At last year's ALA Midwinter meeting at an ALCTS talk on the OCLC Record Use Policy, I suggested the term "descriptionist" -- one who describes. As I recall, there were many more groans in the room than smiles.
Peter
On Dec 6, 2009, at 11:08 AM, B.G. Sloan wrote:
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> Jim Weinheimer pointed out this interesting report in an earlier posting:
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> Directors' views on the future of cataloguing in Australia/New Zealand, 2007: a survey / Jenny Warren.
> http://www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/documents/Warren2007.doc
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> A couple of excerpts...
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> "The word 'cataloguer' is, rightly or wrongly, associated with the past and with one form of metadata only: MARC records. As one director commented: 'a 'cataloguer' is however sadly a bygone relic.'"
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> "It was expected that the survey would provide evidence that the term 'cataloguer' is on the way out, particularly for non-professional staff, but some sites are well ahead on that score. Also, many sites reported that their cataloguing staff are engaged in various other activities. This comment from a tertiary education library: “[We do] not have specific 'cataloguers' any more; those professional positions in our Collection Management Unit are now 'CMU Team Coordinators' and they may be asked to do any professional tasks in the CMU.” And this also from the tertiary sector: “There really is no such thing as a 'cataloguer' any more. Cataloguing is just one of many tasks that librarians, library assistants and others perform. In this day and age no one should have such a narrowly defined job title – it’s very 1970's. Even having a separate 'technical services' division is extremely outmoded.”"
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> But I'm not so sure I like the following suggestion about replacements for "cataloging" and "cataloger":
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> "If the words 'cataloguer' and 'cataloguing' are on the way out, then the word 'metadata' has certainly caught on, and it should be remembered that MARC records are themselves a form of metadata. There really is no suitable verb for the noun 'metadata' yet, but in a recent paper, Dick Miller from Stanford has used the word 'metaloging' (or 'metaloguing') which is appealing, and a good candidate for the next label. It would be a very acceptable term to represent the work of describing resources in any of a variety of schemas, so that a 'metaloguer' could be working in MARC, XML, Dublin Core and so on, or with any taxonomy."
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> Bernie Sloan
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--
Peter Murray http://www.pandc.org/peter/work/
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Received on Wed Dec 09 2009 - 16:50:13 EST