The Plot to Kill Library Cataloging.

[denverjeffrey]

Dear Mr. Beall,

Thank you for sending us “The Plot to Kill Library Cataloging,” which we have now considered carefully.

We regret it is not among final selections for American Libraries’ pages. It would, however, be appropriate for a discussion on our new Reader Forum at al.ala.org/forum/, and we invite you to post it there.

We do appreciate your interest, and hope you’ll keep an eye on the magazine’s direction and assist us with our future needs.

With all the best wishes,

Greg Landgraf
Editorial Assistant
American Libraries
312-280-4216

The Plot to Kill Library Cataloging

Jeffrey Beall, Metadata Librarian / Assistant Professor
Auraria Library
University of Colorado Denver
1100 Lawrence St.
Denver, Colo. 80204 USA
(303) 556-5936
jeffrey.beall@cudenver.edu


There is an ongoing conspiracy to abolish library cataloging and the high-quality information access it provides. The chief source of this plot is the blogosphere, where a strident cohort of anti-cataloging crusaders endlessly bemoans any investment in quality metadata, online catalogs, controlled vocabularies, and library-created standards. Indeed, it’s become trendy to malign library cataloging and any cataloging-related technology or practice that originated in libraries.

Another source of the plot is the ALA publication Library Technology Reports, where writers such as Bradford Eden recently declared, “The era of the library OPAC is over,” despite the fact that at his library, the OPAC is still working. Also, at the recent ALA Midwinter meeting in Philadelphia, it was hard to find a cataloging meeting that didn’t apologize for the perceived weaknesses of library catalogs as compared to Google. I attended one session where Tony Franks, the head of Cooperative Cataloging at the Library of Congress, ignorantly dismissed catalogs as “just inventories.”

Also, Roy Tennant’s 2002 article, “Marc must die,” neatly captures the strategy of the anti-catalogers. They want to kill cataloging, but they don’t advocate for an adequate replacement. They effectively want to eliminate high-quality information discovery in libraries. Karen Calhoun even called for abolishing the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the most comprehensive and heavily used controlled vocabulary in history. Not surprisingly, now that Tennant and Calhoun both work for OCLC, an organization that derives much of its revenue from selling MARC records, they have both tempered their anti-cataloging rhetoric.

At the Library of Congress, the anti-cataloging campaign has been piecemeal and insidious. Associate Librarian Deanna Marcum ordered catalogers there to stop doing series authority work. The number of staff devoted to cataloging work has been greatly cut. Minimal-level cataloging is now the norm at LC.

Most technological change occurs when a better alternative is invented, making the earlier technology obsolete, as in the case of automobiles replacing the horse and buggy. However, in the case of cataloging, there really is no new technology that is better and can replace it. It’s still the best and most ubiquitous discovery tool found in libraries. The current rampage against cataloging is akin to someone waging a campaign against cell phones, saying they are outdated and obsolete, but without suggesting a more advanced alternative.

It’s true that full-text searching of online documents does provide some access, thereby achieving some of the functions of a library catalog, but this technology is beset by serious and often fatal weaknesses, such as the synonym problem, where searches for lung cancer miss all the documents that only refer to the disease as lung neoplasms. Full-text searching is also unable to provide the name and subject disambiguation that library catalogs provide, clustering together all works by a single author or all works on a single subject.

Most importantly, full-text searching does not work for books! Much valuable information is still only available in print form. Libraries have the ongoing responsibility to provide high-quality information discovery and retrieval tools for these print materials. This also includes DVDs, audio, and other non-print formats as well. My library is a medium-sized academic library, and our books are still an essential and heavily-used part of our collection. Much of the information we provide is not available online. It’s only in books, and we still buy many thousands of books each year.

If there were a better technology available that could effectively replace library cataloging, I would be the first to advocate moving to it. I welcome research that explores alternatives to traditional cataloging. But eliminating cataloging just for the sake of eliminating cataloging will only hurt our profession and our library patrons. Until we find a quality alternative to cataloging, we ought to accept and support it.

[denverjeffrey]

I forgot to mention that I would like to suggest this REJECTED article as a topic for the AL forum. Thanks, Jeffrey.