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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...