In a conversation in a faculty meeting in a leading South African LIS school in the early 1970s, I ventured the opinion that cataloguing is a central competency of any librarian. This was greeted with of derision. Since then, as a manager and researcher, I have observed the practical consequences of the drift away from all library-related things towards the “harder” and more academically respectable discipline of information science. As an ineducable dinosaur, I remain convinced of the centrality of cataloguing in the information professions. You may not have to, or want to, catalogue, but some understanding of the principles of cataloguing is essential to almost any facet of information service. Cataloguing is not a refuge for shrinking violets, for pernickety, nit-picking, obsessive-compulsive types who become librarians because they don’t like dealing with people. Cataloguing is for connecting people with resources. It is basic to the selection, acquisition/ingestion, storage, retrieval/discovery, and availability of bibliographic resources of all kinds, ancient and modern, physical and virtual.
This came to mind when my friend Mauro Guerrini, a professor in the University of Florence, Italy, sent me an advance copy of his book, Dalla catalogazione alla metadatazione: Tracce di un percorso [From cataloging to metadating: traces of a journey] (Guerrini 2020).
I have to say at the outset that I’m not qualified to expertly review a book on cataloguing. I was taught cataloguing in the mid-1960s, when the rules were set out in the ALA Cataloging rules for author and title entries of 1949, a revision of the 1908 Cataloguing rules, which had been the result of a collaboration between the American Library Association and the (British) Library Association. This was a slim volume with a brick-red softcover. Roughly when I first started teaching in a library school, the “blue code” was introduced: the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR) of 1967, a much thicker volume with a blue softcover. (For correct names and dates of the various editions see Guerrini or Haider (2021).)
