Making fun of catalogers

A couple of weeks ago, I watched a webinar on discovery layers. It was informative and interesting, but one comment caused my mind to wander.  In a discussion of metadata, one participant said that catalogers don't like any metadata that they didn't do themselves.

This got me wondering if catalogers are the subject of more jokes than other library specialties. It seems to me, without doing any research to back this up, that they are. And if that's true, why?  Do catalogers have some sort of aura that make them easy to poke fun at?  Or are they viewed as a breed apart? 

I definitely felt the otherness of catalogers early in my library career.  I was working in acquisitions in a large room that we shared with the cataloging staff.  Acquisitions folks were always admonished to keep the noise down so that The Catalogers (I always thought of it in caps) could concentrate.  This caused me, for awhile anyway, to view The Catalogers as somehow separate and different.  I got over that fairly quickly when one of The Catalogers kidnapped a stuffed basset hound that one of the reference librarians had at her desk and paraded gleefully through Tech Services. 

Has anyone else noticed lots of cataloging jokes? 

Abandoning Dewey Decimal?

The Kent District Library in Kent County, Michigan has changed their cataloging system from Dewey Decimal to a more bookstore-style classification.   Melissa Wild will be talking about this more at the ALA Annual 2013 today. It sounds like the staff took this in stride, however I'd be curious to know how it affected shelvers/pages and shelving.  Does it slow it down or speed it up?  It seems efficient to keep all the same subjects in the same area, but I assume there was some sort of learning curve.

Did any of you attend ALA and get any more details?

Or have any of you in Oregon changed cataloging systems? How did it go?

Hello RDA, Good-bye Dept.

Few things in the library world in recent years are as big a deal is Resource Description and Access, better known as RDA.  It may be of more interest to catalogers at this point than anyone else, but if you use a library catalog, you'll eventually notice RDA. 

One change RDA makes is to eliminate all those abbreviations that bibliographic records are full of.  Earlier cataloging rules required abbreviations in order to fit as much information as possible on a 3" x 5" catalog card. With a few exceptions (and I'm not a cataloger, so I don't remember what they are), RDA records have all words spelled out.

Since I work primarily with government documents, this has a big impact on me.  For all of my gov docs career, I've been happily using "dept." instead of "department".  During a period when I was (1) doing quite a bit of cataloging and (2) didn't have a mortgage, I had to pay some additional taxes at tax time.  I duly made my check payable to "Oregon.  Dept. of Revenue", which at that time was the correct heading. 

I actually think RDA, while it has some confusing aspects, is a long-overdue update to cataloging rules.  It should make our catalogs more user-friendly and thus enhance access to our collections.

At the State Library, where I work, the head of cataloging switched our author and subject headings from "dept." to "department" yesterday.  It will be interesting to see how long it takes me to make the switch myself!