Congress on Professional Education:
Focus on Education for the First Professional Degree
PREPARING FOR A CATALOGING CAREER: FROM CATALOGING TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
By
Janet Swan Hill, Associate Director for Technical Services
University of Colorado Libraries
Boulder, Colorado
And
Sheila S. Intner, Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College
Boston, Massachusetts
INTRODUCTION
All commonly accepted definitions of "technical services" include cataloging and classification as their operational nucleus. To warrant the name technical services, libraries usually combine units devoted to cataloging and classification with other distinct units for monographic ordering and/or serials management, collection management and development, materials processing, binding, preservation, and automated bibliographic systems, which may include circulation. To save space and the reader’s time, in this paper we focus primarily on cataloging and classification, but briefly treat other technical services when it seems particularly appropriate. Also for the purposes of this paper, the term cataloging is used in its broadest sense to mean all the knowledge and activities of describing, indexing, classifying, and controlling library materials bibliographically.
At the outset, we wish to state two assumptions that underlie our approach to the topic: first, that cataloging knowledge—conceived broadly as bibliographic knowledge—is at the heart of all professional knowledge in library and information science; second, that library and information science is (or should be) one integrated field, which, when viewed generically and divorced from a particular setting, may rightly be called "information science", but when viewed specifically as applied to a library setting, is "library science." We do not accept the view held by some that librarians work for non-profit organizations, while information scientists work in the commercial sector; nor do we accept that librarians use traditional methods, while information scientists work with new technologies.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
One hundred years ago, it was a given that preparation for a career as a librarian included learning how to catalog and classify materials (mainly books) for one’s library. When Melvil Dewey established his first School of Library Economy at Columbia University, the first part of a two-part curriculum covering operational knowledge and skills included cataloging. In fact, cataloging occupied the largest amount of curricular space. The smaller second part of Dewey’s curriculum was devoted to "bibliography," loosely covering what we now call "reference." This division between operations and service—similar to, though not synonymous with cataloging and reference—was emulated by other pioneering library school programs. This model held sway until the 1920s, when developments following the Carnegie-funded Williamson Study of 1923 led to a shift in curricular emphasis as well as to increased academic expectations. The new paradigm retained a two-level curriculum, but altered the focus of the levels, changing them to general (or "core") studies and specialized studies, both of which included cataloging.
As Francis Miksa pointed out 80 years later at the Simmons College Symposium on Recruiting, Educating, and Training Catalog Librarians, 19th century librarians created their own organizational systems because there were no standard systems on which they could depend. This environment of individualistic cataloging systems changed quickly after the turn of the century. In 1903, the Library of Congress began selling printed cards for the materials it cataloged, and soon afterward, a few for-profit corporations began selling cards. For a variety of reasons, including speed of delivery, complexity of the process (which was growing), suitability of the cataloging for local purposes, and the need to allocate expenses to certain categories (for example, the ability to pay for staff time, but not to contract for outside services), not all libraries took advantages of these services. Even those libraries that purchased cataloging from outside organizations found that a significant portion of the materials did not have cataloging available, so cataloging for those materials had to be done in-house. Add to these considerations the many small libraries in which librarians might be expected to turn a hand at every job that was to be done, and it is clear why the need for large numbers of knowledgeable catalogers on-site in individual libraries continued well into the 20th century. In answer to this need, library schools continued to prepare students to fill these roles in practice.
What was included in the historical cataloging curriculum? At first, in Dewey’s program, such things as learning to write cards in a beautiful, balanced script called Library Hand were taught; but, as his critics pointed out, Dewey tended to focus heavily on practical matters. In the 1920s, when library school curricula were intensively reviewed and revised to make them more "professional," Ernest Reece proposed that handwriting and typing be taught solely in training classes for clerical workers. Elementary cataloging, classification, and library techniques such as accessioning, alphabetizing, and book numbering were suggested for an undergraduate curriculum, while the graduate curriculum would have a required course in bibliographical problems, and elective courses in rare book and nonprint cataloging. One can see that dividing cataloging and classification into multiple sub-areas appropriate to varying intellectual levels is not new. Two decades later, Reece confirmed his belief that an understanding of cataloging was essential to professional education, but, emphasizing that the results of cataloging should be aimed at patron service rather than mere satisfaction of librarian-imposed ideals, he stated that library schools should teach, "…the purposes underlying operations such as cataloguing and the building of collections, to insure that these processes are not isolated and exalted for their own sake."
