So I’m on this librarian cataloger listserv, mainly as a lurker. Although it shouldn’t be surprising, but is, these catalogers are verbose. Yesterday’s digest had 84 messages and 4599 lines (no, I didn’t count them, their digest software tells me this.) That’s a little offsetting to me, as there’s a lot of noise on the list and I know cataloging is one of those things that never finishes. I wonder how productive it is to hash over themes and threads over and over as opposed to just doing it. That being said, as a fledgling cataloging student, it gives a great perspective into issues in cataloging and the collaborative/supportive way that librarians define and reinforce their craft.

Again not surprisingly, this listserv is pretty good about descriptive subjects and updating the subjects when discussion topics morph mid-thread. (As well as appreciating and arguing digests versus indexes versus summaries, RSS translations, open searching and harvesting…. Yes, they have interesting meta-discussions about themselves and their access.) But anyway, someone posted a thread about the authority file record for the Dali Lama and main entries versus “see also”s. The Lamas have different (crazy long, hard for americans to type/pronounce) individual names, and discussion has started about where to catalog them, and how to best provide access. This has generated quite a few replies, and is one of the longer more-recent threads.

Of course, I’ve been too busy to read all/much of it, but I do skim the subject headings daily, and I get a good chuckle every time I see the subject: “Dali Lama (long)” Big hitter, the Lama.