Guest Editorial

Navigating Yet More Change

kalan Knudson Davis, Special Collections Metadata Librarian, University of Minnesota Libraries

My first introduction to Mary Beth Weber was a happy accident. I was running late between meetings during ALA Midwinter (yes, this was back in “The Before Times”) and the room, as they often were for cataloging and classification sessions, was packed. An empty seat was open next to Mary Beth, and I claimed it. Between speakers, she introduced herself as the editor of Library Resources and Technical Services (LRTS) and as head of technical services at Rutgers. The details of which conference or what particular session are hazy at this point, as it seems like so much of our life experience of the last two years has blurred what came before. What I do remember is that Mary Beth was there to proudly support her colleague’s work as he presented to that packed room, and she made a point of being a smiling and familiar face in his audience. After the Midwinter Meeting was over, I snail-mailed Mary Beth a thank you card, and was later invited to serve as an intern on the LRTS Editorial Board.

My first impressions and memories of Mary Beth are of a kind, thoughtful, compassionate, and steadfast colleague. Mary Beth, undoubtedly, has seen LRTS through one of the most tumultuous periods in library publishing history. This period was tumultuous not only in terms of the amount of change and remarkable shifts in our profession, but also in our personal lives and shared traumatic pandemic experiences.

In 2013, the year Mary Beth officially assumed responsibility as LRTS editor, the Library of Congress adopted the original RDA Toolkit. A review of LRTS papers that were published at that time shows that some of the topics are still incredibly prescient and familiar even today, such as analyzing the quality of vendor-acquired records, identifying serial title changes, and addressing accessibility needs in cataloging. And now, looking back, so much is the same yet so much has changed.

Just before the pandemic would take hold, in January 2020, Mary Beth wrote of the very last ALA Midwinter Meeting scheduled to take place in 2021, remarked on ALA’s relocation from their long-time headquarters, and foreshadowed the ALA division merger that would eventually create Core. But, as we all know, our lives and shared profession were about to forever change. In her final LRTS editorial, Mary Beth wrote of how technical services work has evolved and changed to meet the demands of a post-COVID world. While the rest of us were grappling with the new normal, Mary Beth was researching ways to help the profession through the dark times, writing and publishing a book in 2022 titled Virtual Technical Services, which focuses on preparing technical services librarians to face the unexpected in disasters seen and unseen.

Thinking back to our initial meeting, I wonder what would have happened if I had not sat next to Mary Beth during that ALA Midwinter session. She has taught me so much about being a reviewer and leading with kindness, thoughtfulness, compassion, and steadfastness. LRTS is synonymous with high-quality technical services scholarship. The journal is also grounded, balancing the theoretical with practical case studies focused on the tried and true. It occurs to me now, that we are in a way, a triple-blind publication. Blind to the future and the next challenges it will bring. Yet, we look forward to writing that future together.

The editorial board welcomes Rachel Scott as the new LRTS Editor. Rachel is the Associate Dean for Information Assets at Illinois State University’s Milner Library. We also welcome Michael Fernandez, E-Resources Acquisitions Librarian at Yale University Library, as the LRTS Assistant Editor, which is a new role and part of the Core editorship model. His new role includes oversight of the book reviews that are provided in each issue of the journal.

We extend a warm welcome to Rachel and Michael and express gratitude to Mary Beth.

This issue of LRTS includes:

• “Evolution of a Subject Heading: The Story Continues,” by Anna M. Ferris outlines the process of proposing a revision to an established subject heading via the Subject Authority Cooperative (SACO) Program’s Subject Heading Proposal System. She illustrates this process by sharing two proposals: one to revise an authority record, and the second is to establish the cross reference as an authorized subject heading. Ferris explores reasons for revising subject headings and provides a review of the revision process using the SACO Proposal.
• In what will be a research topic for years to come, Yuji Tosaka and Cathy Weng investigate how academic library technical services responded to the public health emergency and adapted to new challenges to continue to serve the academic community in their paper “When Disruption is the New Normal: The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Technical Services in US Academic Libraries.”
• In his paper “He Lied to the People, Saying ‘I am Nebuchadnezzar’”: Issues in Authority Control for Rebels, Usurpers, Eccentric Nobility, and Dissenting Royalty,” Gabriel Mckee addresses how current cataloging guidelines for creating name authority records (NARs) for royalty and nobility assume that an individual’s claim to a royal title is clear and unambiguous. Standards such as RDA do not address the question of the legitimacy of a claimed title. Mckee uses Nidintu-Bēl/Nebuchadnezzar III, a rebel against the Achaemenid emperor Darius I named in the Behistun Inscription (sixth century BCE), as a case study to establish best practices for the identity management of historical representatives of dissenting royalty.
• Book reviews.