Required courses in the 1940s library school curriculum were Administration, Book Selection, Cataloging, and Reference and Bibliography, collectively called "Library economy." While cataloging remained strongly central to the core of library knowledge, it was forced to share its position with several other curricular areas. The complexity of cataloging rules, lists of subject descriptors for indexing books, and classification schemes continued to grow, filling all available space for both the basic required core courses and advanced or specialized elective courses. In some schools, beginning and advanced level courses were divided by the physical format of the material covered, that is, books for the beginning course and other types of materials for advanced-level courses. In other schools, a division was struck between descriptive cataloging and subject analysis, or between cataloging performed according to a set of rules used by many public libraries -- including the Dewey Decimal Classification and Sears List of Subject Headings -- and those used increasingly by academic libraries -- including Library of Congress Classification and Subject Headings. Since a beginning course in each of these areas was considered a necessity, the core requirement would involve two courses, rather than one. A third curricular model involved creating an introductory course focusing on cataloging principles, while subsequent courses covered the application of rules and tools to produce catalog products. These traditions persisted to the middle of the 20th century.
CHANGING TIMES
Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s library schools began to experience demand for graduates with knowledge of computing and skills in adapting their work to computer systems. Courses in automation, automated systems, systems analysis, computer programming, etc., quickly sprang up in library schools and although they were electives, they proved so popular with students that they might as well have been required. Some of these courses began to be recognized as "cataloging" and "technical services" in other guises, for example, Automated Systems might focus on computerized cataloging, ordering, or serials management; Programming might include devising in-house catalogs; etc.
At about the same time, an initiative resulting from a long-held desire on the part of some library educators to extend the master’s degree program from one to two years was launched in earnest. All American Library Association-accredited programs in Canadian schools became two-year programs as did some, though not all, of those in the United States. The two-year format allowed these schools to double the number of courses students took to earn their degrees, making it possible to retain the traditional core while adding coursework in new areas of knowledge. Schools that retained the one-year format, however, experienced a severe crunch in which students were forced to choose from a greatly enlarged array of offerings. In some places, cataloging was moved from the required to the elective course list, partly in response to the twin stresses on schools of wanting to be more flexible, and of having to meet the needs of employers for graduates familiar with computing.
Another development of the 1970s was the emergence of information science as a separate discipline, albeit one very closely related to library science. Information science coursework recalled subjects studied in the traditional curriculum, but with its own focus. For example, Cataloging might study indexing for the library catalog with tools such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, etc., but the information science equivalent studied theories of indexing, linguistics, semantics, etc. Cataloging might cover library classifications such as the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classifications, while the information science curriculum studied classification theory, cognition, set theory, etc. Library and information science began evolving into two disparate fields of study, adding still more courses to the curriculum and creating a felt need for separate degrees, separate departments within schools, and separate faculties.
Despite all these changes, cataloging courses retained a presence in the curriculum of library schools into the 1960s, with virtually every school requiring that students take at least one cataloging course, usually as part of the "core" curriculum. Some schools required that students take both a beginning and an advanced course, and even those that did not have such a requirement offered at least two courses, while some schools offered many more.
As the years of the 20th century passed, libraries and their collections expanded rapidly, and numbers of patrons and staff grew much larger, prompting more specialization among library practitioners. Divisions between "technical" and "public" services widened. It was increasingly difficult to bridge the gap in thinking and working between the back rooms where catalogers and other technical services personnel worked and the front desks where patrons sought help in using the catalog from reference librarians. Half a century ago, Ernest Reece pleaded for a change in cataloging emphasis from organizing the collection and keeping it tidy to planning organizational systems to meet users’ information needs. Similar calls for user-centered activity—although initiated as far back as 1876 by Charles Cutter in his Rules for a Dictionary Catalog—gained adherents in the 1940s and 1950s as standard cataloging systems grew more complex and rigidly structured.
In nineteen sixty-seven, a year that must surely be regarded as a landmark year for librarianship, three events occurred which enabled a revolution in cataloging and laid the foundation for a drastic change in how cataloging was perceived in the profession, and also in how and how much it was taught in library schools. In that year, the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR) were published, the MARC II (Machine Readable Cataloging) format was approved for use , and the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) was incorporated. The Anglo-American Cataloging Rules provided a standard structure for the content of cataloging records, no matter by whom they might be created, and centered the rules around a set of explicitly expressed principles, instead of continuing the previous practice of essentially preparing lists for special circumstances. The MARC Format provided a means to label or code cataloging records so that they could be converted to machine-readable form, shared and manipulated electronically, and then re-converted to print in a coherent manner. OCLC provided a prototype of the "bibliographic utility", an organization that could utilize coded cataloging data to provide a variety of products quickly. Perhaps more importantly it was an organization through which all kinds of libraries could cooperate in the joint creation of an enormous repository of cataloging data, so that the number of titles that were not already cataloged by some other library became smaller and smaller.
