I'm still on the lookout for blogging coming out of last month's ALA Midwinter conference. Here's one you'll definitely want to read: Anthony R. D. Franks shares the text of his presentation at the ALCTS Cataloging Management Discussion Group. The topic was the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control's final report. Franks is the Team Leader, Cooperative Cataloging Team at the Library of Congress.
Two of the many buzzwords flying about are "sustainable" and "unsustainable" The way we have done things at LC is unsustainable. Either we now no longer have the staff, or soon we will not have the staff, to support our habitual labor-intensive workflow for cataloging, training, review, and editorial functions. We will no longer be given the staff and the funding to go on as we have done.
I don’t think that I’m shocking anybody who does not work at LC by saying that there are things others do better than we do. So, let’s let everybody do what they do best, accept the communal results, and move on. This is not a burden. It is what each of us is already doing. We simply must find a way to share the products of this labor.
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