What is the Collective Noun for a Group of Librarians?

A t a recent theological librarian’s conference (ANZTLA 2012), this question was raised informally on a number of occasions, and without a clearly defi nitive outcome. I have taken it upon myself to see what possibilities could be used for the description of a group of librarians. In the process, I have discovered that we are not the only group of librarians to ponder the thought of what we should call ourselves ... But fi rst, what exactly is a collective noun? Nouns are people, places, and things. A special class of noun is the collective noun, naming groups composed of members. A collective noun is the name of a number of people or things taken together, described as a single group despite being composed of more than one person or thing. Grammatical rules describing the correct use of singular or plural verbs with collective nouns vary. Some collective nouns descriptively label the people or things they are identifying, for example, a pride of lions. Th e Word Ancestry Journal describes the origin of the use of the word pride for a group of lions as coming “from the felines’ place at the top of the jungle food chain...As the nobility of the wild, lions were anthropomorphically given the same pride that human royalty carried due to their place in the social food chain.” Hence, in this and many other cases, the collective noun is often descriptive of the type of people, places or things it is identifying. Th ere has been a limited amount of discussion offi cially published on this particular topic. In what would seem to be an authoritative resource for collective nouns, the Dictionary of Collective Nouns and Group Terms, Sparkes lists not one, but two options for the collective noun for librarians; a sheaf of librarians, or a catalogue of librarians. In another published