Beginning almost as soon as libraries began to purchase cataloging from the Library of Congress or another agency, librarians recognize that finding and copying the cataloging done by another library usually does not require a professional education. Accordingly, the work of cataloging departments was increasingly organized to concentrate professional activities among fewer librarians, and to have the remainder of the work done by clerical staff. The AACR/MARC/OCLC revolution accelerated this trend as it greatly increased the amount of cataloging that could be found "already done" and therefore devolved to paraprofessional staff, and also offered the benefits of copy availability to even very small libraries. As a result, the total numbers of librarians required for cataloging continued to decline.
Library schools responded to these changes in the operational environment in various ways. Many librarians, including library school faculty, began to believe that the trend of needing fewer people to perform original cataloging would continue until at last there would be virtually no need for them at all. Many also mistakenly believed that being able to catalog was the only reason that people might need to take a cataloging course. Gradually the number of cataloging courses required of library school students was cut and the number of courses offered as electives declined. The focus of those courses that were offered began to change. The basic cataloging course was often transformed from one in which students learned to catalog, to one in which they learned about cataloging. Such "cataloging appreciation" courses (the librarianship equivalent of "rocks for jocks") have a legitimate place in the curriculum as a means of educating those who may never have to catalog about the organization of knowledge, but increasingly library schools offered little beyond this introduction. In keeping with the growth of copy availability through bibliographic utilities, some schools created courses on "automated cataloging" covering library automation and bibliographic networks, with an emphasis on their utilization for copy cataloging. Thus a portion of the curriculum that had once dealt in detail with the accomplishment of cataloging as a necessary cornerstone of librarianship was transformed to an introduction to concepts, with optional training in a paraprofessional mechanism. Actual training for cataloging was declared to be not the business of the schools, but the responsibility of the libraries themselves.
In addition to not preparing librarians adequately for careers in cataloging, and not preparing other librarians to understand and make the best use of the bibliographic control tools of the profession, the approach to cataloging education described above has another deleterious effect that may not be readily apparent. Catalogers and those who hire and train them have long recognized that cataloging is an activity that not everyone will enjoy or do well. It requires a particular "bent" or habit of mind. Although those who hire catalogers have their own sometimes whimsical lists of characteristics and interests that may be indicators of possible suitability for cataloging , the only way for a person to know that s/he is cut out for the work is to do it. On actually doing cataloging, people who have thought they wanted to be catalogers have found that they were not suited to the work, while some others who thought that cataloging was an activity that ran counter to their interests and abilities have found that they were wrong. When the library school curriculum provides no opportunity for every student to perform a certain amount of actual cataloging, many who might have loved the work will never apply for cataloging positions, and for those who fancied themselves as catalogers and were mistaken, it will fall to the employer to discover that their new employee is not well matched to the work.
As the number of cataloging courses required or offered decreased, as their practical component was de-emphasized, and the only courses to stress operations were aimed at a non-professional activity, students received the joint messages that cataloging is a nonprofessional endeavor, and that careers in cataloging are not only few, but the are also likely to be dead ends. Such a message is self-perpetuating, Students who are taught in programs where cataloging and cataloging education is devalued perpetuate that view when they in turn begin to practice or to teach. Inevitably fewer students seek cataloging positions, and those who do, find themselves insufficiently prepared to enter practice.
