigned to catalogers, moved into final review status, or readied for shipment. E-mail is also used for the catalogers' occasional questions for Santa Barbara, and by the project manager at each location to alert the other when surrogates are shipped or received. At UC San Diego, Confluence, the content collaboration tool created by the software firm Atlassian, is used to manage a common wiki space that functions as a shared collection point for all important documents and communications. The entire lifecycle of project materials from receipt in San Diego to shipment back to Santa Barbara is now tracked using one of the wiki pages. Current plans are to authorize selected collaborators at UC Santa Barbara to access the local project wiki pages and view the detailed workflow status.
Initially, Santa Barbara staff shipped batches of 30 surrogates for cataloging. As the San Diego catalogers adjusted to their new routine, the batch size was increased to 50. The two libraries developed a rhythm, rotating three batches at a time: while one batch (C) at Santa Barbara is being prepared to ship to San Diego, there is a batch (B) being cataloged at San Diego; at the same time, a completed batch (A) is on its way back to Santa Barbara. In practice, when San Diego sends Santa Barbara an e-mail indicating that Batch A is ready to ship back, Santa Barbara sends Batch C to San Diego, with the result that, ideally, no more than 100 of Santa Barbara's items are out at any given time.
Cataloging for most batches is completed in approximately four to seven working days. Use of the most economical mode of transport and campus mail services can add an additional week to either end of the timeline, resulting in a three week turnaround on average for each batch.

CONCLUSION: LESSONS LEARNED AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
So far, the UC Santa Barbara-UC San Diego insourcing project has been a success. Nineteen months into the project, 1173 titles had been cataloged by UC San Diego for the UC Santa Barbara Music Library, and the project is still ongoing. The Head of UC Santa Barbara's Music Library has expressed her satisfaction with the project, writing that it has provided a highly cost effective way for us to implement high-quality copy cataloging for the CD backlog in the Music Library. . . . [T]he collection that we targeted for the project is [of] high value for our campus, so the opportunity to have it cataloged has served us very well. 35 Much of the success of this project has been facilitated by the partner institutions being closely aligned in their cataloging policies: at the start of the project, UC San Diego's cataloging policies were similar to those of UC Santa Barbara, necessitating only a brief training period for the San Diego catalogers involved. Although subtle differences in cataloging between the campuses proved troublesome to keep separate in practice, working in large batches has helped UC San Diego's catalogers keep the two campuses' requirements properly segregated.
Exacerbating this situation, however, is something that was not anticipated when the project began: the possibility that one or both institutions' standards and practices might change in ways that could affect the consistent workflow established by the project managers and set out in the Scope of Work document. Several months into the project, San Diego moved towards simplifying its cataloging processes by adopting new guidelines that were informed by the BIBCO Standard Record Metadata Application Profiles (MAPS). 36 Although the sound recording standards adopted by San Diego were richer than the baseline defined in the MAPS, they marked a further distancing from the standards used to process CDs for UC Santa Barbara.
Maintaining a bifurcated workflow has injected additional complexity into the process, requiring catalogers to continue doing some things for some items, while at the same time retraining themselves for a different group of materials. That being said, processing two streams of materials according to different standards has proven manageable, if not exactly optimal.
In working on this project, we have learned and considered many other things about the ways a shared project can be structured and managed, as well as how to deal with unforeseen circumstances such as the one just described. Earlier, we discussed impediments to attempting a similar project with printed scores, and we acknowledge that the project participants chose a format of material that better accommodates remote cataloging. We nevertheless believe that a project involving the cataloging of scores from the items themselves might be feasible under certain circumstances, and possibly mandatory for some projects involving original cataloging. This issue could be addressed by building into the project the occasional transport of material that is oversized or otherwise difficult to capture in a surrogate. An even more ambitious approach might be to pair a cataloging project with a digitization effort, a step that could help produce superior surrogates while at the same time eliminating the labor required to handle and scan an item twice. In such a situation, however, accommodations to standard digitization workflows would have to be worked out: for example, it would likely be desirable to include a scale that a cataloger could use to ascertain the size of the original.
