Appreciating catalogers

A recent question posted to Autocat asked: How do you explain cataloging to non-catalogers? This post by David Badertscher does a nice job: In Appreciation of Library Catalogers and Cataloging Standards.

I paticularly like this insight:

Although search services are often useful, even vital, they are no substitute online catalogs when searching for bibliographic materials housed in libraries, groups of libraries or similar organizations. Cataloging standards can also form the basis for other forms of web searching. A prominent information consultant told me some years ago that he liked to hire catalogers for applications development in database and web searching because he found their training and expertise to be so helpful and effective. [emphasis added]

Comments

[Sarah]

The comment of David Badertscher is interesting if we think about how to explain cataloging to non-cataloguers. Cataloguing it’s not only filling in the gaps of a database but also doing many other tasks which are more complex than what is thought.
People with cataloguing training have the knowledge that allows them to manage in the use of databases and websearching with more precision than a non-cataloguer. For this reason David Badertscher thinks that catalogers are useful to work with information. Catalogers realize many different tasks during their day by day.