By the mid-1980s, the supply and preparation of catalogers had reached a crisis stage. Janet Swan Hill’s "Wanted: Good Catalogers" spoke to the dwindling supply of catalogers, and led to the formation of a task force within ALA's Cataloging and Classification Section. In nineteen eighty-five, the task force reported the results of a survey of cataloging and related offerings of the sixty-one ALA accredited programs of library education, and of a survey of employers who had recently advertised cataloging positions. The report confirmed the relatively small portion of the curriculum that was occupied by cataloging coursework, finding that forty-four programs required only one cataloging related course, five required none, and twenty-four programs listed only two cataloging related courses in their catalog. The report also confirmed the difficulties that libraries had in finding catalogers, with 51% of employers rating the pools of applicants "disappointing", 64% of positions requiring re-posting, and 89% of all pools consisting of 30 or fewer applicants, with 41% consisting of fewer than eleven. At the same time that employers were experiencing difficulties in hiring professional catalogers, the actual and perceived de-professionalization of the work was of increasing concern among catalogers, and was addressed by Ruth Hafter in one of the most talked-about cataloging books of the decade.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE FIELD THAT AFFECT CATALOGING
Demonstrating an intriguing combination of imagination and lack thereof, those who looked at the reduction in the ranks of original catalogers in the 1970s and 1980s were almost right -- in the short term -- in thinking that the need for professional catalogers would continue to decline. They were wrong in thinking that the situation was permanent. For the first half of the century, nearly all of the materials handled by most catalogers were newly-acquired print-form books and serials. Other materials were often held by libraries, but in general the maps, sound recordings, government publications, films, sheet music, archival materials, etc. were not cataloged. They were accessioned or checked off in a printed catalog or simply filed alphabetically or numerically, and they were unrepresented in the library’s main card catalog.
The first MARC formats were for the materials most handled: books, and then serials. The first materials accommodated by bibliographic networks were books. As bibliographic networks grew and were adopted for use by all types and sizes of libraries, cataloging for such "mainstream" materials became increasingly available, and the amount of effort and thus the number of staff required to handle them did indeed decline. Those who predicted the end of cataloging as a viable professional pursuit, however, had forgotten or were unaware of the vast segments of libraries’ collections that had previously been uncataloged.
The non-representation in the card catalog of nonbook materials was a disservice to users, but one with which librarians and library users had learned to cope. Users were prepared to believe that a card catalog might not be an infallibly complete tool, but they viewed online catalogs quite differently. When online catalogs were introduced beginning in the early 1980s, it was quickly noted that users were more apt to believe that a computer had everything, did everything, knew everything. Exclusion from an online catalog, therefore, of major parts of a library’s holdings became indefensible. Increasingly library cataloging departments began to incorporate nonbook materials into their processing stream. At the same time, materials also began to appear and be collected in new and different forms. Catalogers found themselves having to handle such things as microforms, facsimiles, photocopies, remote sensing imagery, cassette recordings, videotapes, computer files, CD-ROMs, interactive multimedia, web pages, and remotely accessible databases. Every year seemed to bring a new type of material, and the lines between the various formats began to blur. Interactive multimedia, for example, is practically defined by the impossibility of determining just what the format is.
As the formats of materials became more varied, complex, and intermingled, the catalog itself was undergoing revolutionary transformation. What had once been a repository for local cataloging of local resources, expanded to include local cataloging of resources not owned by the library, or materials owned, but not held locally. This evolved further to the catalog as a gateway through which access is provided in multiple layers to materials cataloged, held, or accessible in their entirety worldwide, and the situation shows no signs of stabilizing.
When individual library catalogs were isolated from each other, a library could set its own standards for cataloging. Once libraries began jointly contributing to shared bibliographic databases, the importance of standard practice became obvious, and the advantages of engaging more libraries and more catalogers in the creation of high quality records were recognized. Nationwide cooperative projects, often administered by the Library of Congress, were developed. Some of the most important such programs include CONSER, for cataloging serials, NACO (Name Authority Cooperative) to create authority records for names, and later series, BIBCO (Bibliographic Cooperative) to create whole bibliographic records, and SACO (Subject Authority Cooperative) to create subject headings --with all CONSER, NACO, BIBCO, and SACO records conforming to Library of Congress standards PCC (Program for Cooperative Cataloging) to coordinate NACO, SACO, and BIBCO training and activities and to oversee the development of relevant standards, and ENHANCE to allow certain authorized OCLC members to upgrade other members’ records without review. All utilize contributed efforts from a relatively small number of select libraries nationwide, and participation in all of them involves intensive training and quality control. As we approach the end of the twentieth century, instead of the ceding to the Library of Congress all responsibility for doing "the best cataloging", which had in the 1970s and 1980s been widely viewed as being inevitable, if not already accomplished, the cataloging community is instead distributing the responsibility for doing the highest quality cataloging among its own members.
Thus it can be seen that in the second half of the century, the types of materials handled increased in number and complexity, the possibility of doing cataloging "any which way" decreased, the catalog itself underwent revolutionary change, and the opportunities and need for performing cataloging to the highest professional standards increased. The work of those librarians who would catalog is more difficult than ever before, and yet the amount of attention given to the work in the library school curriculum is less than it was when catalogers handled books and serials and could "hide" their cataloging in their own isolated card catalog.
