How rivers flow together... in one part of AUTOCAT we have a discussion of
the cost of copy cataloging, and in another a discussion of WoGroFuBiCo, in
the context of Thomas Mann's most recent essay commissioned for the union
workers at LC. (I know some refer to WoGroFuBiCo as LCWG, but I can't say
"lickwig" without snickering.)

One of the things that is hard about librarianship at present is figuring
out what we carry forward as we evolve librarianship to stay relevant for
our users (scholarly, popular, and otherwise). We can't take it *all *with
us, but we absolutely must take *some *of it with us.

Another complication is that advocacy for and against change is in such an
emotionally-loaded context. There's a reason Mann quotes me and not Roy
Tennant (who said pretty much what I said, and for a magazine, at that): my
comment was more provocative. It's supposed to enrage the anti-change
advocates by promoting a division among librarians. The net result is that
the audience for his report would then feel sympathetic to his argument and
agree with his central premise, which has a lot less to do with sullying
OPAC records with user tagging (a straw man of Brobdignabian proportions)
than it does with his call to arms for the Library of Congress not to
rewrite staff descriptions and reorganize departments, and for ALA, among
other organizations, to help block that action.

Quite frankly, asking ALA to meddle in the management decisions of libraries
is a non-starter, and that applies whether the decisions are good or bad. I
have to assume Mann knows that, and that his true objective is more
elliptical.

That aside, when we get into a tussle about change -- which is again quite
often about what we carry and what we leave behind -- we can get so wrapped
around two or three emotional issues that we miss some subtler problems. For
example, the way our integrated library systems force us to duplicate data
in a million small silos is a travesty of duplicated effort, wasted labor
hours, and lost opportunity. If only we could recapture all the time we
spend maintaining local silos, and build systems that accommodated both the
library happy with ye olde basic record and the library that had the time
and resources to enrich -- not only that, an enrichment that could be
leveraged worldwide, rather than lost locally. (Yes, I can imagine a record
that can be A for X and B for Y.) We need to stop spending so much money
being bossed around by the architecture of local record silos, which largely
benefits only the vendors who sell us the crap we call integrated library
systems. I don't have a clear path out of that -- I do not uncritically
embrace WorldCat or Open Library or any other pathway, such as xCatalog --
but I think the efforts in that direction deserve our kudos.

As do the efforts of Coyle et al, who shouldered their way into something
that was turning into "AACR3" and among other things insisted on design
principles dedicated to making our data more findable and modernized.
For that matter, if we can get ourselves out of the record mindset -- a
mindset so pervasive that all of us in LibraryLand think this way -- we can
start thinking about the very rich library data  we have yet to fully
exploit.

Anyway, if you're waiting for me to respond to Mann, that's about it, beyond
the observation that in 38 single-spaced pages, I expected far more citation
and evidence, particularly when an author is taking on something as broad as
what scholars "want," and much less personal anecdote. Most of my colleagues
are oblivious to this  wurra-wurra among catalogers -- sadly enough. There
will be key decisions made about librarianship by a very small group of
people, and when we look back in several decades at what we said and did, I
hope most of it holds the test of time.

Karen G. Schneider

***********************************************************************

E-mail AUTOCAT listowners:             autocat-request@...
Search AUTOCAT archives:  http://listserv.syr.edu/archives/autocat.html
Selected AUTOCAT commands: http://www.cwu.edu/~dcc/Autocat/options.html
  By posting messages to AUTOCAT, the author does not cede copyright

***********************************************************************