Cataloging Futures

This is what cataloging is all about....

I love this post. In Success Story from the Back Room, John Kennerly, library director at Erskine College and Theological Seminary, describes the quiet, unassuming work of the cataloger and how their retrospective project provided access to a rare volume needed by a user at a large university library:

The praised cataloger, while working on the retrospective cataloging project, added a particular 1901 publication to our online catalog at some point during the project. At that moment, our copy of the book was exposed to the world through the miracle of the Internet. The staff member who sent me the email told the story of how our copy of that 1901 book had recently been requested through interlibrary loan by the library at Princeton. In the interlibrary loan system, only two U.S. libraries were shown to own the book: Harvard and our library. After the initial shock wore off, this realization offered a beautiful success story of the value of cataloging librarians and their efforts. On an average day in the back room with no one around, our cataloger clicked the save button to add a record to our online catalog. Little did she know at the time that because of her unobserved efforts our library was positioned to connect a library user a thousand miles away with a book not widely held in libraries. [emphasis added]

We may not know where cataloging and catalogers will end up in the future. It's nice to know in the present, we're still providing access to what users want and need.

Fly and hope, or, What about interlibrary loan?

Matthew Beacom comments on Sergey Brin's recent NY Times editorial concerning the Google Books deal:

"Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks."

What the hell is he talking about? There is no need to fly and hope. He must know that you have at least one other choice: use your computer to 1. look up the book in WorldCat to see what libraries have copies 2. email your local library to use its inter-library loan service to get the book for you. He can't be ignorant of this--Google has a deal with OCLC that joins Google Book Search and WorldCat--so why did he say "fly" and "hope"? One effect of this: it makes me wonder if the other things he says are just as fishy as this. I don't know anything about those other things, but seeing what he said about the one piece I do know about makes me doubt everything else he says.