Another oversight committed by those who predicted and prepared for the end of cataloging as a career choice was that of believing that the only reason to learn about cataloging was in order to be able to create catalog records. The card catalog was a marvelous invention, and remained the state of the art of intellectual access for individual libraries for nearly a century. Although there were some variations among local catalogs, they tended to be minor, as in the difference between dictionary and divided catalogs. The basic structure and rules governing catalogs and the ways in which information could be portrayed, filed, and retrieved were firmly established. The conversion of bibliographic and associated records to machine readable form and the advent of online catalogs, however, made it possible and even necessary to reconsider every aspect of catalog structure. Early online catalogs may have been little more than digitized versions of card catalogs, but they rapidly progressed beyond that and are continuously evolving to become ever more powerful gateways to an entire world of knowledge either represented by surrogates, or accessible in toto. In order for these more powerful and potentially more confusing tools to be effective and usable in the face of a volume of information that is increasing at astonishing rates, it is essential that those who design them, those who implement them, those who customize them for a specific need, and those who input data into them have both a practical and theoretical understanding of the interrelation of all the data elements that make up the bibliographic control matrix. They must also have an understanding and appreciation of how these elements function for the internal purposes of the library, as well as how they function for the public. This kind of knowledge is not gained through a mere introduction to the concepts of the organization of knowledge.
FROM CATALOGING TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Cataloging is the tool with which librarians have historically organized and managed access to library collections. Cataloging functions in two ways: first, each bibliographic unit is described uniquely, so it cannot be mistaken for similar units; and, second, access is provided to the unit’s objective features (authors and titles) and its contents. Access to the physical packages in which content appears is termed "bibliographic control", while access to the contents of books and other library materials is called "intellectual control." In library cataloging, bibliographic and intellectual control are accomplished at a summary level – some might call it a superficial level. Catalogers generally assign a few author and title headings -- at least one of each, if appropriate, up to five subject descriptors, and one classification-based call number to each book, video, webpage, etc. that they catalog, despite the likelihood that each unit may contain "knowledge" on numerous discrete topics. Unlike more specific kinds of access provided by periodical indexes, which take individual articles or book chapters as their basic bibliographic unit, library catalogers have addressed themselves to the whole book, the entire periodical run, etc., and summarized it.
In the pre-computer world, exercising ordinary bibliographic and intellectual control as defined in the previous paragraph was not a trivial task. Even small library collections contain thousands of catalogable items, while the largest hold millions. Keeping track of them one-at-a-time takes time. When today’s cataloging rules and tools were first established, librarians could assume knowledge came neatly packaged in books, which had to be identified so they could be purchased and – when they arrived in the library – so that they could be stored and retrieved. That was the aim of bibliographic control. No one doubted that the books catalogers sought to treat bibliographically were broader than the units of which knowledge is comprised, but the people who sought the knowledge contained in books were able to find it from the clues provided by the library’s catalog.
The need for traditional cataloging will not disappear soon, but now it need not be performed alone at each library that buys a particular book, video, or computer file. For the bulk of materials acquired by libraries, shared cataloging databases can yield cataloging copy retrieved either directly by individual libraries, or indirectly by groups of libraries, or through purchase from organizations that sell cataloging to libraries. Catalogers acting as consultants can provide also new cataloging to individual libraries on an as-needed basis for unusual or special materials for which the shared databases are not appropriate or sufficient. Such arrangements, however, are merely variations on traditional bibliographic control, and bibliographic control is not knowledge management. Knowledge management is a much bigger and more difficult task, because it requires going beyond the physical packages in which knowledge appears to providing access to the knowledge itself. While it is easy to see that knowledge management might always have been desirable, as libraries extend the resources to which they want to provide access to include all those that may be found through the Internet, where physical attributes of a resource become irrelevant, and its content may be finely divided or fragmented, knowledge management becomes more and more important.
Who will provide knowledge management? Library catalogers probably know more about the processes for organizing knowledge than anyone, but catalog departments consisting solely of support staff, no matter how dedicated, willing, and computer literate they may be, are unlikely to have the skills to convert bibliographic data into organized knowledge. Organizing knowledge supposes being able to connect user queries and the contents of library materials. The people who have been trained to make such connections are reference or information desk librarians who have always been able to rely on the library’s catalog, supplemented by published indexes, to do their work. Now, however, a new kind of catalog is needed, a much larger one in which the contents of all kinds of materials are represented, including those the library does not buy or own, such as Internet resources. In order to function as a knowledge management tool, the new catalog must be designed to identify and control knowledge itself, not the packages in which it is distributed. The skills to prepare that kind of catalog are sophisticated, indeed, and based on estimates of how much knowledge is accessible to libraries today, preparing it will keep its creators busy for a long time to come. The first step will be to identify and select the knowledge a library believes it should collect. To do that, a librarian needs bibliographic knowledge. The next step will be to manage it, for which he or she needs cataloging skills. These are the skills cataloging and reference librarians have been developing and refining for a hundred years – but integrated and moved a step beyond the point they are, today.
