The results of a Delphi survey among 70 librarians expert of cataloguing are published in the current issue of Cat & Class Quarterly (A Research Agenda for Cataloging: The CCQ Editorial Board Responds to the Year of Cataloging Research / Richard P. Smiraglia. - http://doi.org/aje).
The results go in the direction I have explored myself - see my "CPD-Wiki", page "A Second look at cataloguing practices" at http://bit.ly/catdata. That led me to a new cross-domain general definition of cataloguing (one could say 'entrepreneurial', perhaps!) at http://www.connotea.org/user/search/tag/cataloguing - it includes records management even if I am not sure there is enough literary warrant for that but it seems to me inevitable and crucial considered the peculiarities of digital curation and preservation in any sector.
Such generic, cross domain definition of cataloguing does not include authority work and I am aware this may disappoint some.
Fact is that more than ten years ago authority work was said to be specific of some libraries' and services' requirements - and not universally needed anymore ("IFLA goal of universal bibliographic control by way of requiring everyone to use the same form for headings globally is not practical and is no longer necessary", was the 1998 conclusion of a working group). Therefore I think time has come to clearly state in a general cross domain definition what librarians, indexers, information retrieval experts, linked data guru and other specialists have in common.
I believe authority work is crucial for policies and governance reasons in many contexts starting with those experiments in the open data space that may make an author invisible in some authority files, perceived as dead in some others, confused with homonyms or misrepresented via intentionally or unintentionally faked results. The last can be part of defamatory and stigmatisation campaigns with serious consequences on the reputation of people, especially young researchers, and are known to be astonishingly under-reported.
The current issue of Cataloguing and Classification Quarterly presents the work of Carlo Revelli, the over 80 author of the article opening the last issue of "Biblioteche oggi". The article is about the first Italian translation of Ranganathan’s Five laws of library science, with full text available at <http://www.bibliotecheoggi.it> for those who want to practice reading a familiar text in Italian - it tooks only 80 years to have that translation after all ;)
Brunella Longo
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