The Principles of Organization
While not a cataloger myself, I am particularly grateful that a course on cataloging was a required as part of the MLIS curriculum at Dominican University. As a student of anthropology in my undergraduate years, I came to appreciate the complex taxonomies created by evolutionary scholars as they attempt to classify the world's living organisms. The idea of applying such organizational schemes to the much larger universe of recorded knowledge resonated with me as I began my studies in library science.
Systems of organization are, without a doubt, products of their respective times and cultures. Obviously, we no longer encase our texts in clay envelopes stamped with cuneiform characters as did the Babylonians, nor do we maintain storehouses of papyri categorized only by author as was the custom of the ancient Greeks. It is doubtful that posterity will choose to adopt exactly the same systems of organization that we have created to best suit contemporary needs.
Nonetheless, there has always been a concrete need for systems of organization that make the human record accessible to inquiring minds. It is the role of the librarian to ensure that such systems evolve in ways that connect people with information in meaningful ways that both maximize ease of use while clearly maintaining the interrelations of the millions of ideas that constitute the sum total of human knowledge.
An Examination of Cataloging Problems
The basic concepts of modern cataloging are quite simple, but there are a number of problems that arise in applying controlled vocabulary to natural language. A major focus of projects in my cataloging course entailed making decisions in accordance with the rules set out in AACR2R2 when presented with some of these problems. The project below specifically dealt with the nature of creating and identifying authority records for authors who published under several names or who are known by different names in different languages.
Though AACR2R is due to be replaced by RDA in the not-too-distant future, I feel that exploring the intricacies of such a complex organizational system have given me a better understanding of the need for organization that will doubtless benefit the library users I aim to assist in a public services position.