Re:Some thoughts (Score 1)

>>you librarians

Thanks for the promotion. :)

>>the world needs more people doing the cataloging

I don't disagree. My point wasn't that non-experts shouldn't be enabled to do cataloguing, but that cataloguing is an art and that it takes practice to get good at it, whether you are a "trained" librarian or not.

Very few people get an MLIS to become "experts" - at cataloguing or anything else. (Most of my classmates in my cataloguing class hated doing the actual work of cataloguing, and I suspect it's always been that way.) Most get an MLIS because it's required to be considered for professional-level positions in libraries. That unfortunately makes it akin to a vocational degree, unless you strive to make it something more. The ALA has discussed standardizing MLIS curricula for ages, but that has yet to happen. Until the curriculum you get in an MLIS program is standardized, and those standards are adhered to for hiring and retention purposes (a la medical school followed by ongoing board certification), an MLIS will continue to be seen as a job ticket.

It's too bad that you took some outdated courses (they still exist, unfortunately, as anyone currently or just out of almost any MLIS program can tell you). But they definitely don't represent current thinking in information studies. All of the issues you bring up are being discussed in forward-thinking IS programs.

But I digress. My point is that cataloguing is complex - not because the AACR2 is full of arcane rules and strangely organized (although it is both), but because teasing out all the details can get very interesting. That's what makes cataloguing something more than "monotonous, tedious effort".

>>a folksonomy that could accommodate the hierarchy of each and every one of these ill conceived classifications

Why would you want to accomodate an "ill-conceived" classification's hierarchy into anything? The problem with LC classification is not that the hierarchy is bad -- it's extremely thorough and well thought out -- but that it's so rigid and hidebound. As Sandy Berman discovered, it cannot be changed from the bottom up, and once everything began to be standardized for the sake of sharing data, the idea of cataloguing "for the people" (and Sandy's job, unfortunately) went by the wayside. His subject headings have recently been revived on the Internet by some of the Code4Lib people. If I get your point, you are saying that his classification system, as well as LC's and anyone else's, could be included in an über-classification system that pointed to all related classes from central database. I wonder whether Open Library could be a rallying point for such an effort -- it would have to be fixed to be in line with FRBR first (separating works, expressions, and manifestations, for one thing), but that's an interesting idea.

Personally I think these debates about classification will fall by the wayside as systems like Google Books, and perhaps this new effort, really get going. As Google knows, nothing beats a full text search for locating all and every related piece of information. Classification will be for locating information (physically or digitally), perhaps for refining searches, and most certainly for the intellectual task of organizing information hierarchically. Full text search will be for finding (what you're looking for). In the real world, it's already that way to some extent, thanks to our Friends at Google, and that will intensify as Google Books heats up.