The Administrative Implications for University Libraries of the New Cataloging Code

Now that it is my turn to level my lance at the sails of this dangerous and seemingly impregnable windmill, I wonder why I was chosen to speak for university libraries. Perhaps because someone had to be the goat and because my ignorance could be written off on the grounds of youth and innocence. Or, perhaps because Mr. Coney felt that someone who had been exposed to the chilling and biting drafts which sweep around the Chicago Graduate Library School corridors would be sufficiently tough to stand up under the rebuttal blasts which are sure to follow the approach I intend to make. If you think that each university library should have a catalog which will aim at giving a reasonably complete bibliographic description of all its books regardless of the nature and importance of these books, the purpose for which they were bought and used, and the characteristics of the clientele using the books, if, in other words, you accept the assumptions underlying our present cataloging practices, then I think you have to take one of two attitudes toward the new code. You may say that the wise cataloger will welcome the codification and will use it as a useful tool and not as an end in itself, or you may feel that the code will drag us deeper into that kind of perfectionistic cataloging which Dr. Osborn has described so ably.1 But as an administrator, I dare not accept these assumptions and I think the publication of the new code is a propitious moment for a critical analysis of them. I present the following eleven reasons for pursuing this analysis.