Future of Cataloging and the Role of Reference Librarians

I guess I've been lucky. I've always had a great relationship with the reference librarians I've worked with--none of them have been negative about cataloging. But that's not universal. Here's an interesting post by Ron Peterson, Chinese Periodicals and the state of the conversation on cataloging, found over on the Information Obliteracy blog. He looks at the future of cataloging/catalogs debate and the roles that reference librarians and catalogers could play to improve the state of affairs.

"Our catalogs have a lot of room for improvement, but the value that is added by libraries is in the role played by people that making our stuff available for the library’s users. For the catalog, a large part of the value is added by the catalogers who describe the library’s stuff. The better we describe our stuff and the more useful (and usable) that description is, the more value that is added. On the other end, reference librarians add value by assisting in the retrieval of the stuff. Ideally, the reference librarians have worked with the catalogers to leverage the data in the catalog and create a reasonably intuitive interface. And ultimately, the reference librarians will serve as the user’s guide to finding what they are looking for. When the reference librarians don’t understand the catalog, the catalogers are limited in ways they can leverage the data, and the catalog suffers." [emphasis mine]

Ron's post could also be used as a morality tale of what happens to reference-focused library school students who don't take at least one class in cataloging!