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The Library & Information Science Professional's Career Development Center |
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The
Whimsy of Cataloging by Richard A. Murray |
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“I want to be a cataloger.” For a lot of library school students – and many librarians – that seems to be as appealing a statement of career purpose as “I want to be a crash test dummy” or “I want to clean up after the elephants at the circus.” Many students dread their required cataloging class as if it were a root canal. So why would anyone possibly choose to spend their life as a cataloger? The stereotype of the cataloger is, for many, the hermit hiding in the bowels of the library shackled to an OCLC terminal all day, counting pages of plates and measuring the heights of books. On the rare occasion he or she is let out of the dungeon, it’s to be the one at meetings who speaks in unintelligible MARC-ese about “non-filing characters” and “second indicator blank” and “space colon space.” The cataloger’s role in the library is to enforce rules that nobody understands and to make things as difficult as possible for everyone involved. Right? Well, no. Those who love cataloging – and there are more of us than you think – find it fascinating, challenging, and even (dare I say it?) fun. So what’s it really like to be a cataloger? Unlike what you may think about cataloging, it’s not a tedious, never-ending life of rote application of rules and punctuation. Catalogers get to see the library’s most interesting materials and have to figure out a) what this thing is, b) who might find it useful, and c) how to make sure they find it. Yes, you need to know the rules, but the trick is in knowing which rule to use when and how to apply them to the thoroughly bizarre item that’s sitting on your desk. There’s a lot more thought involved than deciding whether to use a colon or a semicolon, and being a good cataloger actually involves a lot of creativity. Though most catalogers don’t have the luxury of reading everything that comes across their desks, it’s amazing how much you learn through osmosis while figuring out what a book’s about and how to treat it. I often feel like I get paid to learn every day. There’s a lot of detective work involved, too, especially when you’re trying to decide whether the John Smith who wrote your piece is one of the hundred John Smiths who have written other things or a totally different one. One of my favorite parts of my job is running across these sorts of problems and then using the library’s resources to find the solutions. In some ways it’s like being a reference librarian, only you’re finding answers to questions you yourself have created rather than ones from a patron who’s just wandered up to the desk. The image of the cataloger never seeing natural light or interacting with other human beings needs to go, too. At a research library, a cataloger has to work intensively with bibliographers to learn what topics their faculty and students are working on and then design work flows that will make these materials available as quickly as possible. He or she has to work with acquisitions staff to answer questions about what they’re ordering or receiving and what to do with it, with preservation staff to figure out how to handle it, and with circulation staff to work out what to do with it for the long run. There’s a lot of teamwork within the department, too, as catalogers are constantly conferring with each other about particularly tricky situations or, perhaps even more often, laughing about the weird things they’ve run across in the course of their work. Oddities we’ve found at my library recently include an OCLC record for a box of Band-Aids, photos of some sort of German festival in which participants dress as haystacks, and a squirrel sewing machine (don’t ask). Not too long ago a friend two cubicles down got to catalog something that appeared to be an inflatable swimming pool (it turned out to be a globe). Another found an OCLC record for a book that, according a note, was “impregnated with cheesy smell.” My coworkers and I like to talk about “the whimsy of cataloging.” Besides everyone else at the library, the cataloger frequently gets to interact with people in far-flung places around the world. Yesterday a colleague was emailing an author in East Timor to ask him the preferred form of his unusual name. Recently I had a lengthy email discussion with a magician in Venezuela named “Abracadabra” in which I tried to determine whether he was the same “Abracadabra” who wrote the book I was cataloging. (He wasn’t, but he was a great conversationalist). All this said, I’ll be the first to admit that cataloging isn’t for everyone. A good cataloger needs to have attention to detail and patience for minutiae. Great curiosity helps, as does the ability to work independently. The ability to think things through logically is a must. And while most catalogers tend to fall on the “Introvert” side of the Myers-Briggs scale, they also tend to be tons of fun. It goes back to that “whimsy of cataloging” thing. The department I work in is famous in the library for our Halloween costumes (among our recent themes have been the Von Trapp Family Catalogers and the solar system). Last year when another department was decorating in a beach theme for a party, they knew to come to us to find a hammock, an inflatable parrot, and various sombreros. We vent our frustrations by invading each other’s cubicles in commando-style ping-pong weapon raids. So if you’ve never thought of cataloging as something you might want to do, give it some consideration. If you’re in library school, you might want to try to get a job in your library’s cataloging department to see if it’s right for you. Libraries frequently have a hundred or more applicants for reference positions but find it difficult to find catalogers because many library school grads – most of whom have no idea what it’s really like to be a cataloger – have already decided it’s something they don’t want to do. And even though the things we catalog and the methods we use are changing in the digital age, the basic concepts of organizing and providing access to information will always be in demand. So before you dismiss the thought of cataloging as a career, give it some thought. You might find you have an appreciation for whimsy, too. Richard A. Murray is Catalog Librarian for Spanish & Portuguese Languages at Duke University. At the time he wrote this article, he was a catalog librarian at Vanderbilt University. His favorite Library of Congress subject heading is "Papaya in art." Article published Feb 2002 Disclaimer: The ideas expressed in LIScareer articles are those of their respective authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the LIScareer editors.
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Page last updated
10/03/2005
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