Staincliffe, Paul (2004) Has cataloguing become too simple? : why it matters for cataloguers, catalogues and clients. New Zealand libraries 49(10).

I love that I have only taken a month of cataloguing and I can understand every single word in this paper. Not only that, but I found it really interesting. Maybe I am too Library 1.0?

Some great quotes:

Why is making a digital image of something already represented in the catalogue deemed a more worthy use of expertise, time and systems than adding to the catalogue items tdigitise, digitise.

AACR2 fails as a cataloguing code for the global environment. Although theoretically there will be consistency within the local catalogue, there cannot be in the global catalogue due to the use of options and varying interpretations. But right at the heart of the failure is 1.0D: “Base the choice of a level of description on the purpose of the catalogue or catalogues for which the entry is constructed”17 – a phrase unchanged from the 1978 second edition.

Now that we are moving to subject headings and leaving AACR2 behind everyone else in my class is ecstatic, while I think I am going to miss it and its soft and warm blanket of logical steps.

[How do we deal with the above inconsistency?] By dumbing down the resource description and the catalogue so that it accommodates the customer’s approach to information retrieval, by making our catalogues look and “feel” like a Web search engine when in fact they are far more powerful tools.