Cri POUR core

[Amy H Turner]

Why is there so much resistance, both among catalogers and public services
staff, to the core standard? For years we've been under great pressure from
administrators to adopt radical cost-cutting measures such as minimal
cataloging.  The difference between core and full is much smaller than the
difference between minimal and core.   Why aren't we all applauding the
inventors of core for coming up with a compromise?  Why aren't catalogers
across the nation dancing through the listserves with joy because our good
judgment can override rule interpretations that go on for pages without
hope of covering every case or satisfying every need?


Of course, librarians tend to be conservative, and hate to give up any
"potentially useful" information. But there is so much that we could do,
but don't, because we refuse to give up anything we're already doing. I
expect that it is not only at Duke that we are continually under the gun to
keep up with the flood of new materials, and quickly dismiss many projects
that would benefit users and staff because we just don't have time.
Catalogers can sweat blood over the minutiae of one record, while the
catalog is full of major inconsistencies created by various interpretations
of various rules over the years, which nobody has time to deal with. (Thank
goodness for our authority control vendor, who enables us at least to
standardize most of the headings.)  Local documentation rapidly goes out of
date as national standards and local circumstances change, and we don't
have time to update it. We struggle to find the time to train new
catalogers in the complexities of the job, knowing that much of the
training is orientation to the volumes of documentation, so that the
process of continuous self-education can begin. We argue about what the
users need, but evidently very few people in the country have had time to
do user studies, so arguments almost always come down to what we think
users need, and we fall back to tradition, because it is there.

One user study done here at Duke years ago showed that most users looked
only at the brief record, and thus never saw notes. It also revealed that
users were totally baffled by the concept of uniform titles, although they
understood and supported the idea of collocation of authors' names. Any
cataloger who has trained other catalogers, or who thinks back to their own
training, has to be aware of the tremendous gulf between what users know
about cataloging records and what we know. Some of us talk of the need to
educate users, but what percentage of the months and even years of
full-time cataloging training can we hope to impart?  New catalogers are
bemused by the internal inconsistencies of the rules, and overwhelmed by
the level of detail.   Then after we internalize all this, we adhere to it
strictly in the name of consistency, of giving the user what they have come
expect. Over the years I have informally polled lay people about what they
expect from library catalogs. Most are unaware of the existence of notes,
and have given very little thought to such things as how many subject or
author entries are made, and how they are kept consistent. This is not to
say that consistency is unimportant--users don't need to understand
authority control and classification to benefit from them. However, the
issues that we catalogers struggle with are often peripheral to the basic
aims of cataloging.

I strongly support core because it is a small step towards focus on the
basics. Here, one of the complaints is that core is so much like full that
by the time you think about the differences, you may as well just do full.
That may be true at first, but now that I've been cataloging with core as
the default for a year, it comes very naturally. More time savings will be
realized as new catalogers are trained with core as the default and don't
have to rethink from full.  Core may not save enormous amounts of time, but
time is at such a premium that every second that I can spend on subject
analysis, classification and authority control, rather than notes, is
important to me. Core gets a lot of flack because in some cases there are
fewer subject headings, but concentrating on the primary subject really
isn't such a radical idea. What users know the rule of 20%, and how often
does it come into play?


Perhaps one reason for the resistance to core is that the rules are so
complex and fluctuating that we loose track of where we are, and
simplification seems like just another level of complexity. One small
example of the difficulty of keeping up with all the changes: in her "cri
de core" Ann Kebabian laments the passing of the "Translation of:" note and
blames core. LC dispensed with this note for most translations years before
core. The policy is outlined in LCRI 1.7B2.

Often when I argue for simplification of cataloging, for attention to the
basics, I sense that some catalogers fear that would make it too easy. In
many contexts, including cataloging, "simple" is the opposite of "easy"..
Providing standard access to a diverse range of information will never be
easy. Making that access as clear and simple as possible is a challenge and
a valuable service.

Maybe catalogers of the future will be able to work from basic principles
and judgment rather than from nine linear feet of documentation (I read
that statistic somewhere ...). At this point, it seems unlikely, but one
can always dream.


Amy H. Turner
Monographic Cataloger & PCC Liaison
Duke University Libraries
Durham, NC 27708-0190