Cataloging for the Future

Cataloging and catalogs are changing yet again to benefit from advances in technology.We have new ways of looking at the bibliographic universe to meet the needs of today's users.We must do cataloging differently in the future while retaining the best of basic cataloging principles and the benefits of authority control.Our tools not only will improve future catalogs but also information seeking systems of tomorrow's world.Objectives of the catalog In the 1830's and 40's Anthony Panizzi, who was then the Keeper of the Books at the British Museum (translation "Librarian" at what is now the British Library) -Panizzi spoke eloquently about the purpose of library catalogs, about his 91 rules to create a catalog, and about the elements to include in bibliographic records and the ideas of collocating the editions of works under the name of the author -the principles of authorship and idea of the literary unit for organizing information.He justified the costs of creating a "full and accurate" catalog that would be more than a mere finding list or inventory of a collection, to help the user to find works and bring editions together.Cataloging costs were even a problem 170 years ago, and the cost of cataloging is still a major issue today, probably more than ever before.How can we justify cataloging and keeping some of the cataloging traditions?I hope to show you that some of the principles, objectives, and concepts that can be accomplished even better with new technology and that future systems will benefit from what catalogers and librarians have to offer.The ideas of collocation and of enabling finding works under the name of an author were restated and expanded by Charles Ammi Cutter in 1876 as his "objects" of the catalog -enabling a user to find a book when he or she knows the author, the title, or the subject and to show the user what the library has by a given author, on a given subject, or in a given kind of literature, that is, collocating the bibliographic records, and to assist the user to choose a specific edition or to help with identifying the literary or topical character through notes. 2 We know the finding and collocating objectives are fundamental to specific user tasks and are worthy objectives of search systems for the future.But are all of our cataloging traditions still necessary today?Let's look at main entry -an oftenchallenged concept.In the 1960's we had the debates about main entries between Eva Verona and Seymour Lubetzky about literary units and bibliographic units -Eva Verona favored the bibliographical unit that achieved the first objective of finding a book, and Lubetzky favored the literary unit that Panizzi and Cutter advocated (using more uniform titles) to achieve the second objective of finding all editions, translations, etc. of a given work -the collocating objective.1 Dr. Barbara B. Tillett is Chief, Cataloging Policy & Support Office, Library of Congress and was one of the consultants to the IFLA Study Group on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.Some portions of this paper are included in "FRBR and Cataloging for the Future," Barbara B. Tillett.