Cataloging and Indexing

The Future of Cataloging

Deanna B. Marcum

Address to the Ebsco Leadership Seminar Boston, Massachusetts

My career in librarianship has included work in cataloging, which I have always

understood to be a major part of library functioning. But I didn’t fully realize how

major until I made a discovery when I became associate librarian of the Library

of Congress. e discovery was nancial—the Library of Congress is investing in

cataloging at the rate of forty-four million dollars a year! You can well appreciate

that a cost of that magnitude really got my attention.

If such an expenditure produces great benets for the Library of Congress,

libraries across the country, and others around the world, then we can justiably

argue that the forty-four million is well spent. But in the age of digital informa-

tion, of Internet access, of electronic key-word searching, just how much do we

need to continue to spend on carefully constructed catalogs? at is the question

I have come here this evening to pose—how should we think about cataloging in

the Age of Google?

I have not come to say that we no longer need the cataloger-produced biblio-

graphic entry. I recognize that my own institution, the Library of Congress, cre-

ated the bibliographic structure that is used by nearly every library in this country

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and by many around the world. Before starting any revolution against that struc-

ture, I want to take care to consider the potential consequences.

But I have many questions about cataloging, and I believe we must face them

together and begin answering collectively. I therefore welcome the invitation to

speak here as an opportunity to begin that discussion. I need your advice, your

judgment, and that of others in the library and research communities to consider

what the technologies that all of us are now adopting mean for cataloging in the

future. I ask you to think of this evening as the rst step in a longer exploration

of a dicult issue.

Let me begin with a practical demonstration of the question’s importance—an

example of how digital-era students work.

Let us suppose that you are a librarian at a small college near the middle of

the continental United States. Let us even suppose that yours is the library whose

Web site I recently picked at random to see what digital resources it was oer-

ing. I am pleased to tell you that I was impressed. In addition to an electronically

searchable catalog of your own physical holdings, I found that you oer four-

teen EBSCOHost Online Databases, thirteen online databases from OCLC First

Search, eleven InfoTrac Online Databases, ve Lexis Nexis Online Databases,

three Proquest Online Databases, and at least nine other online resources, includ-

ing encyclopedias, dictionaries, electronic books, and materials for research on

current issues. Consequently, users of your library have online access to literally

hundreds of scholarly journals and other resources on all kinds of topics in a wide

range of academic elds.

Now let us suppose that I am one of your college’s students with a term paper

coming due. And let’s also suppose that I’ve been assigned to write about the for-

eign policy of President Fillmore. (I don’t know why I am using this subject as an

example, except that I can’t get out of my mind the name of an amusing recording

of political ditties that a friend recently told me about. It’s entitled “Sing Along

With Millard Fillmore.”)

Now, in the old days, I might have walked to your library, looked in an ency-

clopedia there for “Fillmore,” then searched your paper card catalog to identify

books on Fillmore, located these books by call number on a shelf, and looked

through their tables of contents and maybe indices to nd what they contained

on foreign policy. But today I don’t want to go to the library. I want to stay in

my cozy dorm room, where I have a computer, which your college may even have

provided me. So I decide to use it to do my research. One option, I nd, is to do

it through your library’s Web site.

I click on your library’s Web site (that is, on the Web site of the actual library

that I selected). ere I nd the term “Online Catalog,” and click on that. en I