I was struck yesterday by this comment in an account of a visit to the Courtney Library in Cornwall:
"From a cataloguer's perspective this is the most fascinating aspect of this Library; there is no computerised catalogue for printed books".
I have said before on this blog that I am a very old person. I spent the year before my professional course, and the three years after it, working with big union card catalogues, so to a large extent I cut my professional teeth on them.
The first job people that like me were given, was withdrawing cards for items no longer in stock. The logic for this was, that if you took out the wrong card, it could be put back again. Only when you had proved your care and diligence in withdrawals were you allowed to file cards in to the catalogue, because a mistake there might not be found for a long time, if at all.
What I learned, and learned very quickly, was that a mistake in an entry, whether that mistake was a simple typo or a failure of authority control (not that I knew then that that was what it was called) meant that cards for the same entity were not filed together; equally, that cards with consistent entries filed next to each other and meant that lots of stuff by or about the same thing were brought together (I didn't know that this was called collocation). It was a very simple way to demonstrate the basic principles of a catalogue.
While I'm not advocating card catalogues as a better tool for today's world than their online equivalents, I wonder if it is as easy for new or aspiring cataloguers nowadays to get an understanding of the way catalogues "work" without such a pragmatic and hands-on experience.
Opinions, anyone?
Some of my earliest proper library experience was volunteering at my local public library in the unviersity vacation. They put me to work in the music library updating the hand-written card index of of song titles in compilation volumes. (It's a wonderful thing, that index, I hope they've still got it! It saves hours of staff time when someone wants to find the book that has 'Some enchanted evening', or whatever, in it.)
ReplyDeleteAlthough that wasn't a full-on card catalogue, it gave me a real feel for the power of catalogues, and real a practical understanding of problems that come from inconsistencies. There were some issues in that index, I recall, stemming from differences of opinion about filing order (letter-by-letter or word-by-word...).
So yes, I think working with the physical object helps you understand e.g. authority control. But then so does, perhaps, looking at something like this: http://bit.ly/ocWBdh
That's enough rambling from me. Thanks for writing a post that chimes with much of what I think!
Katie
Nicholson Baker wrote an interesting article on exactly this issue: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1994/04/04/1994_04_04_064_TNY_CARDS_000365934 (this is just an abstract). I think the problem is precisely that so many people felt automated catalogues means standards could drop (and quite possibly, the money for the OPAC was contingent on qualified staff cuts), whereas in fact, as you say, it's far easier to lose errors in an online catalogue. Paradoxically, poor authority control becomes more visible to the end-user (yes we know there aren't really four different George Orwells, sorry about that...)
ReplyDeleteThank you both for your comments and links. Katie is right when she says that it is when you see the index that you understand about authority control and its importance - when all you see is the results of a search, you don't realise what's underneath. With so few online catalogues allowing a "Browse index" option, not many people do see indexes (which can also be a relief when you know that there are four George Orwells in there!)
ReplyDeleteI think that catalogers must understand the card catalog since what they make (the catalog records) are still designed to function in the card catalog. Nothing was ever changed. The records we make could be printed out today and placed into a card catalog just as easily as 30 years ago.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, trying to explain main entry makes no sense unless you show how it worked in a card catalog (or book catalog). Once you see how it worked there, you begin to understand why and it starts to make sense... in a card catalog. It makes much less sense today.
You may be interested in a posting I made on NGC4LIB and then placed on my blog.
As a graduate student studying to be a librarian, I must say that I feel the computerized card catalogs are great but confusing. I do not find the digital card catalog hard to use as a patron, but as a cataloguer of records I am struggling. Of course I am only taking my first course on cataloging and have had little experience with MARC Records. Does it get easier with experience? I am so used to things coming easy to me, but this cataloging course has definitely been a challenge. I can remember the times in elementary that I used the paper card catalog and always enjoyed it. Of course it would be very time consuming and the records could easily become mixed up.
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