This brought me up short when I read it last week (it is from an article about Socrates by Bettany Hughes and was published in The Guardian on Monday 18th October):
Our modern passion for fact-collection and box-ticking rather than a deep comprehension of the world around us would have horrified him [i.e. Socrates] too. What was the point, he said, of cataloguing the world without loving it?
He wouldn't have meant cataloguing as we mean it, and love may be too strong a word, but who wouldn't agree with him if I were to paraphrase it as, "What is the point of describing and defining things if we don't approach them with a willingness to engage with them and like them?" I have always expected cataloguers to have an intellectual curiosity, but this goes beyond, to an openness of mind, a desire to do the best we can by the things we are handling and genuine goodwill towards authors of all kinds and the works they create.
There was a debate a while back about whether cataloguers are data inputters (of course we are) or more than data inputters (and of course we are that as well) - and when I try to define professional cataloguing it is pretty much as Socrates says, not a dull unthinking and routine recording of the obvious things about a work, but an active interest and a kindly teasing-out of the best within it.
Does anyone else think that Socrates has hit the nail on the head?
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