It's big and blue

When I was a cataloguer, it would never have surprised me if the reader services staff had said not to bother with the physical description part of the record. It always seemed a bit of a faff, counting pages and wielding the ruler. It was the sort of pedantic fiddle-faddling that gave cataloguers a bad name. Now that I have jumped over the fence and turned from gamekeeper to poacher, I realise just how useful that physical description is. 

I doubt that there are any libraries where everything is exactly where it should be, with every book in its place, but even if there are, I am not working in one. And when you are looking for something that isn’t in its right place, it is very useful to know what sort of a thing it is that you’re looking for, especially when you have got someone waiting who very much wants to read that book and to read it right now, and is getting quite impatient that you can’t find it. 

The date is a bit of a clue – a book published in 1937, or 1957, isn’t going to look like a book published in 2013. But what is really useful is knowing how thick it is likely to be, roughly how many pages it has – am I looking for a great fat tome or a flimsy pamphlet?  And if you notice that it is 38cm high, well then, it just might be worth looking on that shelf where the tall books go to lie down. 

Wouldn’t it be great if instead of a cover image, we included an image of the spine? After all, that’s what we are looking at, most of the time. The ultimate help would be for the bib record to tell me what colour the book is, but I guess not even RDA is going to do that. In the meantime, all you cataloguers out there, please remember those of us who are looking for needles in haystacks and keep on including the 300 field.