Shawne,
Thanks so much for your thoughtful analysis. I am considering them. You may
be correct that I am thinking more in terms of procedures. I would like to
explain that I am not trying to come up with new laws of *library science*
but new laws for the purpose of the *library catalog* and of *the records in
the library catalog*.
What I am basically trying to do is reset the world-view of *catalogers*
(this world-view is not and has not been shared by reference librarians or
selectors, by the way) away from the almost navel-gazing focus on the "local
collection." For very good and sound historical reasons, library catalogs
have focussed exclusively on the materials within their own collections and
things outside were other people's responsibility. As a result, there were
separately published indexes to journal articles, or literary collections
held within the library; separate bibliographies; catalogs of other
collections in the world; and even separate catalogs for special collections
held in the same library, but that never made it into the main catalog.
I understand why this is so, and I am not finding fault with any of this,
but the result was that readers have always had to go from one catalog or
index to another to search the entire holdings within the local collection,
and even more places to see what was really available to them.
I believe it is vital that we all recognize that those times are dead and
gone, and while the reference librarian knows this, and certainly our users
know this, I submit that this change of focus has not yet essentially
entered into the cataloger world-view. This means that we *must* work with
new initiatives that are doing similar things, library-centered ones such as
VIAF, but also popular ones like subj3cts.com (this is a fascinating project
for the subject theoretican, by the way!), Ontopedia and all sorts of other
tools.
Another unspoken point I have is that *catalogers need help,* lots of help,
if they are not to get buried under the avalanche of "information." It's
unrealistic to imagine that organizations will hire zillions of new
librarians, so the help must come from Web2.0 and 3.0 tools.
So those are my foundational thoughts.
By the way, that was interesting about Ranganathan. Another major classifier
who did not like the catalog was Ernest Richardson (at Princeton). He
absolutely hated the catalog, and gave a talk entitled "The curse of
bibliographical cataloging" which was also published. Although I think he
was wrong in many things, and I would violently disagree with some of the
things he wrote, I must confess that he was remarkably ahead of his times in
many areas and I believe his work and thought would be a fruitful area for
study today.
Jim Weinheiemr
Received on Wed Oct 28 2009 - 06:27:49 EDT