Bade, D.: ¬The creation and persistence of misinformation in shared library catalogs : language and subject knowledge in a technological era (2002)
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- Footnote
- Bade begins his discussion of errors in subject analysis by summarizing the contents of seven records containing what he considers to be egregious errors. The examples were drawn only from items that he has encountered in the course of his work. Five of the seven records were full-level ("I" level) records for Eastern European materials created between 1996 and 2000 in the OCLC WorldCat database. The final two examples were taken from records created by Bade himself over an unspecified period of time. Although he is to be commended for examining the actual items cataloged and for examining mostly items that he claims to have adequate linguistic and subject expertise to evaluate reliably, Bade's methodology has major flaws. First and foremost, the number of examples provided is completely inadequate to draw any conclusions about the extent of the problem. Although an in-depth qualitative analysis of a small number of records might have yielded some valuable insight into factors that contribute to errors in subject analysis, Bade provides no Information about the circumstances under which the live OCLC records he critiques were created. Instead, he offers simplistic explanations for the errors based solely an his own assumptions. He supplements his analysis of examples with an extremely brief survey of other studies regarding errors in subject analysis, which consists primarily of criticism of work done by Sheila Intner. In the end, it is impossible to draw any reliable conclusions about the nature or extent of errors in subject analysis found in records in shared bibliographic databases based an Bade's analysis. In the final third of the essay, Bade finally reveals his true concern: the deintellectualization of cataloging. It would strengthen the essay tremendously to present this as the primary premise from the very beginning, as this section offers glimpses of a compelling argument. Bade laments, "Many librarians simply do not sec cataloging as an intellectual activity requiring an educated mind" (p. 20). Commenting an recent trends in copy cataloging practice, he declares, "The disaster of our time is that this work is being done more and more by people who can neither evaluate nor correct imported errors and offen are forbidden from even thinking about it" (p. 26). Bade argues that the most valuable content found in catalog records is the intellectual content contributed by knowledgeable catalogers, and he asserts that to perform intellectually demanding tasks such as subject analysis reliably and effectively, catalogers must have the linguistic and subject knowledge required to gain at least a rudimentary understanding of the materials that they describe. He contends that requiring catalogers to quickly dispense with materials in unfamiliar languages and subjects clearly undermines their ability to perform the intellectual work of cataloging and leads to an increasing number of errors in the bibliographic records contributed to shared databases.
- Imprint
- Urbana-Champaign, IL : Illinois University at Urbana-Champaign, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
