Cataloguing, the marketplace, and the fair of clichés

Abstract

The librarianship debate at the beginning of this 21st century suffers from the spreading of clichés, continuously repeated and almost never critically examined, perhaps as a sort of reaction, or contrast, with respect to the prejudicially and obstinately critical attitude that characterized, in waves, the second half of the twentieth century. 
The text that we publish is one of the strongest and best thought out reactions to some of these clichés and it comes from a place, the Library of Congress, in which changes are either being made or projected that have excited much anxiety within the environment of scholars and in part in that of libraries. 
The author, Thomas Mann, has been working for many years as the reference librarian in the Library of Congress, in the Main Reading Room, and is known also in Italy because of the important review that Rossella Dini made a few years ago in the «Bollettino AIB» (34, 1994, n. 4, p. 473-476) of his book Library research models: a guide to classification, cataloging, and computers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). He then published The Oxford guide to library research (ivi, 1998, that has reached its third edition), that revises the book of 1987 A guide to library research methods. 
We have only to look at the bibliographical information to realize that Mann has devoted no less than twenty years of his life to his subject, that is so central for the function of a library. 
The article that we publish , written by Mann on behalf of a professional association of the librarians of the Library of Congress (April 2006, available at <http://www.guild2910.org/AFSCMECalhounReview.pdf>), is the reply to the report prepared for the library by Karen Calhoun, in charge of technical services at the Cornell University Library, entitled The changing nature of the catalog and its integration with other discovery tools (March 2006, available at <http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf>). 
Various interventions on the subject followed, on discussion lists and blogs, and Mann himself intervened with a new contribution, What is going on at the Library of Congress? (June 2006, available at <http://www.guild2910.org/AFSCMEWhatIsGoingOn.pdf>), as well as having previously drafted for the same association another article entitled Will Google's keyword searching eliminate the need for LC cataloging and classification? (August 2005, available at <http://www.guild2910.org/searching.htm>).