by Sanford Berman
Don Saklad
http://www.sanfordberman.org/whatsnew/whatsnew.htm
Random Notes on
Library Juice 8-9-06 "interview with Barbara Tillett"
http://tinyurl.com/yz9qms
http://librariansplace.wordpress.com/2006/08/12/library-juice-%C2%BB-interview-with-barbara-tillett/
*in a Fall 2004 Counterpoise interview, I was asked
"How would you update your comments in
"Jackdaws Strut in Peacock's Feathers,'
which appeared in Librarians at Liberty, six years later?"
I replied
SB: Of course, some specific example might be dropped or revised,
but I'd retain the overall complaint and indictment.
Let me stipulate the continuing problem in a few pithy
observations:
. Cataloging should be unmistakably identify a given work, convey
its nature, content, and thrust, and specify how it can be
accessed: e.g., by subject headings and various added entries
for title variations, editors, illustrators,
notable contributors, translators,
associated groups or agencies, and local, specialty, and
alternative presses.
. Electronic tinkering and keyword searching do not compenstate
for rigorous, accurate, fulsome, and fair cataloging at the
start: that is, the crafting of a functional bibliographic
record.
. Most US libraries rely on Library of Congress cataloging
for the bib-records that will appear in their local OPACs.
This is especially so for US trade publications, which
constitute the bulk of new acquisitions by public, school, and
some college libraries.
. Increasingly, most libraries do not review "outside copy"
(i.e., the LC or network-supplied data) in a constructively
critical fashion.
Too often, paraprofessionals or clerks may be assigned merely
to check on call number suitability and verify such basic
elements as main entry and title, nothing more
Berman (8-12-06): 2
. As demonstrated in "Jackdaws" (reprinted in the
'Librarians at Liberty' section of this issue--Ed.) and
numerous other sources, LC-originated copy is often deficient
in notes, subject tracings, and other access points.
The dilemma persists: Libraries accept LC-like products and tools
with an almost infantile faith that they're really useful.
In fact they are frequently imperfect and dysfunctional.
What to do?
Undertake more local enhancement and revision, realizing that
poor cataloging may undo the considerable effort and expense of
selecting and processing material.
If the items can't be found, whta's the point?
Also, support LC's future requests for greater funding and
staffing, providing they acknowledge what particularly needs
repair, like the more timely establishment of topical headings
and the accelerated inclusion of content-clarifying and
keyword-searchable notes.
For recent example of LC cataloging infelicities,
see my column, "berman's Bag," in Unabashed Librarian, no. 132.
Last week, I received a gift from students at the
College of St. Catherine in St. Paul:
Shut Up Shut Down: Poems
(Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2004.
It's by Mark Nowak, with an Afterword by Amiri Baraka.
It consists largely of poems about work, workers, and the
labor movement, punctuated by black-and-white photos, quotations,
and reading lists.
Coincidentally, it is a case study in what's wrong with standard
cataloging.
LC assigned a generous four headings:
Corporate culture. Corporations--Corrupt practices,
Business ethics, and Greed, all subdivided by--
Literary collections.
The sole added entry:
I. Title.
So what's amiss?
No added entry (access point) for notable contributor
Amiri Baraka.
No turnaround title added entry for "Shut down shut up."
No tracing for the alternative publisher:
Coffee House Press.
No note indicating the graphic dimension,
the photodocumentary aspect.
No genre heading for "Working class poetry."
No topical headings for plant closings,
downsizing, and labor movement.
Nor for, say, "Employee resistance and revolts."
And "Greed" is way too broad.
This is emphatically about corporate greed,
which demands an appropriate new heading.
Also needed: "American poetry--21st century."
Finally, Dewey classifiers placed this essentially
verse collection in "American fiction"
Not quite bibliocide-by-cataloging, but close.
For the record, over two years or longer I submitted suggestions
and documentation regarding cataloging to LC's Cataloging Policy
& Support Office.
No replies.
Then finally, after some 40 or 50 submissions, came a response,
which I believe materialized only because the CPSO Chief was
ordered to do so by her superior.
Since that December 16, 2004 letter, more have arrived.
I would dearly like to report that the "thaw" betokens a genuine
responsiveness, manifest in concrete reforms or new-heading
creation.
Alas, that hasn't quite happened.
Mostly, it's been perfunctory acknowledgments or tortured
explanations about why they won't do what they should do.
