Today I met with an aspiring school librarian. We talked about cataloging because that is her next class, and the importance of being able to find information in your library.
Long ago in the dark ages, when I took cataloging, doing it yourself by hand was the only way to make sure that information in your library had a proper location. Cataloging and classification of materials used to be the center of a librarian's universe. A librarian would spend hours examining books for subject headings, measuring and precisely recording the size and shape of a book so that other librarians could find and retrieve information for patrons. Theory and relationships factored into how a book was finally classified. When your librarian had finished with the book it was ready to be shelved, sometimes never to move again during it's entire stay in the library.
Books and librarians have changed. While being able to catalog a book properly is still important (thank you to my cataloging teacher) there is nothing more important in your library than the students these materials are intended to help. Cataloging can still take me away to a quiet place where I achieve a certain Zen Oneness with the library universe, but most of the time, I admit to not having time to catalog. There I said it, go ahead call me a blasphemer, but I don't believe that using the Library of Congress or OCLC as a source for records is wrong.
Cataloging as we knew it 20 years ago should not happen in small libraries. We do not have the resources to spend an hour cataloging 10 books by hand, most of us don't have the resources we had even five years ago. Clearly there will be exceptions i.e. libraries without Internet access, special books that don't have records in the big libraries, ephemera (still my favorite to classify) and self published items, just to name a few. If you want to be a cataloger there are libraries out there that are looking for you...
But, if you want to be a library media specialist ask yourself the following questions: What is the real reason you wanted to work in a library? Did you think it would be a quiet place where you could read and not be disturbed? Where you would look at books all day long and never be bothered? Or did you want to help people find information, learn how to distinguish the good stuff from bad? Do you like helping people? Libraries today are not bastions of silence. At least not my library and not any of the others that I have visited. Libraries if done right, are the center of a school or community. A library is where the heart of learning and culture in your building should exist. If your library is a quiet place where people are afraid to ask questions, you need to find a real librarian.
-AMA
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