Creative cataloguing

Brunella Longo says: "cataloguing is going to be transformed in a process more and more technologically driven but, at the same time, it will become incredibly more discretional and creative" (I am quoting from her piece here: http://bit.ly/titleproper) and while I am all in favour, as I have said before, of cataloguers using their judgement and common sense, it was "creative" that brought me up short. I don't think of creativity in cataloguing as an unmixed blessing (in snippier moments I have used it as a term of abuse: "Hmmm - bit creative, that"). Too often it looks more like sloppy thinking or a skewed perspective that with hindsight appears perverse.

Brunella also says, "It is not just how good you are at cataloguing rules learned through your librarianship school or how good you are at managing cataloguers, copy-cataloguing services and paraprofessionals on a job rotation basis". Well - isn't it? (I admit to being biassed, as this is pretty much how I spend my working days).

While none of us want to be unquestioning drones, and many of us will think that some of the rules we use are not as helpful as they might be, the fact is that by using the same standards and applying them consistently, we help each other and our users by providing data that can be recognised and shared across services. Surely mavericks end up creating silos?

Is the perfect the enemy of the good?

Here is a practical question - and I'd be interested in any views, because it is one of those things that don't get taught in library school but I bet we face quite often in the workplace.

As I have said before, much of our straightforward cataloguing is delegated to library assistants - who have no theoretical training in the rules of cataloguing and indexing and, very often, no previous experience. Their job is to download records, check them against the book in hand, identify errors or omissions and make any necessary changes. They deal with (what should be simple) adult and children's fiction, all English-language and all of it newly, or recently, published.

Were they professional cataloguers, I would expect them to know AACR and M21, and apply those standards sensibly - by which I mean, that if faced with a record acceptable in all respects except a fairly minor one (and I mean something like the omission of "by", or an ampersand for "and", in the statement of responsibility) then I wouldn't expect them to correct it. On the other hand, I would expect them to put right something that really matters - a mis-spelling in a name, or an added entry omitted. So they have to know what matters and make a judgement - is it worth spending time correcting or adding something if it doesn't affect retrieval and isn't misleading, bearing in mind that we none of us have time to do everything perfectly and their time would be better spent on something more important.

That's a fair enough expectation (in my opinion) for a professional cataloguer, but is it fair enough to expect the same of a library assistant? I find it quite difficult to explain the rudiments of AACR and MARC to library assistants, but they will usually believe me that there are rules which should be followed. What they find very hard to understand is when rules needn't or shouldn't be followed.

What I tend to end up with, therefore, is a simplified set of rules being rigidly (I could almost say, thoughtlessly) applied - which is not much to the benefit of the staff or the catalogue. I don't like people using tick-lists but I am often told that this is easier and that it is unfair to ask library assistants to do more than this.

What do other people do?