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This article contends that the library catalog and the traditional function of cataloging will soon cease to exist. This is because there is a revolution in progress that will overthrow traditional catalogs and cataloging, breaking them down into their component parts, exploding and transforming them into several different pieces of the new information landscape. This revolutionary transformation will democratize the responsibility for the organization of information, similar to the process of democratization of the information publishing process brought about by the widespread embrace of the Internet as a communication medium.
Keywords
Catalogues, Libraries, Internet, Information retrieval
Abstract
Predicts that the library catalog and the traditional function of cataloging will soon cease to exist. This is because there is a revolution in progress that will overthrow traditional catalogs and cataloging, breaking them down into their component parts, exploding and transforming them into several different pieces of the new information landscape. This revolutionary transformation will democratize the responsibility for the organization of information, similar to the process of democratization of the information publishing process brought about by the widespread embrace of the Internet as a communication medium.
"Off with their heads!" said the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, whenever someone did something she did not like. The Red Queen had absolute authority over all the subjects in the kingdom and they trembled when she spoke. Not so Alice, who was growing a little skeptical about everything she encountered in this strange land. She said to herself when she met the Queen and her subjects, "Why, they're only a pack of cards, after all", and refused to allow herself to be bullied by the Queen.
The cataloging aristocracy
When I started out as a cataloger in an academic library in the mid-1980s, no one was yelling "Off with their heads!" (except maybe the head of our automation committee when she found out that our vendor had filed for bankruptcy halfway through the conversion of our authority file ... ), but I do remember that cataloging was a kind of monarchy - controlled by an aristocracy of catalogers trained and anointed in the secret ways and language of cataloging and whose birthright were the crown jewels of the library -- the authority file, the shelflist and, of course, the catalog.
Implementation of automated library systems and new copy cataloging practices raised issues of edit access to catalog records by "commoners" such as acquisitions clerks and paraprofessionals. Indexing and retrieval methods in an automated public catalog brought into question the necessity of some arcane authority and classification practices that now seemed redundant in an automated catalog.
Still, the automated version of the catalog was enough like a card catalog that with some easing of the boundaries and an allowance for a bourgeoisie of exceptions to the rule of aristocratic law, the elite held onto their position. Access was granted to create, edit or remove records from the catalog as a limited privilege. Authority and classification practices were adapted to the automated environment but remained under the control of the cataloging elite.
A catalog is a catalog is a catalog
Not that I am a royalist, but this tight control had some benefits. A well-constructed and consistently maintained catalog is a thing of beauty. Because materials are evaluated and selected intentionally to be added to the collection based on the community being served and boundaries of the collection itself, the catalog reflects a certain world view and approach to knowledge. Internally coherent, rich with the detail of each catalog record, it is knitted together to form a meaningful whole by means of fully authorized subject and name headings and references. Classification applied within the context of the collection assembles and groups like things together to anticipate the needs of the user. This creates a layer of meaning that acts as a sort of bridge between the user and the primary source materials that they seek, providing a map for the discovery of materials to be filtered through this layer. As the "map" grows richer and more full of meaning, it ultimately becomes a valuable resource unto itself, a free-standing and internally logical, coherent and useful guide through the knowledge embodied in the primary materials. It can reveal relationships among ideas and provide context, history and definition for the collection. As information professionals, we love our catalogs, and rightly so.
However, we should remember that the library catalog is a model built on the traditional setup of a physical collection that is separate from its virtual representation in the form of catalog records. Unfortunately, this model is no longer useful or valid in the face of the new information landscape, no matter how much we try to make it so. There is an old saying that goes something like this, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, then very soon everything begins to look like a nail". Well, we have tried to use our hammer of a catalog and apply it to all of the new information "nails" to greater or lesser degrees of success.
Stretching the model
In trying to maintain the status quo, we have stretched the traditional catalog model in several directions and it seems to work, after a fashion. In one direction, we stretched the model to include records for items that are not part of the physical collection, for example, Web sites or electronic journals. In another direction, we have reconstructed electronic texts to embed catalog elements in the form of "META" and other tagged fields that allow for more precise description and access. In the area of cataloging, other efforts are underway to reformulate definitions in order to accommodate changes in type and format of the materials being cataloged. There are problems with each of these approaches, not the least of which have to do with the scale and the speed of change in this new environment. Most importantly, continued development of new technologies for creating, storing, and deploying electronic resources are causing the fundamental differences between print and electronic resources to grow past the point of being able to treat them as simply the same thing in two different formats.
By scale and speed I mean two things: the inability of the model to scale well to accommodate and process the massively growing body of materials that we'd like to catalog, and the inability of the model to handle the new and changing types of materials that we'd like to catalog. These two pressures on the model will ultimately overtake any small changes that we can make. They will force us to break the catalog and cataloging down into their component parts and will cause a revolutionary transformation that will ultimately result in the demise of the catalog. A reformation of these component parts is also underway in the form of what I am calling the democratization of the information organization responsibility. In other words, the Red Queen is not long for this world.
