CONVERSATIONS WITH CATALOGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Recent Titles in The Libraries Unlimited Library Management Collection Video Collection Development in Multi-type Libraries: A Handbook, Second Edition Gary Handman, editor Expectations of Librarians in the 21st Century Karl Bridges, editor The Modern Public Library Building Gerard B. McCabe and James R. Kennedy, editors Human Resource Management in Today’s Academic Library: Meeting Challenges and Creating Opportunities Janice Simmons-Welburn and Beth McNeil, editors Exemplary Public Libraries: Lessons in Leadership, Management and Service Joy M. 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McCabe, Series Editor Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, or reproducibles, which may be copied for classroom and educational programs only, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conversations with catalogers in the 21st century / Elaine R. Sanchez, editor ; foreword by Michael Gorman. p. cm. — (Libraries Unlimited library management collection) Summary: “Authored by cataloging librarians, educators, and information system experts, this book of essays addresses ideas and methods for tackling the modern challenges of cataloging and metadata practices”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–59884–702–4 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Cataloging. I. Sanchez, Elaine R. II. Title: Conversations with catalogers in the twenty-first century. Z693.C65 2011 025.3—dc22 2010048782 ISBN: 978–1–59884–702–4 EISBN: 978–1–59884–703–1 1514131211 12345 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Libraries Unlimited An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America CONTENTS Foreword vii Michael Gorman Introduction xi Elaine R. Sanchez I. AACR2 and RDA 1. Moving Cataloguing Rules Out of the Library: Goodbye, AACR2? 3 J. McRee (Mac) Elrod 2. AACR and RDA: One Cataloguer’s Reaction 13 Helen Buhler 3. RDA, AACR2, and You: What Catalogers Are Thinking 20 Elaine R. Sanchez II. Visions: New Ideas for Bibliographic Control and Catalogs 4. A Systems Librarian’s Cataloging Daydream 73 Jon Gorman 5. A Question of Identity: The Role of Identifiers in Library Catalogs 95 Ed Jones 6. NF: A New Format for Metadata 104 Bernhard Eversberg 7. The Single Shared Catalog Revisited 121 Martha M. Yee v CONTENTS 8. Role of the ILS and How Libraries will Purchase and Maintain Their Systems, Including Information from a Vendor Perspective 137 Scott Piepenburg III. The Cataloging World in Transition 9. Catalog and Metadata Librarian: A Foot in Both Worlds 147 Lynnette M. Fields 10. Facing a Time of Change 159 Halvard (Hal) Cain 11. Judgment and Imagination: Carrying Cataloging Through Times of Change 169 Jay Weitz 12. Cataloger Survival in a Sea of Change and a Surfeit of Acronyms 175 John F. Myers 13. Changing Mind-set, Changing Skill Set: Transitioning from Cataloger to Metadata Librarian 181 Christine Schwartz 14. Realities of Standards in the Twenty-first Century 188 James Weinheimer IV. Cataloging and Metadata Librarians: Research, Education, Training, and Recruitment 15. The Brick Wall: Attracting People to a Career in Cataloging 209 Janet Swan Hill 16. Blogs and Their Place in the Continuing Education of Catalogers 219 Jennifer Marie Eustis 17. Cataloging/Metadata and Library Science Education Programs for Catalogers and Metadata Specialists: Challenges for the Twenty-first Century 226 Sylvia D. Hall-Ellis 18. Chronological Bibliography of Selected Works Related to Cataloging and Libraries through 1800; and, Selected Bibliography of Library and Cataloging History 255 Elaine R. Sanchez Afterword 269 Sheila S. Intner and Susan S. Lazinger Index 275 About the Editor and Contributors 279 vi FOREWORD Michael Gorman Civilization and learning depend, to a very great extent, on the textual and graphic part of our cultural heritage—the human record—created by human beings since the invention of writing many millennia ago. Librarianship is about many things, but none more important than the stewardship of that human record—a stewardship that consists of acquiring and giving access to subsets of the human record, of working to coordinate the millions of subsets to widen access, of organizing the records of those subsets to facilitate access, and of ensur- ing that the carriers of texts and images in all formats are preserved for future generations. It is, of course, the texts and images themselves, not the formats in which they are presented and preserved, that is of paramount importance; but some formats are more durable than others, and some formats are more condu- cive to the preservation and onward transmission of the human record that are the ultimate goals of librarianship and the prime motivation for what we do. Library school (to use the old-fashioned term) was for me a life-changing experience, as it should be if library education is to be more than a ticket- punching exercise. I went to library school with a vague idea of a career as a reference librarian in public libraries, I emerged, two years later, committed to and fascinated by cataloguing—the enterprise that gives us the bibliographic architecture without which the tasks of facilitating access to the human record and mapping that human record for posterity are impossible. I was, as are all true cataloguers, enthralled by the details of codes, the arcana of corporate headings, uniform titles, Cutter-Sanborn numbers, descriptive abbreviations, faceted clas- sification, the order of names in the headings for Spanish married women, and vii FOREWORD the like; but, I hope, never lost sight of the fact that catalogues are information retrieval systems to be judged by the eternal verities of precision and recall, or they are nothing. The pantheon of Panizzi, Cutter, Dewey, Ranganathan, and Lubetzky hovered over us as we learned and practised cataloguing in accordance with their teachings, but this was no Casaubon-like amassing of lore for its own sake. To adapt one of Ranganathan’s laws, catalogues are for use,andthework that goes into them is justified only when they are used to provide speedy and efficient retrieval of relevant carriers of recorded knowledge and information. These are dark times for cataloguers and cataloguing in many ways. The ubiquity of search engines has made many library users far less demanding than they were. After all, scholarly rigour is absent in someone whose idea of “research” is bunging words and phrases into a search engine and being rewarded, all but instantaneously, with a glittering pile of random texts in random order (or, worse, an order determined by advertisers and other hucksters), from which he or she extracts a few things of vague relevance found on the first screen. Search engines do not make you stupid, but they can, too often, leave you in ignorance. They are cheap and quick, unlike cataloguing, which is labour inten- sive and time consuming. Small wonder that library administrators (who may belong to the first generation of librarians who have little or no knowledge of cataloguing) believe, or affect to believe, that some search engine–like process can replace real cataloguing and professional cataloguers and trim their person- nel budgets accordingly. Small wonder that senior administrators in the Library of Congress have openly talked of abandoning their century-old mission of pro- viding cataloguing data to the nation’s libraries. Small wonder that the cata- loguers who remain are worried about their futures and the future of libraries. Some feel that current controversies in cataloguing, such as that over the wretched RDA and the fatuities of “metadata,” are irrelevant in a time when we can watch libraries twittering, gaming, and grabbing at any technological straws they can as they spiral down into irrelevance. High levels of precision and recall, the two ways in which we judge any infor- mation retrieval system, are dependent on controlled vocabularies and national and international standards—they cannot be obtained by other systems not involving human intervention, no matter what technophiles and billion-dollar advertising companies may tell you. Scholars, researchers, and students depend on systems that give them knowledge of that part of the human record with which they are concerned and will do so for the foreseeable future. For that rea- son, I think the dark days for cataloguing will come to an end as more and more people realize what we are losing in letting our catalogues decay, and turn to those who have devoted their careers to making the human record accessible. I am, therefore, very glad to welcome the publication of Conversations with Catalogers in the 21st Century and applaud the courage of its editor and contribu- tors as they make a persuasive case for the relevance of cataloguing.