Among other things, I've been trying to get them to introduce
subject headings for Culture Wars, Infoshops, Student
Anti-sweatshop Movement, Plutocracy, and Native American
Holocaust, as well as either replacing Fanzines with Zines or
creating Zines as a comlementary descriptor.
The latest LC communication was a full-page rebuke,
dated 2-10-05 (See p. 10--Ed.), for daring to mention the
inadequate Cataloging-in-Publication entry for Nan Levinson's
Outspoken: Free Speech Stories in my upcoming
College & Research Libraries review.
Berman (8-12-06): 3
Since that interview, both Plutocracy and Zines have been
established as new headings.
They are most welcome, although woefully tardy.
And such sugested "Zine" permutations as Zine Distributors,
Zine Libraries, Feminist Zines, and Queer Zines
still await creation.
+Adding "Culture Wars as a UF (unused form/"see" reference) under
Culture Conflict effectively buries the considerable literature
on that topic, which particularly refers to contention in the
U.S. over public morality.
In a 12/26/04 missive to LC, I wrote:
"Hennepin County Library established this form in late 1996,
initially applying it to 13 titles in the collection.
This is HCL's new-heading report in Cataloging bulleting 145:
[] Culture wars.*
cn HCL form. Assignment: Mark Gerson's
Neoconservative vision: from the Cold War
to the culture wars (1996); Ira Shor's
Culture wars: school and society in the conservative
restoration, 1969-1984 (1986); James Davison Hunter's
Culture wars: the struggle to define America (1991);
Gerald Graff's Beyond the culture wars: how teaching the conflicts
can revitalize American education (1992); Richard Bolton's
Culture wars: documents from the recent controversies in the arts (1992);
Fred Whiteheads' Culture wars; opposing viewpoints (1994);
Russell Jacoby's Dogmatic wisdom: how the culture
wars divert education and distract America (1994);
Tom Sine's Cease fire: searching for sanity in America's
culture wars (1995);
William J. Bennett's De-valuing of America: the fight
for our culture and our children (1992), which includes "Culture wars";
Camille Paglia's Vamps and tramps (1994),
which includes "Culture wars"; Daniel Starer's
Hot topics: everything you wanted to know about the 50
major controversies... (1995), which includes "Culture wars";
Chip Berlet's Eyes right: challenging the rightwing backlash (1995),
which includes "Culture wars and freedom of expression."
sf Cultural wars
Wars, Culture
xx Cultural policy
Culture conflict
Educational policy
This innovation was formally recommended to LC.
The original cross-reference sturcture should be augmented
with these additional BTs:
xx Church and state
Popular culture
Religion and politics
Social policy
United States--Politics and government--1980-
And this is apossible scope note, derived in part from the myriad
"Culture wars" entries presently available (even, I suspect, to
LC catalogers) on the Web:
pn Here are entered materials on disputes and confrontations
in American public policy and culture dating from the early
1980s and typically involving such ideologically- and
religiously-based issues as abortion, gun control, censorship,
church-state separation (including school prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, teaching evolution,
and faith-based government programs) and homosexualilty."
that model scope-note also appeared in a Libary resources & technical services
"Letter to the editor," Jan. 2006, p. 4.
+Yes, "Mr. Berman" does occasionally submit "news clippings,"
strictly to further document term-usage for a recommended
heading, not as assignment-candidates.
(Occasionally, however, a clipping or journal article explicitly
mentions books, periodicals, films, or websites dealing with
the subject, in which case I highlight them for possible
applilcation.)
+Finally transforming "Vietnamese Conflict" to "Vietnam War"
in 2006 should be cause for embarrassment, not exultation.
+"Lobbying members of Congress" is something I've rarely done.
However, if I hadn't prompted the late Senator Paul Wellstone to ask LC why
they hadn't yet created a heading for National Health Insurance, that
rubric wouldn't have entered LCSH. (Nothing else had worked.)
Similarly, copying my Minnesota Senators and Congressmen recently
when querying Librarian of Congress Billington why Armenian Massacres
hadn't been converted to Armemian Genocide and how come no one at CPSO
would respond to my concern at least produced a reply from
Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services (repreduced in
Unabashed librarian, no. 139, p. 15-18).
+It's too bad that anyone needs to resort to "grandstanding" to prompt
obviously desirable changes.
