Old Wine in New Bottles: Lorcan Dempsey in EDUCAUSE Review

Thanks to the member of my staff who pointed me to Lorcan Dempsey's excellent piece in the December 2012 EDUCAUSE Review, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention."  In this piece Dempsey, who now works for OCLC and used to work for JISC, synthesizes many ideas that he's previously developed on his blog.  He also weaves in work from elsewhere, all in an effort to better understand the current status and potential evolution of the library catalog.

It's a meaty piece, best read closely to allow time for Dempsey's many ideas to germinate.  The gestalt of the piece is a call to place old wine in new bottles.  One fundamental contribution of librarianship is to provide the means of organizing and retrieving information objects--books, serials, maps, DVDs. etc. This has required classification schemes, union catalogs, MARC records...the entire cataloging apparatus. 

All of that intellectual work is still valid and useful and important--this is the "old wine."  But we haven't yet figured out to graft these principles onto the "new bottles" of born-digital objects.  Library cataloging rules date from a time when you had to physically publish or manufacture a work.

Cataloging protocols evolved over centuries, so it will take a while to make a fundamental transition toward describing digital objects. (Just linking to web sites from within the catalog doesn't count.)  This transition will only occur if librarians acknowledge the fundamental shift that Dempsey describes--that the library catalog, as a record of a locally selected and managed collection, will represent an ever-decreasing share of the user's information base.

Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, iTunes, Pandora--these are all information sources that library patrons have access to without any need to use the library.  If we keep perfecting the catalog as we currently understand it, we'll eventually have a perfect catalog that nobody uses.  It's better to embrace the world entire, both in and outside our walls, and give what's floating online the organization and curation it so desperately needs.