Rethinking What We Catalog: Documents as Cultural Artifacts

Cataloging is at its most interesting when it is comprehended as part of a larger, meaningful, objective. Resource description is a complex task; but the essence of librarianship is curatorship of a collection, and that sense of curatorial responsibility is one of the things that makes resource description into cataloging–that is, professional responsibility is the difference between the task of transcription and the satisfaction of professional decisions well-made. Part of the essential difference is comprehension of the cultural milieu from which specific resources arise, and the modes of scholarship that might be used to nudge them to reveal their secrets for the advancement of knowledge. In this paper I describe a course designed to lend excitement and professional judgment to the education of future catalogers and collection managers by conveying the notion that all documents are, in fact, cultural artifacts. Part of a knowledge-sensitive curriculum for knowledge organization, the purpose of this course is to go beyond the concept of documents as mere packets of information to demonstrate that each is a product of its time and circumstances. Bibliographic skill leads to greater comfort with the intellectual and cultural forces that impel the creation of documents. Students become comfortable with the curatorial side of cataloging–the placement of each document in its cultural milieu as the goal of resource description, rather than the act of description itself