Sometimes subject cataloging is like fitting a square peg into a round hole. The constraints of Library of Congress's subject headings require a combination of diligence and apathy: exploring the furthest reaches of analogy while recognizing that there's a good chance that you'll never actually alight on a heading that perfectly describes the point of the piece in your hand. So not only is it like fitting a square peg into a round hole, it's like fitting a square peg into a round hole in a world where the very concept of a round peg does not exist. And that's if you're lucky. Since a large part of my job requires me to catalog dissertations and theses, dissertations and theses in disciplines that I have absolutely no grasp of, I'm fully aware that what I think might be a round hole could very well be some extradimensional shape that I have no remote conception of. So sometimes subject cataloging is fitting a square peg into a tesseract shaped hole.
So you hammer the peg in with all your apathetic might, you trim off some corners, or, some days, you just place the peg on top of the hole and redefine your definition of fitting so you can go home. Such is the state of things.
I can't really complain, of course. The alternative, of uncontrolled keywords, hardly seems attractive. Without some sort of standardization, collocating things would be nightmarish. Searching by publisher is like that. Publishers are free text, which sure saves time when entering records, but if I want to find everything by a certain publisher I have to hope to God that they've never changed how they record their name even slightly. I also have to know the conventions of how catalogers enter publishers names: what they leave off, what they leave in, and all the up in the air possibilities dependent on the mysterious cataloger's judgement.
I'm currently very frustrated with the state of conventional cataloging in the library system. It seems traditional cataloging is stuck in its own mire of antiquity, complicated by interlibrary reliance on those outmoded systems. At two different ends of the spectrum: I was complaining about how time intensive subject cataloging can be to a co-worker in Reference and Instruction who pointed out that patrons don't even navigate the catalog with subject headings. Of course, they don't. On the other hand, a coworker in acquisitions pointed out how important subject headings were for collection development: if books aren't cataloged correctly, how do they know the subject areas that are most heavily used?
If the organization of information was started to help seekers make sense of the information available, the organizers have since been buried underneath their own system.
So you hammer the peg in with all your apathetic might, you trim off some corners, or, some days, you just place the peg on top of the hole and redefine your definition of fitting so you can go home. Such is the state of things.
I can't really complain, of course. The alternative, of uncontrolled keywords, hardly seems attractive. Without some sort of standardization, collocating things would be nightmarish. Searching by publisher is like that. Publishers are free text, which sure saves time when entering records, but if I want to find everything by a certain publisher I have to hope to God that they've never changed how they record their name even slightly. I also have to know the conventions of how catalogers enter publishers names: what they leave off, what they leave in, and all the up in the air possibilities dependent on the mysterious cataloger's judgement.
I'm currently very frustrated with the state of conventional cataloging in the library system. It seems traditional cataloging is stuck in its own mire of antiquity, complicated by interlibrary reliance on those outmoded systems. At two different ends of the spectrum: I was complaining about how time intensive subject cataloging can be to a co-worker in Reference and Instruction who pointed out that patrons don't even navigate the catalog with subject headings. Of course, they don't. On the other hand, a coworker in acquisitions pointed out how important subject headings were for collection development: if books aren't cataloged correctly, how do they know the subject areas that are most heavily used?
If the organization of information was started to help seekers make sense of the information available, the organizers have since been buried underneath their own system.
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