The Practice of Cataloging
I started out in library school wanting to be a cataloger. I started out as an undergraduate wanted to be an English major (I’m not sure what I intended to do with the degree, but the subject interested me). The path between being an English major and becoming a cataloger was charted by the book Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance (and my student job at my college library). The book changed my life and was probably the biggest reason someone who liked English Romanticism ended up programming for a living (and liking it).
What brings all this up was an interesting teaser from Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog: Quotes about order and disorder. He says, “Order seems very much a part of the public perception of the library, often counterposed to the potential disorder of the materials themselves.” I used to do a lot of writing about cataloging and (dis)order while I was working towards my LIS degree (I copy cataloged my way through library school, taking one or two courses a semester, and writing has always been a form of “sense-making” for me).
One thing that interested me about cataloging at that time was the catalogers need to be able to live peacefully in a completely chaotic environment. One might look at cataloging as making order from chaos but, to me, being able to live in the chaos always seemed to be a more central part of the process than the order that was created (though I know (or at least believe) that patrons benefit from the end result). I’ve often wondered if being as ordered as many catalogers seem to be (from the outside) was just a method for dealing, internally, with having one foot in the yawning void.
In other words, there should be some similitude of order resulting from the cataloging process but the process itself requires a cataloger to keep one foot in order (reason, rules, conventions, etc.) and the other firmly planted in the chaos (changing authorities, changing rules, a never-ending landslide of things to be cataloged, user needs, changing retrieval patterns, etc.) When I was studying to be a cataloger, I often thought of the process of cataloging as a sort of religious practice (if you’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance you’ll get my drift I imagine).
It is a matter of being conscious and aware in every moment. Cataloging is not about “sorting socks” (as I’ve heard another librarian say), but about making conscious decisions (wholly present in the moment and in the process — if you are not, I don’t see how you can do it for a living year after year… the chaos will get to you). It is not unlike the Japanese tea ceremony where everything has a purpose and an order. The process is the end result.
So while it may seem like catalogers create order, what they really do, in my opinion, is perform a practice that maintains that balance in the library. I can go on and on about how they are not appreciated as much as they should be and how they should be paid more than they are (since they are the core of the services that the library provides, and will continue to be even in our single search box era), but I think the real reward for catalogers is in the cataloging itself (they surely don’t do it for the money). They are the monks of the library world… creating balance and constructing pathways that users can use to navigate the information landscape.
I think after I finish reading Cryptonomicon (my current book) I need to return to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance again (I’ve read it three times (so far), the first time in high school, and never fail to get something new from each reading).
Powered by FireStats