It is particularly ironic that at the very moment in time that the world is poised to take advantage of a universe of new knowledge, much of it furnished to us without the burdens of having to order it, wait for fulfillment, receive, and process it, libraries hiring newly-graduated master’s degree-holding librarians may lack the skilled professional staff who hold the key to managing it successfully. The reason is clear: library schools are removing cataloging from the list of core proficiencies new professionals must acquire. Nothing could be more detrimental to successful patron service. Librarians of the future need to open the packages they have been cataloging and retrieving for decades and start describing, organizing and managing their contents. The new library collection will be global, multimedia, diverse, and only partly contained within library walls. When we have achieved a profound understanding of this new knowledge collection, we can start managing it for our clients and our institutions.
IMPLICATIONS FOR PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION
Early education for cataloging concentrated significantly on details of production and on other matters that today would be regarded as entirely clerical, but so long as libraries were responsible for creating their own local catalogs manually, such things as the format of catalog cards, filing order, and even handwriting were important. More substantive issues such as determination of a main entry and establishment of it in an authoritative form, identification and depiction of the subject content and accurate description of the physical carrier were more obviously worthy of a librarian’s attention, and these matters also occupied cataloging students through the first half of the twentieth century, but the emphasis was on the "how" more than on the "why". Gradually history, theory, and principles were incorporated into cataloging instruction, and in keeping with the professed role of library schools to "educate" rather than to "train," the pendulum continued to swing away from practice.
Catalogers of today need the entire arc of the pendulum, from theory to practice, and all points in between. They must have sufficient understanding of the underlying principles of bibliographic control and sufficient mastery of practice that they can apply the principles in a useful way as they attempt to provide access to a bewildering array of information resources while taking advantage of all the capabilities offered by new technologies. It is not possible to gain either a sufficient understanding of the principles or a sufficient mastery of the practice in a library education program that presents either theory or practice at the expense of the other, or that presents very little of both.
Today, librarians who will be involved in cataloging or technical services activities often emerge newly degreed, with little more than a sketchy introduction to the specialty in which they are about to make a career. Few library schools offer enough courses to teach it all, and even if there were enough courses with the right content, few students enrolled in a two- or three- semester program would be able to take them all. Whatever is not learned in library school must either be learned on the job, or through workshops, self-study or various kinds of professional involvement. Depending on the job new librarians find themselves in, they may have to teach themselves, or they may be taught by someone without the necessary knowledge or perspective to do it well. If they are very lucky, they may be taught by someone who both knows what is necessary to know and knows how to convey it.
There is an additional complication in the education of today’s technical services professionals which we have not yet touched on. There are indeed fewer librarians who spend their time doing mainly cataloging than was once the case. Only the largest libraries and the largest cataloging agencies have more than a few. Most librarians employed in a cataloging or other technical services operation in a library are involved to some extent in management. They manage people, departments, and workflow. They are in charge of training and evaluation of staff, and in charge of designing, implementing, and evaluating projects. They write or oversee contracts for outsourcing or cataloging or authority control. They contribute to the writing of, and evaluate responses to RFPs for library automation systems, and plan for, train for, implement, and evaluate such systems. They are concerned with cost effectiveness, with collection and interpretation of management information, with weighing priorities, with effective organization, and with choosing an optimal mix of the strategies available to them in order to capture and provide useful access to all the resources that their particular constituency may need. Yet coursework in the management of cataloging or technical services is uncommon in library schools. Few library school courses in cataloging or technical services teach students how to perform the work of managing technical services operations, which involve creative thinking, writing, and communicating, and interpreting a wide variety of events, statements, documents, and data in order to make decisions. At the same time, having managerial duties has not obviated the need to know rules, tools, and applications. Successful management of technical services operations requires a deep understanding of the details of the work, as well as of the principles underlying them, and of the mission and mores of library service as a whole. The technical services manager must know technical services and management, not one or the other.