Our experience further suggests that enlarging such a project for a wider pool of participants, each with different cataloging standards and practices, would magnify some of the problems we have noted here; and with the impending adoption of RDA, the possibility that participating institutions might choose different implementation dates and practices would further complicate matters. For example, the earlier-discussed potential for inconsistency created by the different levels of granularity permitted in the choice of relationship terms/codes under AACR2 is continued in RDA, with Appendix I.1 directing the cataloger to "[u]se relationship designators at the level of specificity that is considered appropriate for the purposes of the agency creating the data." In such situations, some problems could be avoided by coordinating a common implementation date, while the move to a new cataloging code could serve as an opportunity for participating institutions to work towards a more consistent policy unencumbered by institutional history, should that be a possibility. Our experience on the project clearly demonstrates that a unitary cataloging policy is easier to implement than parallel workflows.
The informal pilot-project nature of this partnership poses other interesting questions, the most prominent of which is that of funding. Clearly, UC San Diego is shouldering the greater part of this project's expenses, dedicating portions of the time of two catalogers and a manager to process the CDs and oversee the project. Further highlighting the fiscal imbalance, as we noted earlier in our literature review, UC San Diego derives only slight apparent benefit from performing this work, and its cataloging operations are complicated and made less efficient by the need to operate using multiple standards. When viewed more generously from the wider University level, however, the local imbalance could be viewed as an intra-University sharing of scarce resources, in the spirit of the University's Next Generation Technical Services initiative discussed in the introduction to this paper. The project, then, clearly functions as an early experiment in bringing some of these principles to life. The reality that campus libraries are funded separately, and that this is not a formally funded pilot project, however, reinforces our initial sense that this is an example of filial largesse within the University. One potential model for "funding" consortial projects such as this one in a more equitable way across the system could be that of a cooperative in which libraries accrue cataloging credits or debits in a central "bank" based on non-monetary currency such as cataloging hours or the number of titles cataloged. Continuing discussions on further integrating the University's cataloging operations doubtless will be looking at parts of this project to model potential new shared cataloging services. Whether this particular project is viewed as an area to develop on a larger scale remains to be seen. In any event, a more comprehensive planning process would need to precede any attempt at a larger or more formal project.
Another side-effect of the somewhat informal nature of this project highlights the fact that the project CDs rank lower in priority at UC San Diego than its own incoming materials. While this ensures that the hosting institution's workload does not suffer, it does leave UC Santa Barbara in the position of not being able to count on their materials being processed against a guaranteed throughput target. In practice, this has not been a problem, as the OPAC records of items sent to San Diego for cataloging have been suppressed to temporarily prevent their retrieval by potential users. This does beg the question of their availability, however. A more binding arrangement with formalized priorities and formally restructured percentages of time for the catalogers would help create an environment where the institution with the items needing to be cataloged could be assured of more reliable throughput.
We have described several aspects of the project that could benefit from a more formal approach. Informality, however, does have its advantages, and the fact that the project exists at all is a testament to it. Only a very few weeks elapsed between the original call for interest and the start of actual cataloging. Setting project standards and expectations received proper attention, but was eased along by both sides' flexibility and willingness to compromise on points important to the other. Proceeding as an exploratory pilot project has allowed UC Santa Barbara to get a significant block of their music CD backlog processed without major expense. At the same time, catalogers at San Diego have been able to focus their work on materials that correspond with their main area of expertise and interest. As the Head of UC Santa Barbara's Music Library put it, "this has been a win-win situation." 37 505: Formatted Contents Note.
Supply or verify contents. Durations and performers may appear here instead of in separate duration and performer notes if the cataloger determines that this is the clearest and most economical way of recording the information. Prefer basic formatting, without subfields, unless copy already uses enhanced formatting. 511: Participant/Performer Note.
Correct or supply if participants are not recorded in conjunction with a contents note. If the item names the individual performers in a larger group, list the performers parenthetically after the name of the group unless more than eleven performers are named. For classical albums, provide name and uniform title access to all performers and works listed on container unless cataloger judgment decides this would be excessive. For popular music, provide performer name access only. When a group is named, don't provide individual access points for its members. Add relator codes to performers, using cnd, itr or voc; however, if bib record already has a pattern established where itr and voc are collapsed into prf , follow the technique found in the record. 830: Uniform Title.
Provide/verify as necessary. Trace traceable series.