Looking Back: Moments in ALCTS History 1957-2007
Nineteen Fifty-seven and All That*
Paul S. Dunkin, Chief of Technical Services, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D. C.
“But my dear,” said the Hatter, “Was there progress?”
“Well,” said Alice earnestly, “There was change.”
It was the Year of the Great Osmosis. On the very first day the
ancient and honorable Division of Cataloging and Classification was
swallowed up by something bigger than all of us, the Resources and
Technical Services Division. We became a lowly, albeit vocal, section
along with three partner sections for acquisitions, serials, and
copying methods.
Our Journal of Cataloging and Classification, bountiful
gift ten years ago of the vision and stubborn hard work of our
beloved Marie Louise Prevost, had been build into a sturdy journal by
Esther Piercy. Now it joined with Serial Slants to blossom into Library Resources and Technical Services, taking along with it Miss Piercy as Editor, Miss Prevost as Honorary Editor, and Carlyle Frarey as Managing Editor.
Our President became a Chairman and our Executive Board and
Executive Committee. Our Executive Secretary, won with so much
difficulty, became Executive Secretary of RTSD. Our Policy and Research
Board stuck by us, but it is now a section committee. Our twenty-nine
regional groups, lively products of local self government, became
regional groups of RTSD.
But how define osmosis? We adopted
some bylaws in principle (whatever that means) at Midwinter 1957; we
adopted a one-page stop-gap statement of organization at Kansas City.
And in this issue of LRTS Alice Pattee’s hard working and hard-to-discourage committee has come up with yet a newer and better version of bylaws.
Also it was Another Year of the Code. Seymour Lubetzky began to
translate his general principles into concrete rules. By year’s end
there were three sections: personal entry, anonymous works, and
corporate entry. Each in its turn came under the eagle eye and pointed
pen of Wyllis Wright’s Code Revision Committee. A soul-numbing,
time-eating process, but Mr. Lubetzky plows ahead. There has been some
grumbling because these tentative rules are not available to all
catalogers and because no preliminary edition is intended (see Library Journal,
Jan. 1, 1958, p. 61). But the work might grind to a complete stop in
the crowd around the goldfish bowl were to swell and the tapping on the
glass wall increase. The CCS began work in 1957 on a pre-Conference
Institute on the Code to be held at Stanford in 1958; perhaps the
Institute will satisfy the urge to peek and tap.
Linked somewhat to code construction is the Jackson study of
catalog use, originally sponsored by the Policy and Research Board and
financed by a Bassett grant. In the spring, Vaclav Mostecky agreed to
help edit the study, and 1958 will see its publication by ALA. Still
unanswered is the fundamental problem of to what extent, if any, even
the most thorough study of catalog use can, or should, influence
catalog rules.
The papers of the Chicago University conference on the code, edited by Ruth French Strout, originally published in the Library Quarterly (Oct. , 1956) appeared in 1957 as a separately-published book with thoughtful reviews by Laura Colvin (LRTS, Fall, 1957) and Wesley Simonton (College and Research Libraries,
Nov., 1957). The international aspects of the code, much talked of at
Chicago in 1956, won ever greater attention in 1957. Andrew Osborn,
representing the ALA and sponsored by the Council of Library Resources,
attended the German Library Association conference in Lübeck in June
and returned optimistic about the chances of compromise between the
Anglo-American and the German traditions even on corporate entry (see
his report in the ALA Bulletin, Nov. 1957). An international
conference, sponsored by IFLA, perhaps in 1959, to seek agreement on
basic principles seems in the making.
What kind of
international code? Whom should it include? How should it affect our
national code? What would be its service? Dr. Osborn seems content to
limit it to reconciling choice (but not form) of entry between the
Anglo-Americans and the Germans, without any great effect on national
codes. Its service, he suggests, would be in current national
bibliographies “facilitating order work for librarians and dealers
alike”.
But what of the great area outside the
Anglo-American-German traditions? And would not order work be served
much more quickly and efficiently if the producers of national
bibliographies simply got together privately and worked out some basic
agreements of their own? No matter how international agreement is
achieved, can a national bibliography ignore a national code? Buyers of
books will still have their problems if books are entered in one way in
national bibliographies and in another way in dealers’ catalogs and
library catalogs.
“Internationalism” has become a magic
word, a panacea to solve every problem in a complex world. But is
an international venture more fruitful when it seeks unanimity or when
it seeks merely to understand different points of view and welcome
their unique contributions to civilization?
A major event of the year was the three-volume LC National Union Catalog. In publication it follows the same pattern as Books: Authors,
which it supersedes: monthly issues with quarterly, annual, and
quinquennial cumulations. But it includes not only titles cataloged by
LC, but also those LC titles assigned to Priority Four and all titles
in Roman alphabet for publications issued in 1956 reported by other
libraries.
Also cheering was the announcement during 1957 of more speedy
publication of a new British Museum catalog, even though the
anticipated saving in time will mean a less finished product.
This year saw the completion of the new Code for Cataloging Music and Phonorecords
(being published by ALA) and also the production of the “Preliminary
Rules and Manual for Cataloging Chinese, Japanese and Korean Materials
(In LC Cataloging Service, Bulletin 42, July 1957). Hopes of
a code for cataloging Persian library materials rest with Nasser
Sharify, Deputy Director (on leave to Columbia University School of
Library Service) of the Parliamentary Library in Taheren who has
received a grant from the Council on Library Resources for this purpose.
And Eunice Keen’s committee worked diligently and effectively on the
problem of bibliographically controlling audio-visual materials (see
Frances Hamman’s report in LRTS, Winter, 1957). It is hoped their work will lead toward a manual in this field.
