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Off the Shelf, July 7, 2008
Several of the sessions I attended last week at the giant American Library Association conference were concerned with the library catalogue (or catalog, as they say in California). Many people in the library profession are speculating on the future of the catalogue in its present form.
I will be dating myself when I admit that I clearly remember the days of the paper card catalogue, and in fact my first full-time library job was in a library that was not yet automated. I remember the trepidation with which we sent the catalogue drawers away a few at a time (there was an outside contractor who took care of the “conversion” process), and the reluctance with which the patrons (and staff) let go of the old, familiar way.
Today, using the online catalogue is second nature to me, and the power of the electronic and online search tools is incredible. However, as some of the visionaries in Anaheim maintain, we (that is, librarians) still are holding on to the antiquated systems that underlie that catalogue. While the Dewey Decimal System, Library of Congress Subject Headings and the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules were cutting edge in the 19th century, many people feel they don’t serve today’s library patron. MARC, which is an acronym (sort-of) for MAchine Readable Cataloguing, converted traditional cataloguing data into a form that computers can read. The world-wide standard, it celebrated its 40th birthday this year. It’s an extremely rigid coding language, difficult to learn and become proficient in, and cataloguers have a reputation for being obsessive about its quality.
Now, with social networking, Wikipedia and contributor-written or enhanced content, MARC may go the way of catalogue cards. FRBR, much talked about at the conference, stands for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, a conceptual system that relates retrieval and access in online library catalogues from a user’s perspective, rather than a librarian’s. Patron-generated content is becoming more and more common in the larger library catalogues. At the conference, I saw one vendor that was selling a system of patron-contributed book reviews, sort of like the ones on the Amazon website. If you want to know something about a certain book, you can find out if anyone among all the subscribers of the service who has contributed one. If you’ve read a book and disagree with the review, you can write your own contradicting it and have it seen all over the world.
The only constant is change, as they say. The transition will probably be slow and gradual, but you can expect to see more user-friendly and even user-authored content in the library world – sooner rather than later.
Lauren Stara, Library Director