Cataloging and technical services librarians of tomorrow need all that the librarians of today require, and more. If, as seems likely, the future of providing information resources and providing access to them, especially in an academic setting, is discontinuous from the past, representing not just astonishingly rapid incremental changes, but an economically and technologically-driven break from the past that affects even our basic organizational structures, those who will be responsible for planning for and providing access to information must be able to bring their knowledge of today's mechanisms and the principles underlying them to the new environment, which will include the need to interact with and act in concert with their information technology counterparts, wielding sufficient knowledge to command respect and to assure effectiveness and the retention of those "goods" that librarians have long regarded as essential.
FACTORS AFFECTING THE OTHER TECHNICAL SERVICES
All the factors that have affected cataloging—changes in the field such as standardization of cataloging practice, increased complexity of cataloging processes and products, automation, and deprofessionalization, changes in education for the profession, such as standardization of curriculum, raised academic levels, increased number of course offerings, and the divergence of library and information science -- have also impacted the other areas of technical services, although in this paper we have focused primarily on cataloging. Other factors have a bearing on the extent to which education as we know it for careers in library and information science provides a suitable background for practice.
One of the principal effects of automation and subsequent deprofessionalization of many of the component tasks previously having to be performed by professionals in cataloging, acquisitions, and serials management, is a shrinking number of master’s degree-holding librarians hired to work in these areas in libraries. The few who do serve in such capacities generally manage operations that are staffed predominantly by computer-knowledgeable paraprofessionals and/or clerks. As was noted in the preceding section, virtually all of the librarians in these positions plan and direct workflow, train and supervise personnel, negotiate contractual relations with outside organizations, represent their institution in external partnerships, and evaluate and report on operations to both internal and outside authorities. Many also prepare the budgets they oversee, recruit new staff, write grant proposals and otherwise generate income, and contribute to internal decision-making for technical services and other library services. Given these responsibilities, rarely can librarians afford to spend their time performing line services (searching, cataloging, claiming, etc.) for a significant portion of their workday. And because many of the line tasks of cataloging, acquisitions, or serials control have now become largely clerical tasks thanks to computers, and because those are the most numerous and most visible tasks performed, many people mistakenly believe them to represent the whole job of cataloging, acquisitions, and serials control, with the result that the work as a whole is equated to the "tasks" and the fields of endeavor have lost status among educators and practitioners.
Two areas of technical services -- preservation, and collection management/development -- are experiencing entirely different scenarios. Contemporary definitions of both have changed or matured recently and both are the focus of heightened interest and intensive research. Preservation is a relatively new specialty, growing out of the realization in the late 1970s that research library collections were rapidly deteriorating and becoming unusable. In the last decade, preservation management has become one of the most popular specialties at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, where one of the authors teaches. The curricular space devoted to preservation has increased threefold, from one 4-credit course to a 12-credit "concentration" that encompasses three courses and an internship.
In contrast, collection management and development is a relatively old specialty that is enjoying a kind of renaissance reflecting renewed concerns over the creation of optimal collections, this time through complex combinations of owned, leased or licensed, and shared resources. The expansions in research and published literature, job opportunities, and related library school curricula offer evidence that this area has been re-discovered and re-emphasized in recent decades.
RECOMMENDATIONS
It may be seen from the preceding sections, that the current professional education curriculum does not adequately meet the needs of the profession or of prospective librarians in the area of technical services, and especially in cataloging. The authors recommend the following courses of action:
1. Library schools must increase the proportional representation of cataloging and technical services related instruction in the curriculum.
2. Courses offered must be redesigned to reflect the changes in bibliographic control and in libraries as reflected in the sections above.
3. Courses must be designed to include adequate components of both theory and actual practice, as library schools accept responsibility to assist in the training as well as in the education of technical services professionals.
4. Management of library operations must be accorded more importance within the curriculum, and this instruction must encompass the management of technical services.
5. Library schools and their faculty must examine how they portray cataloging, bibliographic control, and technical services to make certain that they are not portraying it as beside the point, passe, non-professional or simply "dull and picky", and instead let student know that cataloging and the rest of technical services are not career dead ends, that they can be exciting and challenging , and that they require invention and innovation.
6. Library schools must incorporate into their courses adequate preparation for research.
7. Library schools must consider seriously whether all courses necessary for preparation for librarianship, including courses covering cataloging and technical services, can be encompassed within a degree program of less than two years of graduate study.
8. Research into the skills and talents needed for cataloging, technical services, and catalog design are needed now, and library school faculty and practicing professionals should be encouraged to conduct it.
