Conceptualizations of Catalogers' Judgment through Content Analysis: A Preliminary Investigation

Abstract

Catalogers' judgment has been frequently mentioned, but is rarely researched in formal studies. The purpose of this article is to investigate catalogers' judgment through an exploration of the texts collected in the database of Library and Information Science Source. Verbs, adjectives and nouns intimately associated with catalogers' judgment were extracted, analyzed and grouped into 16 categories, which lead to five conceptual descriptions. The results of this study provide cataloging professionals with an overall picture on aspects of catalogers' judgment, which may help library school students and graduates and novice catalogers to become independent and confident decision makers relating to cataloging work.

Working Knowledge

“…A dizzying array of rules and regulations guide cataloging practice with the goals of saving time, maximizing efficiency through consortial cataloging, and ensuring consistent description across records. As discussed by Diao (2018) and Hasenyager (2015), however, content analysis reveals that no two catalog records are exactly the same. Observing and recording with catalogers reveals counter-narratives that lead to variation across records and the stories that catalog records tell.…”

Expanding Our Conceptions of Embodied and Affective Information Interactions with Queer Theory

“…Further, their work explores how both queerness as an identity and queerness as a thing encountered operate to destabilize fixed orientations between historical understandings of cataloger and object (Šauperl, 2002) as well as notions of domain and document frames of subject description (Mai, 2005). Their work then theorizes towards what it would mean to make the work of cataloging body‐oriented and how this informs not only discussions of a cataloger's positionality (Diao, 2018), but practitioner positionality within LIS more broadly. Wagner's presentation will engage with the following questions: a) How does queer embodiment inform the interpretation of gender within cataloging practices?…”

“She Started Wearing Men’s Clothing and Acting More Masculine"

“…The idea as currently utilized situates the practitioner as a descriptive agent of information from a vantage point of neutrality. Most scholarship asks the cataloger to think critically of their role in making information available to users, while never noting how the identities of those users and catalogers inform descriptive presumptions (Diao, 2018). Latent here is that a cataloger, on behalf of their respective institution, can imagine all potential user needs or can see all potential representations within a given piece of information.…”