Reflections on Cataloging

I've read lots of Michael Gorman, Walt Crawford, and Sanford Berman, and so I'm VERY dismayed by sentiments of commentators like this:

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"I don't see much future in academic or public libraries for what we
usually think of as "catalogers", those that sit and create original
records in OCLC for traditional materials. .
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As probably Michael Gorman would point out---hell, somebody's gotta do it somewhere!

Especially with LC stepping back from being the cataloger-of-record, as de facto national library.

Those catalog records don't self-generate, don't you know...


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Those who plan to enter the profession and do cataloging need to refashion themselves as metadata librarians,
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Pardon me, but I still can't help but think of "Metadata Librarians" as translating
to something equivalent to:

"Hip, Cool Techno-Geeks who love LINUX & XML, hate MARC & can't be bothered to really learn AACR2r2"


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... and be prepared to deal with systems, electronic and
internet resources, aggregators and databases, and archival and
digitized resources, and work with the local automated systems to
incorporate those resources.
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--Which Arlene G. Taylor points out can easily be handled adequately well using AACR2r2 and MARC effectively.

I can't help but come back to Michael Gorman's considered judgement that Metadata is trying to do an end-run around professionally done library cataloging;

Traditional library cataloging-->More costly? yes.
Worth it? Absolutely.
Damaging to scholarship if done half-assed? You BET!

--this, incidentally, was basically the thrust of my talk at USC, and a thinly veiled J'accuse aimed at Library directors who would defy those truisms; maybe that's part of why I got passed over...?


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Another way to go is as the system
coordinator for a library, or the web director."
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Systems librarians have their own role to play---bibliographic control, strictly speaking, isn't precisely one of them.

And what the hell is a "web-director?" and what is he supposed to do for a library?
(I know, very Gorman-esque of me to even ask such an impertinent question)

...What's ironic is that I am a young librarian (30-something), moderately techno-savvy, but I find myself in complete agreement with traditional catalogers and traditional cataloging principles and highly suspicious of the metadata shuck-and-jive. Which makes me decidedly UNCOOL.

But I can't seem to get hired into a cataloging job, nor get an experienced, wizened cataloging mentor to show me the ropes, etc.

The profession's dying in part, I think, because too many old catalogers are unwilling to pass on what they know, or have the patience to teach it, even to those willing and receptive to what they know and believe and practice.

You would think after so many bitter personal disappointments i would just say "screw cataloging" and leave that part of the profession to its own fate; and I would do so except for the realization that Cataloging impacts every aspect of what librarians do in libraries, from Reference to ILL, to collection development...and makes all those other jobs so much harder if the cataloging is done poorly or haphazardly.

It anguishes me greatly, but in the absence of real, gainful library employment, the most I can do is write about it and blog about it...maybe churn out scholarly articles or even, god forbid, a book someday. I'm partly reluctant to publish because of my humble lack of real job experience, but I have read and thought about these issues for several years now, even BEFORE I sat down and formally applied to Library school. I'm reluctant to publish for fear of librarians saying "oh what does he know, he only worked as a librarian for 6 months and was non-renewed--what can he know...?"

---Of course, that...lack of professional library experience... hasn't stopped all manner of outside-the-profession "experts" from publishing reams of over-hyped, simplistic garbage about "all digital libraries", etc. So maybe there's hope for me yet.

An older colleague counseled me to go along with the metadata fashion trend, if only to be able to do traditional cataloging covertly. Live like the Spanish Moranos/Conversos, then, I guess.
She did note that Dublin Core gets more complex every year, approaching a MARC-like complexity, in fact. Which is of no surprise to either of us, since we both already know MARC got that way by bumping up against the real-world complexity of the real, existing bibliographic universe (or Recorded Informatic Universe, if I want to be excruciatingly PC/trendy about it), and not because catalogers just love to be obtuse and generate rules for their own sake. We both chortle as "tag clouds" and "folksonomies" begin to "regress" (we'd say progress) "back" to authority control. Thomas Mann still has written most eloquently on the virtues of Authority Control in LCSH (and I recently kicked off a nice sh*t storm on a professional email list for saying so while simultaneously condemning a recent target of Mann's sharp professional wit); You can accept all of Sanford Berman's critiques of LCSH and still stand by Authority Control as a guiding general principle. Indeed you MUST, I think, if you genuinely want to serve users well and promote scholarship and learning. Uncontrolled vocabulary may have a useful subordinate role to play in finding materials....Amazon.com's SIPs and CAPs are an excellent example of this--but not at the cost of abandoning traditional controlled vocabularies altogether. No matter how much the Google-philes may argue, they cannot square that circle. MARC21 records created using AACR2R2, using LCSH for subject access and either LCC or DDC to generate a classification number, remains the single best way to organize a collection of recorded information for easy access, use, sharing, etc. We can tweak that paradigm, add useful features, etc, but the core remains the same.

Don't even get me started about Peak oil, energy depletion and the implications for online shared cataloging. The library profession as a whole remains largely asleep when it comes to recognizing, let alone responding to, these emerging trends & realities. Nicholson Baker may well be proved right, but not for the reasons he initially imagined nor the arguments he made in favor of restoring the card-based catalogue. No, imagine a scenario where the power in your neighborhood library is as sporadic and unpredictable as electricity service currently is in Baghdad today...when the power might go off for half the day, or half a week. With no card catalogue, the only way to find the books is to physically scour the shelves, presumably with a flashlight or some other portable light-source. The card catalog saves the time of the user in such a library, because if the OPAC is off-line that much, its value and utility are greatly diminished. We may not get to that point in our lifetimes. But then again, we just might.

I remain deeply internally divided whether or not to give up on cataloging and focus full-bore on reference work; It's certainly tempting, it certainly seems to fit better, given my diverse reading interests and desire to share what I know, to help people make connections, etc. But I still worry about the fate of cataloging. And if there's something I can still personally do about it, I want to. I find I can't give up on it yet.

I really don't feel like going back to get re-credentialed as a school librarian, though. I only have 1 year teaching experience, and though many school districts have scaled back the classroom teaching experience requirement from 3 to 2 years, that still leaves me 1 year short, even if I did have the school library graduate-level coursework behind me, which I don't, despite my ALA-accredited general-program MLS. The most I'd like to do in that direction is take the one cataloging course on Dewey Decimal, because subject cataloging using DDC22 is one area that I am deficient in, and I think it'd be fun. I'd like to learn IDC (International Decimal Classification) which is a truly international offshoot of the DDC. But in any case, IDC and DDC both are more recognized world-wide and more universally applicable regardless of alphabet used--since it's wholly based on Arabic numerals (while LC uses the Latin alphabet in combination with its own enumerated system and Cutter additions). LC is gaining ground, however, which is not necessarily a good thing, but demonstrative of just how influential the US Library of Congress still is, world-wide, and Anglo-American scholarship more generally.

Thus concludes my rant for the evening. Thanks.