RESOURCES FOR ADDITIONAL READING
Carroll, E. Edward. The Professionalization of Education for Librarianship with Special Reference to the Years 1940-1960. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1970.
"CCS Task Force on Education and Recruitment for Cataloging Report, June, 1986" RTSD Newsletter (11:7) 1986, pp. 71-78.
Churchwell, Charles D. The Shaping of American Library Education. Chicago: Association of College and Research Librarians, 1975.
The Core of Education for Librarianship: A Report of a Workshop Held under the Auspices of the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago, August 10-15, 1959. Lester Asheim, ed. Chicago: American Library Association, 1959.
"Current and Future Trends in Library and Information Science Education." George S. Bobinski, ed. Library Trends 34, no. 4 (Spring 1986): 535-788.
Dewey, Melvil, "School of Library Economy," Library Journal 8, nos. 9 and 10 (September/October 1883): 285-291.
Education for Librarianship: The Design of the Curriculum of Library Schools. Herbert Goldhor, ed. Urbana, Illinois: Graduate School of Library Science, University of Illinois, 1971.
Hafter, Ruth. Academic Librarians and Cataloging Networks: Visibility, Quality Control, and Professional Status. (Contributions in Librarianship and Information Science, No. 57) New York: Greenwood, 1986.
Henderson, Kathryn L. "Some Persistent Issues in the Education of Catalogers and Classifiers." Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1987): 5-26.
Hewitt, Joe A. "On the Nature of Acquisitions," Library Resources & Technical Services 33, no. 2 (April 1989): 105-122.
Hill, Janet Swan. "Wanted, Good Catalogers," American Libraries, 16, no. 10 (November 1985): 728-730.
Intner, Sheila S. "Practical and Theoretical Knowledge in Cataloging: What We Should Teach and Why." In Theorie et Practique dans l’Enseignment des Sciences de l’Information: Comptes rendus du premier Colloque conjoint entre l’Association Internationale des Ecoles de Sciences de l’Information (AIESI) et l’Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)… Rejean Savard, ed. Montreal: The Meeting, 1988, p. 259-273.
Intner, Sheila S. and Janet Swan Hill, ed., Cataloging: The Professional Development Cycle. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990).
Intner, Sheila S. and Janet Swan Hill, ed., Recruiting, Educating, and Training Cataloging Librarians: Solving the Problems. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Lubetzky, Seymour, "On Teaching Cataloging." Journal of Education for Librarianship 5, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 255-258. [Early volumes of this journal offer a wealth of useful historical information.]
Mann, Margaret. "The Teaching of Cataloging and Classification." Bulletin of the American Library Association 31, no. 5 (May 1937): 285-290+.
Myrick, William J. "Are Library Schools Educating Acquisitions Librarians?: A Discussion." Library Acquisitions: Theory & Practice 2, nos. 3 and 4 (1978): 193-211.
New, Peter G. Education for Librarianship. Hamden, Connecticut: Linnet, 1978.
New York State Library. Handbook of the New York State Library School, including Summer Courses and Library Handwriting, 1902-1905. Albany, New York: The School, 1902.
"Perspectives on Education of the Information Professional: New Dimensions, New Directions." Lois F. Lunin and Marianne Cooper, eds. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 39, no. 5 (September 1988): 307-366.
Reece, Ernest J. The Curriculum in Library Schools. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936.
Saye, Jerry D. "The Cataloging Experience in Library and Information Science Education: An Educator’s Perspective." Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1987): 27-45.
Schmidt, Karen A. "Education for Acquisitions: A History." Library Resources & Technical Services 34, no. 2 (April 1990): 159-169.
Sellberg, Roxanne. "The Teaching of Cataloging in U.S. Library Schools." Library Resources & Technical Services 32, no. 1 (January 1988): 30-41.
Tauber, Maurice F. "Training of Catalogers and Classifiers." Library Trends 2, no. 2 (October 1953): 330-341.
Thomas, Alan R. The Library Cataloging Curriculum, USA: A Survey of the Contemporary Compulsory Instruction. London: Panizzi Press, 1976.
Vann, Sarah K. Training for Librarianship before 1923: Education for Librarianship Prior to the Publication of Williamson’s Report on "Training for Library Service". Chicago: American Library Association, 1961.
White, Carl M. A Historical Introduction to Library Education: Problems and Progress to 1951. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1976.
Williamson, Charles C. Training for Library Service: A Report Prepared for the Carnegie Corporation of New York. New York: The Corporation, 1923.