Library of Congress begins to go to hell in a handbasket
Monday, July 31st, 2006Isn’t that a delightfully grumpy and fuddy-duddy title?
Although I’ll be repeating myself to most of the friends of mine who care the most about this issue, I’m going to post the text of an email I sent out in response to an article my father sent me.
The article, rather irrelevantly called “Calling Melvil Dewey,” from Inside Higher Ed, is about upcoming efforts to “simplify catalog systems at the Library of Congress” by ending the creation of serial authority records.
Some of you may know that one of my favorite things about the various jobs I had at Stanford while I was going to library school was handling serials (magazines and newspapers) and monographic series (groups of individual books in the same series). This makes me quite a sick puppy. Most people loathe the complicated nature of figuring out when a government document is a serial (one title with many issues) and when it’s a series (many titles under one umbrella).
By deciding to stop creating series authority records, “[i]n effect, catalog records for new books will no longer indicate if they belong to a series.” This is a huge blow to making sense out of government documents, maps, even fiction titles that are related to one another.
So here was my response:
After reading this, I feel a little like someone I know and respect in the field has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
But I also feel like we should all have seen this coming. More and more institutions have come to depend completely on LC cataloging—because they can’t justify the expense of their own catalogs in the face of fewer and fewer patrons understanding the difference between a library catalog and the internet or Amazon.com. That’s partly because librarians can’t sell themselves or their services well, partly because there has not been enough emphasis on serving the user and making catalogs and catalog data usable, and partly because of… factors completely outside our control.
We’re in an era where people choose the free or cheap over the good and authoritative. And we’re in an era where a distributed contribution model is considered better than an expert one. Will enough monkeys and enough typewriters produce something rivaling Shakespeare? Well, no, but will it be good enough, and will it have other advantages the classic model doesn’t? Is there a way to combine the two models and reap the best of both? The jury’s still out on that one.
I do wonder if the pendulum will ever swing the other way again. I feel like a dying breed: people who respect authority, instead of thinking that everyone being equal means that we’re all equally qualified to do everything….
That was waaaay more philosophical than I usually get, and way more conservative, too. But then, I love serial and series cataloging, and I don’t want to watch it die. And Amazon, even though it hires tons of librarians, is still crap in comparison to any library catalog.
Sadly yours,
Vera Shanti