There was some talk of a new edition of Merrill’s code for
classifiers. This would be quite a chore if the new code were to be
brought into line with modern thinking about codes. The Merrill code is
simply a heaping up of what some classifiers did (sometimes with no
attention to logic) about some particular problems. What would seem to
be needed first would be a study, similar to the Lubetzky report, to
determine what general principles of classification should be. A
resulting code might well be more in terms of general directives
applicable in several related situations; probably it should not be a
batch of specific rules.
And it was Another Year of the New Dewey. The Classification moved ahead per aspera if not ad astra. Ben Custer’s lucid report (LRTS,
Fall, 1957) seems to indicate that the Dewey of 1958 will return to
many of the guiding principles of earlier editions and not offend too
many people. Here, as with the Code, there are the goldfish bowl and
those who peek in and tap at the occupants. Under the conditions any
progress is amazing. Each new edition brings up the same old questions.
Is the user—whether librarian or library patron—to decide how the
numbers are assigned? How can we cling to our cherished “integrity of
numbers” in the dramatic change of our modern world? How do people
really use a new classification scheme anyway? Do they swallow it whole
and reclassify everything? Or do they stick to the 12th edition (or
whatever they opened the library with) and look at the new only when
they want ideas for changing some particular point in the old? If Dewey
himself were around and in his twenties, what would he think of DC and
how would he go about writing a new classification scheme? Perhaps it
is just as well that the evil which med to lives after them while the
good is oft interred with their bones—if the good does live after them,
and is oft interred in an institution.
It was Another Year of Special Conferences.
Some nine hundred people attended the Symposium on
information-handling problems and techniques in Cleveland in Mid-April,
sponsored by the School of Library Science of Western Reserve
University and the Council on Documentation Research. Emphasis was on
systems rather than machines, and papers dealt with theory underlying
the systems as well as the systems themselves.
Also, there was the International Study Conference on Classification
for Information Retrieval at Dorking in May, reported in detail by
Jesse Shera in the Winter issue of LRTS. The Conference’s own published conclusions and recommendations are only general and not particularly new.
Still
unsolved is the search for a more specific definition of documentation
and bibliography, and, indeed the whole problem of special language—I
shall not say “jargon.” D. J. Campbell, for instance, found Documentation in Action
(1956) “ponderous and repetitive. . . often verbose. Matters. . . more
commonplace to all. . . are dealt with repeatedly. . . The feeling
among scholars that short, clear words and sentences are unscholarly
dies hard” (CRL, 18:341. July, 1957). Perhaps the suspicion
that the documentalist is a sort of intellectual confidence man who
sells another question passed on to 1958: How can we bring librarians
and documentalists together again?
John Metcalfe’s Information Indexing and Subject Cataloging,
perhaps the most original book of the year, dealt with but did not
answer finally this problem. Mr. Metcalfe believes that of fifty or
more writers on cataloging, classifying, and information indexing from
1856 to 1956, those who contributed most to “the right lines of
development” were Cutter, Dewey, Kaiser, and Hulme; and of these he
most reveres Cutter. “The bibliosophers,” he suggests with their
“panaceas, competing followers, different logics, inconsistent jargons
and conflicting metaphysics” have led us astray and we must now “bridge
back over the years the locusts have eaten and join. . . the men of
1876 and 1911.” Mr. Metcalfe’s style is often irritating, his solutions
violent; but this is also true of the Old Testament prophets. How know
the true prophets from the false? Both kinds irritate.
Subject cataloging was examined in Andrew Osborn’s thoughtful review (in LRTS. Spring, 1957) of Shera and Egan’s Classified Catalog (1956) and in George Scheerer’s article in Library Quarterly,
(1957) the latter closing, despite Metcalfe oddly enough, with a plea
to bury Cutter. Work on the new sixth edition of LC subject headings
went ahead with publication scheduled for 1958. David Haykin continued
work on his code for subject heading work.
Cataloger,
classifier, documentalist—one question plagues them all: What of the
user? Do we follow him or lead him? If we follow him, how find out
where he wants to go? The Jackson-Mostecky study is only one of several
in progress or in prospect listed by Rudolph Gjelsness or Jesse Shera
in Library Trends (October, 1957). If he, the user, is the
leader, we shall have to put up forever with tedious, fumbling research
about him; and the long-drawn-out, stultifying compromise of
committees—the goldfish bowl routine. If he is follower, we shall have
the stimulating, efficient, but sometimes misdirect, orders of creative
librarians wrestling with themselves in their studies—Dewey and Cutter,
Ranganathan and Lubetzky. The choice is neither obvious nor easy. It
may be worth noting, however, that Dewey’s classification and Cutter’s
rules have in large part survived three quarters of a century, while
the ALA codes of 1941 and 1949, products of multi-membered committees’
many years of work, were damned almost in the moment of publication.
Our greatest loss in 1957 was the tragic death of Henrietta Howell.
She served her profession and DCC well, most recently as Chairman,
Council of Regional Groups. I had known Henrietta since graduate school
days at Illinois where we spent many an hour in Ethel Bond’s seminar
taking the world apart. Over the years we had continued the process at
ALA meetings. It is hard to think of this coming Midwinter without
Henrietta’s drawling wisdom and dry humor over coffee in the Edgewater
Beach drug store.
For me the high point of the year came when David Haykin received
the Margaret Mann award. A creative thinker, a man of much knowledge
and wisdom and yet a merry and lovable man. He belongs in the august
company of Marie Louise Prevost, Seymour Lubetzky and the others of the
Mann fraternity. We do not often meet his like.
And that,
dear reader, was 1957 for me. I am sure it was many more and different
things for you. But you didn’t have to write this stuff with the fishy
eye of a deadline staring at you.
Not an annus mirabilis. But not a bad one either. Not a bad year at all.
*Reprinted from LRTS vol. 2, 2 (spring 1958): 82-86.
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