A Generic Cataloguing Research Paper

October 29, 2003 - 12:20am — djfiander

I wrote this when I was doing an independent study paper in cataloging for my masters.

Reiterate either the Paris principles or Cutter's objectives of the
catalogue. Make sure to reference the original publication, even though you've never actually seen a copy of it.
Describe the relationship between the set provided and the other. Again, make sure to reference the primary documents.
Lament the fact that the rules were created for a 5x3-index-card
world. If you're Canadian, note that the cards were actually metric.
Propose a "radical" revision of the rules that includes at least one
of

Eliminating the main entry (provide a definition of it)

restructuring the catalogue to focus on "the abstract work" rather than "the manifestation"

linking every record in the catalogue to every other record

creating a shared catalogue that allows the user to discover the perfect book in a rural library in Lesser Mongolia, which library does not participate in the local consortium's ILL service.

discarding MARC bibliographic markup and replacing with a new network-ready, vendor-neutral, tagged, structured data encoding system

Conclude with the statement that "it will take some work" but that the benefits outweigh the costs.

I then proceeded to write a paper that follows about half of my own suggestions.