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Abstract

"I can't presume to know how other catalogers view the systems, information resources, and institutions with which they engage on a daily basis. David Paton gives us a glimpse in this issue of the affective experiences of bibliographers and catalogers of artists' books in South Africa, and it is clear that the emotional range among them is wide. What I can say is that catalogers' feelings and worldviews, whatever they may be, give the library its shape. I think we can agree that the librarians who constructed the Library of Congress Classification around 1900, Melvil Dewey, and the many classifiers around the world past and present, have had particular sets of desires around control and access and order. We all are asked to submit to those desires in our library work, as well as our own pursuit of knowledge and pleasure reading. And every decision regarding the aboutness of a book, or about where to place it within a particular discipline, takes place in a cataloger's affective and experiential world. While the classification provides the outlines, the catalogers color in the spaces with the books, based on their own readings of the book descriptions and their interpretations of the classification scheme. The decisions they make and the structures to which they are bound affect the circulation of books and their readers across the library. Indeed, some of the encounters will be unexpected, strange, frustrating, frightening, shame-inducing, awe-inspiring, and/or delightful. The emotional experiences of students described in Mabee and Fancher's article, as well as those of any visitor to the library, are all affected by classificatory design. One concern is that a library's ordering principles may reinforce or heighten already existing feelings of precarity or marginality. Because the classifications are hidden from patrons' view, it is difficult to measure the way the order affects a person's mind and body. That a person does not consciously register the associations does not mean that they are not affected."