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Case: 0022

Sector: -

Beware the catalogue!

Is cataloguing inherently biased? What are the responsibilities of a cataloguer to provide objective pointers to information?

Summary: A freelance librarian is employed to catalogue a specialist collection. She decides to allocate each information object to one primary subject classification, and optionally to one or more secondary subjects. In deciding to which primary subject an object belongs, the librarian is making a choice about the physical position of the object on the bookshelf. This may prevent serendipitous discovery by browsers, but to what extent is the librarian responsible?

NOTE: This Case Study is fictitious. It is informed by experience in the information world, but it does not claim to represent a scenario of actual events or relate to individual people or organisations.

Case Study: A subject expert working as a freelance librarian is employed to catalogue ab initio a large specialist collection of books and other materials. The catalogue requires each object to be assigned just one primary subject classification. The librarian can then assign secondary classifications if they are deemed necessary.

Because the primary classification of each object determines its place on the bookshelf, the librarian is making a decision about how library users might view that object as part of a collection. Whether the manual cataloguing process – which depends on personal expertise and opinion and is therefore subjective - is a form of inadvertent bias is questioned.

Any attempt by the librarian to assign a primary subject classification to an object artificially and to mislead library users intentionally is unjustified and unethical. The librarian ought to assign primary classifications as objectively as possible, but it is acknowledged that to do so with total objectivity is only a theoretical possibility. Consider, for example, the likelihood of two independent librarians identically classifying a whole library collection!

However, in this particular case we note that the librarian has to make a choice about which single primary subject will be assigned to each object. In some situations this may be intellectually challenging, particularly when the catalogue does not allow for multiple entries of an object with cross references. A book must be about either Cuban history or about United States foreign policy – it cannot be primarily about both.

The mechanism for determining aboutness is not a topic for discussion here. However, we should note the librarian’s responsibility to provide a competent and as objective a service as possible, and to consider ways of mitigating inadvertent censorship. Perhaps the librarian ought to advise his employer of the possibility that some books will be suboptimally shelved, and it may be incumbent on the head of the library service to ensure that proper catalogue resources are provided on the advice of the cataloguer librarian.

The library user has a responsibility to ensure that he/she properly acquaints him-/herself with the main limitations of the catalogue and takes appropriate measures to retrieve books, but here perhaps the ultimate responsibility lies with the professional librarians to provide training and/or awareness to library users.

	Primary	Secondary
Principles	7	3 - 4
Code	B3	B1 – B2 – B7
Related cases	0002 – a case in which an information manager creates a unique classification scheme based on his own subject knowledge. 0023 – a similar situation in which the compilers of this database of case studies had to choose which of several subjects could be considered the primary subject(s) of a case.

References:

To recommend resources related to this Case, please contact the editors.

Feedback:

The editors welcome feedback. To comment on the facts of this Case, or to respond to the editorial review, please contact the editors.

Revised: v1.0 11-Dec-05 : JG-T. v1.01 18-Dec-05 : JG-T. v1.02 14-Dec-06 : JG-T.