Owen Massey > Libraries > Professional
Owen Massey > Libraries > Professional
Tidy people have an important place in libraries, of course - it's just that the tidying instinct can't be allowed to run amok.
Nicholson Baker, The industry standard, 2001
There are two opposing philosophies of service in librarianship. The committed librarian sees their duty as active education and social improvement, not in a paternalistic sense but to boost diversity and fulfilment. In public libraries this might be considered education for citizenship, while in schools and colleges it has a more assertive educational role.
The other philosophy is one of invisibility. Not to retreat from the fight for good, but to follow Foskett's librarian's creed of 'no politics, no religion and no morals'. Think 'all politics, all religions and all morals' rather than Lennon's 'Imagine' (and banish all images of amoral librarians). This is a humble belief in fervent neutrality, realised through our individual diversity.
My vote's for the invisible librarian. Infrastructure is the stuff you don't notice until it's removed - transport networks, obviously, and the wiring in a house, and food regulations, and socket sizes, and Internet RFCs, and book classifications. Despite the labour of developing these standards, the measure of their success is their invisibility. Dealing with metric and imperial or specifying Celsius or Fahrenheit is a simple demonstration of that.
So my ambition as a librarian is to build systems and structures to empower the curious to find what they're after without ever noticing the edifice that's made it possible. That's why I'm a bibliographic control freak: others can deal with the content of books, but first someone has to organise them. On a personal level, while there are professions geekier than librarianship, cataloguers are definitely the geeks among librarians. On a really personal level....
I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the 'vain and superstitious habit' of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the palm of one's hand... They will acknowledge that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but contend that that adoption was fortuitous, coincidental, and that books in themselves have no meaning. That argument, as we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.
Jorge Luis Borges, The library of Babel (translated by Andrew Hurley)
Library cataloguing falls somewhere between indexing and inventorying. It is as disciplined as the copying of texts in monastic scriptoriums, and attracts similar scholastic debates about angels and pinheads (or main entries and corporate bodies as it may be). Many of the fundamental ideas were thrashed out decades ago and became AACR2, either the cataloguer's catechism or the cataloguer's Decalogue. I prefer a secular metaphor, with AACR2 as the statutes and AUTOCAT as the case law.
It's the variety that attracts me. Not the variety of the tasks but the variety of the objects to be described. Odd Things In Pitt's Libraries appeals to this magpie instinct while Watch WorldCat Grow lets you sit back and see new books input around the world.
I am excited by the possibilities for setting cataloguing on a firm theoretical basis offered (principally) by FRBR. The Web may not have posed any real challenges to cataloguing but it has provided an opportunity to re-evaluate and think clearly about what we do. Not just What libraries can learn from bookstores or If the library were like Amazon.com, but really provocative stuff like Steve Coffman's Building Earth's largest library.
Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children's Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not - or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader - the curious reader, the alert reader - to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned.
Alberto Manguel, A history of reading
A quote that suggests a pitfall of co-operative cataloguing. In this postmodern age no one would imitate the documentalists of the early 1900s in attempting to encompass all knowledge in a grand design, rather offering many overlapping routes to information rather than preordained and mutually exclusive paths. It is perhaps better for catalogue records to vary in subject assignment and even description since imperfect readers depend on a little slack to find what they don't yet know they want. I once completed one library's catalogue entirely by myself -- there's a very high level of consistency, but should a searcher happen to approach it in a different way to me, they risk falling through the cracks.
Hackers may believe that libraries need only customised databases, and it's true, they do; but the degree of customisation and the profusion of relevant standards are such that it's usually simpler to leave it to dedicated companies. That said, there are moves towards open source library systems, three examples being the Open Source Digital Library System Project, oss4lib and Koha.
Since librarianship differs from other professions in that lives are rarely jeopardised by incompetence, it's been a long struggle to implement some of these standards completely. In fact some argue that it's better to tweak standards to improve service to readers rather than sacrificing flexibility for the sake of the dream of Universal Bibliographic Control. (It's interesting to look at how, and where, individual institutions depart from standards.) My own approach is 'think globally, act locally', or, to adapt a maxim from networking, 'be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept' (RFCs 791 and 1122). Besides, I like standards for their own sake: long may they multiply.
It would be far-fetched to pretend that modern librarianship has much to learn directly from its ancestry, but modern practices can be informed by a knowledge of their origins, just as comparative international librarianship has a value for the domestic profession. I once edited the library history category in the idealistic Open Directory Project, which work you might have noticed in Google searches.
The enemies of books by William Blades (1888) and Librarians as enemies of books by Randolph G. Adams (1937).
On books and the housing of them by W.E. Gladstone (1898) - yes, that Gladstone, describing his invention of rolling stacks for his library at Hawarden.