The dif-ference between a catalogue and an index is so great thatthey ought not to be confused; a catalogue mainly deals withbooks, an index mainly handles information.

but they left their own belovedmanuscript unclassied and undescribed, and thus it never attainedthe status of a holding, which it so obviously deserved, and wasinstead tacitly understood to be merely a “nding aid,” a piece offurniture, wholly vulnerable to passing predators, subject tojanitorial, rather than curatorial, jurisdiction—even though thiscatalog was, in truth, the one holding that people who entered thebuilding would be likely to have in common, to know how to usefrom childhood, even to love. A new administrator came by onemorning and noticed that there was some old furniture taking upspace that could be devoted to bound volumes of Technicalities, TheElectronic Library, and the Journal of Library Automation. The cardcatalog, for want of having been cataloged itself, was thrown into adumpster.

By the early seventies, therewas an ominous arrearage of uncataloged material waiting on herdsof rolling carts near the overtaxed cataloging departments of mostlarge libraries. Cataloging had reached a state of crisis

obody canexpect a library to maintain sequences of alphabetized cardboard fora collection that is growing, as some currently are, at a rate of vehundred items a day.

Created over a 50-year span from 1939 to 1989, that catalog grew to about 4 million cards in 65 cabinets with 4,000 drawers.

…In the realm of headings that deal with people and cultures — in short, with humanity — the LC list can only ‘satisfy’ parochial, jingoistic Europeans and North Americans, white-hued, at least nominally Christian (and preferably Protestant) in faith, comfortably situated in the middle and higher-income brackets, lagely domiciled in suburbia, fundamentally loyal to the established order, and heavily imbued with the transcendent, incomparable glory of western civilization. Further, it reflects a host of untenable – indeed, obsolete and arrogant assumptions.

I have used the bibliographies to conduct my own research in the area of cataloging assessment, and the social justice bibliography has helped me with a project I’m working on to examine video classification practices.

I began to wonder if by merely assessing the mechanistic aspects of cataloging work we were missing out on an opportunity to include broader social concepts in our assessment and planning processes