unfolded in review

Blogger Scott Alexander is running one of his book review contests, in which readers submit lengthy analytical and critical reviews of a book of each writer's choice, usually non-fiction, and then his general readership votes for the best one. (Among the non-finalists this year is a very interesting view of The Silmarillion. It's in the docs file on this page, alphabetized under T for "The".)

So one of the finalists this year covers Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker, which interests me, as the book is a critique of librarianship, which was my profession for most of my working life. It struck me as the most sophomoric book I'd ever read. "Sophomore" means "wise fool," and Baker combines some highly appropriate complaints about the difficulties and limitations of using microfilm with some incredibly ignorant attacks on libraries for supposedly discarding perfectly serviceable print material, mostly newspapers, after microfilming them.

According to Baker, this was still going on wholesale into the 1990s, but I knew there had to be something wrong here. I was taught in library school, in 1980, which was over 20 years before Baker's book was published, that discarding serviceable print material this way was a bad idea that had been abandoned in the 1950s. It was not good library practice. I suspect Baker's claims were, at the least, selective and misleading. I didn't work in library preservation, but that's also the impression I got from such comments about the book that I heard from specialists in that area.

I was one of several librarians who weighed in on the comments section there, which seems now to have settled down after a day or so of heavy-duty response.

Baker's ignorant approach was also obvious to me from his complaints (not in the book but in some associated articles) about card catalog conversion to electronic form. Now that was my specialty, so I could see the flaws straight out. Baker's argument was that a lot of valuable information, often specific to the individual copy, was preserved on catalog cards that didn't get transferred to electronic form. But he was mistaken. For one thing, when I did the job, at least, that information got transferred. For another, he seems unaware that, even after discarding the main card catalog, the library preserved a master card catalog in the back workroom called the shelf list, and those cards had not only the information Baker was concerned about, but more information, e.g. on acquisition dates, that never appeared in the public catalog at all.

This gives me a chance to say here, since it wouldn't have fit the comments section, how retrospective conversion, which is the technical term for what I did, worked. I would take a section of the shelf list, which has just one card for each book (where the public catalog has multiple cards for authors, titles, subjects), sit down at the computer, and log in to a union catalog database like RLIN or OCLC. These were the ancestors to the public WorldCat you may use today; the main difference was that they were designed for librarian use only, used specialized search functions, and displayed the results in the hypertext mark-up language called MARC that catalogers use and everyone else finds incomprehensible. They were loaded with records from their users and with the online database from the Library of Congress.

I would search for each book in turn, and if I found a matching record, I would edit it for errors and omissions (sometimes necessary with the more sketchy records from obscurer libraries), add our local data - copy-specific information like provenance, call number and shelving location - and enter the record. We were now listed as holding that book.

If the book wasn't in the system - and especially in the earlier years it often wasn't - I would copy the info from the card, adding the hypertext tags, and create a new record. Or, if some other edition of the work was already there, I'd copy that data over into a blank record and save work that way. This was called variant-edition cataloging.

This work required a lot of care, not just the ability to conduct accurate searches. OCLC's search system was extremely bizarre: to search for The Lord of the Rings you'd type lor,of,th,r and then the search would bomb out because there were too many editions, so you'd have to get at it some other way. And this was bad because OCLC charged by the search, so you'd best know beforehand what would work and what wouldn't.

Also vital: Knowing all the tricks of cataloging to distinguish between different editions was vital, especially with foreign books with different publishing practices; a working knowledge of various European languages, at least as far as their publishing practices were concerned (Asian languages were rare in the libraries where I worked, though I did once have to catalog a book in Farsi); complete comfort with all the complex and numerous MARC tags; accurate typing and the ability to look at catalog cards all day without getting walleyed.

Every once in a while I'd find something odd on a card, a lack of sufficient information to identify whether a record I'd found online fit the book, or something on the card that didn't fit with the online records, like a publication date preceding what was clearly the first edition.* In which case I insisted, sometimes against some supervisory opposition, on going to the stacks and checking the actual book. Usually I found an error or omission in the card and was able to recatalog the book, sometimes from scratch - another skill set.

*This was particularly common at one library, where a long-ago cataloger who didn't read French would misread the enactment date of the French copyright law as the book's publication date.

Going to the stacks was particularly exciting when I worked at the Hoover Institution, where the stacks (closed to public use) were in the shaft of the Tower up a rickety elevator, and as the shaft had no windows, each floor was pitch-black until you felt around for the light switch. And what was then revealed was a small cramped space full of dust and piles of books on the floor because they'd long since run out of room.