Comments on: I Love Catalogers

By: Iris

Iris — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:55:03 +0000

You people ROCK. For real. Thank you.

By: suzigurl, cataloger

suzigurl, cataloger — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:33:47 +0000

aw, shucks. Seriously, thank you for the love. It can sometimes take a lot of hunting to do the work we do. I have a pin from OCLC that says “cataloging is public service.”

By: Iris

Iris — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:57:00 +0000

There are lots more stories where this one comes from. I just happened to write this one down. :-)

Cataloging is decidedly NOT purposeless.

By: bibliotecaria

bibliotecaria — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:08:00 +0000

Thank you (we blush in acknowledgement). I do like my job as a cataloguer. If there was no one to find the things we describe, it would be absolutely purposeless. So thanks for sharing a story of how we help ge the job done.

By: Iris

Iris — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:32:00 +0000

I completely agree! And I wish that our catalogs could actually make full use of all this great metadata.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:22:00 +0000

I hope to be able to live up to the standards needed by you all and others.

And as an insatiable library patron and consumer of bibliographic data, I too love catalogers. ;)

By: Meredith

Meredith — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:21:00 +0000

Catalogers don’t get the recognition they deserve because when they do their job right, things just work and no one (patrons are least) is any the wiser that someone put effort into it. Our head of Tech Services has made so many fabulous improvements to our catalog records that have made our stuff so much more findable. Putting a great search interface on a catalog is worthless if there isn’t good data behind it.

If you can’t already guess I <3 catalogers too :)

By: Iris

Iris — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:59:00 +0000

I know there’s a movement afoot to save time by omitting stuff because “who needs this stuff anyway.” But I tell ya, if we don’t have this information, nobody does. Because nobody else knows they care until they ask us and we don’t have it.

I <3 catalogers. Lots.

By: rogersurbanek

rogersurbanek — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:55:00 +0000

Having just spent 20 minutes debating the merits of cataloging non-periodical serials monographically vs serially and the relative importance of ISBNs and ISSNs in said decision, and then wondering if anyone EVER cares about this sort of thing besides catalogers…

Thanks, right back atcha.