Music Uniform Titles and librarian manifestos

Today I finished AACR2 chapter 25, reading carefully the sections on uniform titles for music. My understanding of uniform title creation is to aid in the collocation of identical works that happen to have actual titles that may differ in spellings, languages, arrangements of words, etc. If all manifestations of a work can have the same uniform title in the catalog, the user is able to find all items in the library with that title. If not, he or she would have to guess the various ways "sonata", for example, could be written (sonate, sonata, sonatas, sonatina, sonatine, etc.). Due to the extreme complexity of genre/form designations in music, however, an equally complex protocol for representing works in a catalog is required. I'm sure this will be a source of constant intellectual challenge for me as I enter the practical portion of my internship tomorrow.

In other news, I received a link to a blog posting by K.G. Schneider, librarian, entitled, "The User Is Not Broken: A meme masquerading as a manifesto". She writes a series of short aphorisms meant to highlight what she feels are problems in the communication of information between the library/librarian and the patron-user. Her points span the range of tone, from those that are drole ("The average library decision about implementing new technologies takes longer than the average life cycle for new technologies.") to the pessimistic ("That vendor who just sold you the million-dollar system because 'librarians need to help people' doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, and his system is broken, too.") to the postmodern ("You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave."). Some of the most pointed, I feel, are worthy of contemplation in regard to information access and retrieval by the end-user, which is really the whole point spending so much time and effort on creating a catalog:

"Information flows down the path of least resistance. If you block a tool the users want, users will go elsewhere to find it."

"You cannot change the user, but you can transform the user experience to meet the user."

"If we continue fetishizing the format and ignoring the user, we will be tomorrow's cobblers."

"The user is not 'remote.' You, the librarian, are remote, and it is your job to close that gap."