Inability of the model to scale well
Things are moving too fast and there are not enough of us (catalogers) and the Internet is not a catalog. For anyone involved in trying to catalog Web sites, electronic journals and the like, it is immediately obvious that the task is too large, the catalog record too ornate and the materials too slippery and too diverse. Evidence of the fact that we lost the race to catalog the Internet is all around us in the form of search engines and other non-catalog type retrieval systems, a general public opinion that everything needed can be found on the "Web" (without the help of a librarian or any kind of library developed tools), and our own sinking feeling within the profession that we have been bypassed along the path of creation and organization, and the best we can do is to learn how to be "super-searchers" on the Internet, following the rush afterwards as experts - but following nevertheless. I picture the Red Queen running after the crowd, yelling for a beheading, with no one around to listen or to care.
Even more importantly, the Internet does not represent an intentionally developed collection as had the true catalog. A collection, built by evaluation and selection, gathered for the use of a particular community or purpose, had an internal coherence and meaning that could be reflected in the catalog. This was done by the means of consistent application of classification and subject headings, understanding of boundaries and user needs, etc. The inclusion or exclusion of materials in the collection made sense because it was driven by the broader needs of the collection and the user community itself. Because the Internet is simply an accumulative set of materials that continues to grow only because contributors continue to add to it, not because the guardians of a collection allow certain materials to enter the boundaries, means that any "catalog" record or attempt at cataloging cannot be knitted with integrity into the cohesive whole of a meaningful catalog, and therefore loses its sense of internal logic and meaning and becomes a jumble of unrelated items.
Inability of the model to adapt to the new information materials
Let us return to Alice for a moment, who has been invited to play croquet with the Red Queen using a flamingo as a mallet and a live hedgehog as a ball.
The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed (Carroll, 1999).
One might say the trying to use AACR2 rules and a MARC record to catalog some of the new types of materials being "published" in the new information environment is a bit like playing croquet with a flamingo and a hedgehog "... a very difficult game indeed". We have developed new ways of thinking about things like format and material type, but even stretched and redefined to their limit, the current rules still can't begin to accommodate the radical changes that are causing materials to morph, reinvent, and revolutionize themselves constantly. Cataloging is based on an assumption of the published permanence of a book or the intentional evolution of a journal. It is not designed to capture and manage these new materials that might recreate themselves endlessly, repurpose themselves as if they were reports out of a database and appear or disappear randomly, forming and reforming relationships, communities and conversations at will.
The Red Queen abdicates and the catalog explodes
There is another thing about this new environment and these new materials. They are becoming, helped along by the technology that is used to create, store and deploy them, much more intelligent and self-explanatory. The need for an elite set of catalogers or for a specific and highly controlled set of rules for creating separate catalog records (or even embedded metadata) is being replaced by the ability of the materials to encode their own meaning and maintain their own relationships with other relevant materials. For example, a document encoded in XML can describe itself - even better and at a more granular level than we ever could do with a catalog record. There is no longer a need for the catalog to reflect the internal coherence of the collection or to address itself to the needs of the community or the demands of its purpose. The meaning and the community are embedded in the materials and the technology itself.
So where does this leave the Red Queen? Well, probably without a whole lot to do, because it is now the creator of the material who encodes the meaning directly into the work in a way that the machine can understand. This provides the information needed for later grouping the materials based on some community or focus or relationship need of the users. In other words, the responsibility for information organization has been passed to the individual at the widest and most democratic of levels, rather than remaining in the hands of the few and the collection/boundary function of the catalog has become part of the gathering and filtering mechanism of the technology used to discover the materials.
The traditional act of cataloging bundled together the work of description, access and intentional meaning for a certain community. A democratized environment splits this work, making the creator responsible for description and access and the technology responsible for automatically indexing and delivering the content focused into communities after the fact, rather than intentionally pre-coordinated. So, as the aristocracy of cataloging crumbles and the catalog explodes into its component parts, anyone can be a cataloger and each of us can have our own catalog.
Reference and further reading
Carrol, L. (1999), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Ch. 8, <http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/ alices-adventures-in-wonderland/index.html>
Goodman, A. (2000), "Searchonomics: a new era in human-- guided Web search", Traffick, August, <http:ll www.traffick.com/story/08-2000/where.asp>
The author
Debora Seys is an Information Consultant at Hewlett Packard Global Library and Information Services, Palo Alto, California, USA.
About the author
Communications to the author should be addressed to Debora Seys, M.L.I.S., Information Consultant, Hewlett-Packard Global Library and Information Services, MS 2L-10, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303, USA. Tel: 650/857 3895; E-mail: [email protected]
Debora Seys is an Information Consultant with Hewlett Packard Global Library and Information Services. Her work includes consulting on Information Architecture and Content Management as part of a corporate-- wide information technology team. She has worked on the development of a first and now second-generation HP Employee Intranet Portal. She received her MLIS from UC Berkeley in 1985 and her background includes work in both special and academic libraries as well as developing software for libraries.
Copyright MCB UP Limited (MCB) 1999