Literature abstract: M. Charbonneau (2006), A White Paper on the Future of Cataloging at Indiana University.

My advisor sent this document to me, recommending that I take a look at what some of the catalogers at Indiana University identified as future trends in the cataloging world. Whereas none of their observations and conclusions surprised me, the general sense I took from their comments was that, as with other library jobs, the profession is in a state of flux, where current professional practices and the demands/needs of the library user may be diverging just at a time when budgets are shrinking and the workforce is aging. While one may argue that this has always been the case in academic libraries, the capabilities of technology and the changing research behaviors of students, scholars, and faculty are presenting new challenges and opportunities for catalogers.

As library budgets shrink and as new formats for information products and services abound, the task group writing the white paper found that the library will have to rely on the work of outside vendors to supply metadata that was once controlled by employees at individual institutions. They write:

Metadata in non-MARC formats from vendors, special collections librarians, and other types of cultural heritage institutions will increasingly be used to populate fields in MARC records rather than being entered locally at every institution... Better technological support for the cataloging process will assist catalogers in removing redundancies among and within institutions, allowing cataloging professionals to spend more time performing expert tasks.

These expert tasks include cataloging of uniquely-held items in special collections, but also in training to understand and use non-MARC metadata formats. I see this as an especially important aspect of the future of cataloging, because although the revision of AACR2 (called Resource Description and Access, or RDA) is coming, and promises to better accomodate digital resources, some resources will inevitably be best served using other metadata formats.

Finally, I was pleased to see that the paper mentioned some of the more innovative ways to easily enhance a catalog's bibliographic records through the inclusion of reviews, detailed contents notes (incl. tables of contents), and best of all, user-contributed "tagging" of resources. This last one has been effectively implemented on many of the new Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us in what amounts to voluntary subject heading assignment. While I don't really see this type of feature completely replacing the need for librarians who may assign controlled vocabulary subject headings, as a suplemental feature that easily satisfies most users, this could have a powerful effect on the way students especially use the library catalog. With a little control over some aspects of the bibliographic record, it is conceivable that students feel a sense of collective ownership of the catalog and responsibility toward fellow students to share knowledge by helping others access and retreive information resources. We'll never know unless we try it out, however. It remains to be seen just how deeply cataloging will be affected at Indiana University as a result of the observations in this white paper.