I plead "guilty" to the charge.
Publicly ridiculing the heading Water Closets at an ALA program later that day
translated into a conversion to Toilets.
And repeatedly displaying a light bulb during talks and asking
the audience what that item was termed in their catalogs eventually
spawned a discrete rubric for Light Bulbs
(which had previously been termed "electric lamps, Incandescent.").
Too bad, but that's what it took to do the sensible thing.
+I had recommended replacement or dissolution of Jewish Question
as early as 1971 (Prejudices and antipathies, p. 22-26).
I (and others) repeated that sugegstion for the next many years.
Nothing happened.
Then, as I reported in Technical services quarterly, Fall/Winter 1984, p. 188-89;
"Finally, in June 1983, nearly 13 years after that heading had been publicly
and thoroughly denounced, LC agreed to scrap Jewish Question.
Marjorie Greenfield, an irate Jewish-American librarian, persuaded the
Anti-Defamation League to intercede.
And that did it."
+Incidentally, the trouble with the "god"-treatment simply represents
a much larger deficiency regarding a host of other religion-related headings
(for more examples, see the "Christocentric headings" index entries in the
1993 Prejudices reprint).
+"Before we made the change from 'Gypsies' to 'Romanies', staff members
from CPSO...consulted closely with a renowned expert and advocate in this field."
That expert/advocate was doubtless Ian F. Hancock, Linguistics Professor at the
University of Texas-Austin and himself an English Romani.
Writings and correspondence by Hancock years before had led Hennepin
County Library to make the ethnonym-switch. And those Hancock-sources
(as well as HCL's treatment-details) had een regularly forwarded to LC.
With no positive result.
+No explanation is given for continuing to cling to "Lepers" and "Leprosy",
except for a reference to Mesh as an suthority for such forms.
Well, what about the U.S. Public Health Service as a suitable authority?
USPHS has favored "Hansen's Disease" and "Hansen's Disease Patients"
for decades.
And they actually deal with HD patients and medical personnel.
(For more on this terminological dispute, see Fall/Winter 1984
TSQ, p. 155-160, and "Hansen's Disease, not Leprosy"
Librarians at liberty, Dec. 2000, p. 27-8.)
+"Most of our correspondence contains helpful and constructive suggestions."
The clear implication: my correspondence is not either helpfulor constuctive.
Yet for 26 years, I duly forwarded to LC copies of HCL's bimonthly
Cataloging bulleting, replete with full syndetic workups for new & changed
headings, assignment-citations, and quoted usage-examples.
Lately, in retirement, I have privately recommended dozens of new headings
and changes, accompanying each with backup documentation and
proposed scope-notes and cross references.
(I'll gladly supply photocopies to anyone. Topics range from Erotophobia,
and Recovered Factory Movement to Moral Panics and Genderqueers.
Also available: two instalments of "Who did it when?, dating
from 1990 and 1992, which comopare LC and heading establishment by date
and language.)
Berman (8-12-06): 6
The unstated reason for why headings aren't created or corrected
in a timely fashion is that catalogers may be discouraged from doing so.
This is from my column in Unabashed librarian, no. 137, p. 25:
As exemplified by the 12-year (or longer) delay in establishing a Zines
heading, I've repeatedly lamented LC's failure to create needed subject
descriptors and also Dewey numbers in a timely, responsive, and even proactive
fashion.
Invariably, the question arises in talks and conversations: Why?
How come the laggardliness?
Surely, some of the several plausible reasons include underfunding,
insufficient staff, and unending backlogs.
But there's another reason, too: Attitudes or management
priorities, which currently seem to regard digitization as a panacea for space
problems, preservation, and searching.
(An older and probably continuing mindset is basically conservative
and bureaucratic, hesitant to innovate until somehow shamed or otherwise pressured to do so.)
These are not merely the speculations of a jaundiced and frustrated outsider.
Lately, whena high-ranking memeber of the LC cataloging establishment was asked how
LC creates new subject headings and whether individual catalogers
propose them, she replied:
Yes, catalogers are responsible for setting up new subject
headings when needed for a work they're cataloging.
However, our catalogers are under a lot of pressure to produce widgets.
Since they don't get any credit for setting up new subject headings or classification numbers,
this work takes a definite back seat to cranking our cataloging.
http://www.sanfordberman.org/whatsnew/whatsnew.htm
By Sanford Berman