An IT Guy Looks at Cataloging Standards

Here's a thoughtful post by Eli Jacobowitz, Manager of Digital Technology in Academic Computing at Sarah Lawrence College. It's titled The Virtues and Limits of Cataloging.

He looks at traditional library cataloging within the context of the ascent of Google, Web 2.0, tagging, etc. But rather than being dismissive, he highlights some of the strong points of traditional library standards. He also asks the question who will catalog all the digital resources being produced, i.e., pointing out the limits of traditional cataloging. These are the limits we're all struggling with as libraries attempt to organize and provide access to digital resources as well as print materials.

Here's an excerpt:

"The bottom line is, you need a degree in Library Science to do this right. Where does that leave the vast amount of digital information that is piling up? Early projections are speculative, but according to this study, the amount of information in the world doubled in roughly three years. It is a serious and valid question whether it will be humanly possible to catalog even the fraction of information that we find worth keeping.

This limitation, combined with the competition of amateur, democratic, rough-and-ready categorization, means that professional cataloging must adapt or die. The good news is that the information technology community is finally ready to hear what the librarians have been saying. The brute force, flat data approach doesn't scale." (Emphasis mine)

Via librarian.net