Bad cataloging

On Thursday I was looking for an item, in which form I would find the item I wasn't quite sure. Fortunately, I had what appeared to be a largely complete citation. My first step was to look in our catalogue, which unfortunately yielded no positive results. From there, I went to the uncatalogued section of the library and quickly, with the assistance of a co-worker, located the related series of documents. After a quick skimming of the titles I came to the conclusion that we did not have what I was looking for. It seemed as though my next option would be to find the item in an electronic form, the odds of which seemed pretty good as it was a government document.

In just a few moments I was able to find something that appeared to be the document in an online location, though I was not sure if it was the same version of the document that had been cited, as the citation did not include a description or page number. I was quickly becoming aware that the citation with which I started wasn't as complete as I would have liked, something that is frequently quite an inconvenience and cause for much time wasting.

From the vast open plains of the untamed Internet I turned to the more restricted confines of Amicus, the catalogue of Library and Archives Canada. Again, within just a few moments I was able to find something that resembled the item I was looking for, though my skepticism was rising with each new approach.

Unfortunately, there were major differences between several of the records in the union catalogue (which is what Amicus is) that I was searching. The physical descriptions of the items varied drastically from record to record. In two or three cases the item was supposedly 18 pages long, in others it was 89, and some just indicated that it appeared on pages 72-89 of some other document (without saying which document).

Eventually, once I turned back the to those fruitful unfenced plains that we call the Internet, I was able to find a reference to the original form of the item indicating that it had been a paper published as part of a collection of papers with a collective title. From there I was able to recall seeing the title on the shelf and then use the pages numbers indicated in some of the Amicus records to locate the item.

This experienced has caused me to reaffirm my belief that the use of proper citation formats is critical, if not for the average reader than for the future researcher or librarian (or library worker). Additionally, analytics, or the practice of creating separate catalogue records for discrete intellectual entities found within larger bodies of work, needs to be undertaken with great care because it otherwise runs the risk of making the task of identifying a particular item more difficult. It also seems that certain institutions supplying catalogue records to Amicus need to improve their quality control, otherwise the usefulness of Amicus might become greatly diminished.

On the other hand, without such mistakes I would be able to have the satisfying experience of finding something that was marginally more difficult to find than it should have been. To modify and reverse an opinion jokingly expressed by my cataloging professor, bad cataloging keeps reference librarians employed.