To Honor the Catalogers. Sort of.

 The last part of a passage I previously quoted reads thus: “It’s tempting to say that his [Panizzi’s] discovery of intertextuality among even the most mundane books forebodes the rise of the interconnected world of the digital age; it’s probably more accurate, however, to note that, from the vantage point of the wire world, Panizzi’s catalog looks like the beginnings of the Internet.”¹

I immediately thought of Douglas Adams whose piece called “Build It and We Will Come” was published in The Independent on Sunday in November of 1999. The writing is included in a posthumously published collection of Adams’s writings called, delightfully, The Salmon of Doubt². It is also available as an audio book, which is how I first experienced it, and makes for wonderful and enlightening moments. The breadth of the man’s interests and writings astonished me and was also incredibly freeing, as was the recognition of the difficulties of writing to deadline.

Why this piece in particular? Because of the thesis statement buried deep in the middle of the thing: “The computer is actually a modelling device. (92)”²

Because the person who wrote it is Douglas Adams, and because I agree with him firmly based on the evidence given in the aforementioned essay as well as independent ponderings after the fact, I’m not going to try to convince you of the truth of the matter. I’m going to treat it as fact.

Thinking of the catalog of Panizzi as the monster of bibliographical information that it must be (with equally contorted card catalogs that threatened to, and eventually did take over many library lobbies and reading areas, and the sort of relief the floors may have felt when computers with much smaller footprints began to carry the same information): what exactly is a catalog modelling? I believe it is the brains of The Library. I would say that the catalog is modelling the actions of Librarians, but they are (in Truth if not in practice) specialized beings whereas catalogs are created for the generalist user/reader/patron. Online catalogs are incredibly useful entities for organizing, tracking and adding to or removing information from entries into the catalog. They have the potential to interact with other, already established catalogs, create MARC records with little strain and also can be programmed to make bar codes and spine labels.

They can do everything that a team of librarians can do, and they can do it more quickly and with less overt physical effort on the part of those librarians. They do not replace human ingenuity or interaction with materials, and they do have to be made to be flexible. But the basic idea of an online or digitally maintained catalog is that when a person, a human, looks for a book, that person goes to a provided computer terminal or available website, enters the information that is at hand, and is given the coordinates to find that item within their current context. Lists of books that don’t get checked out, lists of periodical titles that the library holds subscriptions for, items that are on order, damaged, in transit, etc. are generated as part of the library’s functioning.

I know a woman who works at A Novel Idea in Lincoln, Nebraska whose co-workers describe her biblio-recall abilities as watching her flip through her mental Rolo-Dex. I’m sure that the information that she stores on those cards appears in different places as the keywords or characters or impressions or genres are the unique search terms in different situations. It takes time to build the kind of depth and specificity into such a mental search engine as she has, but I have felt it begin and have encouraged it to take root on my own, and while mine is more of a commonplace book or recreation room strung with yarn and connecting images, and will never rival the power of what an online catalog can accomplish, still, it is confirmation that our brains can and do surpass our wildest expectations of them.

The library catalog has the potential to accomplish something no less daunting than magic. It can help a reader find something he or she was sure they’d never be able to identify. It cannot always leave traces of how to find the treasure someone seeks, but it can, through subject headings, authors, titles, series titles, keywords and the like, show the reader something like the path that was taken to get to the treasure the first time.

In order to accomplish such formidable tasks, minute and thorough items of information have to be identified and entered into the knowledge base of the catalog. It must be told when and how an item came to be in the library. It must be told how an item relates to another item. Humans must make educated guesses about the use of an item and include what information will allow that item to be used and useful. Other humans may be given the opportunity to add reviews and search terms, to suggest connections that the catalogers may not have known existed. Involving the patrons in the development of the library catalog is one of the brilliant strokes of catalog development. It has need for mediation, but it is a powerful way to engage library patrons with library materials.

The catalog is a model of the relationships built between libraries and their communities. It is in deciphering those relationships that we learn about the design of the model, and what meaning the library is seen to have in the community.

¹ Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2003. 214 pages +notes & index.

²Adams, Douglas. The Salmon of Doubt, Harmony Books, New York, 2002. Paul Guzzardi, ed. 299 pp.

³Mentré, Mireille. Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain, Thames and Hudson, Inc, London, 1996. Jenifer Wakelyn, trans. 304 pp.

 Before I end this, I have to put my nomination forward for canonizing Douglas Adams (who was, I know, an atheist; have a sense of humor). I thought of that particular essay as I was typing up the other post. At the library, I went looking for Homer in order to get details and ideas in mind for what I plan to write during November (NaNoWriMo!), and found The Salmon of Doubt instead. When I’d gotten home, fed the (starving!!!) cats, and unloaded my library haul (Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain³, anyone? Oh, yeah), I opened the book right to the essay I wanted, even to the page and almost the line. You can’t respect the man without at least nodding at his beliefs, so I can’t quite see naming him a Deity, but at least a halo of connectivity on portraits? If someone gets a chance, ask Stephen Fry, will you? He’d know what to do.