Pragmatic approaches to cataloging are both a recognition of the transient nature of betterment and a mild form a pessimism in which the striving for a better system is curtailed in the interest of cost, time and other material constraints. If one framed descriptive cataloging as part of an ongoing process of betterment then many of the maxims of behavior described by Osborn provide cautionary stories of the derailment of betterment. Gorman takes an irreverent tone of rhetoric to puncture the supposed profundity and universality of various cataloging orthodoxies including corporate authorship, uniform personal headings, main entry, and the card catalog to show that technology can cause a shift in the balance of influence of particular ideas. The ideas precede and create the impetus for new technologies such as the example of MARC records being developed initially as an improved way to produce library catalog cards and then being exapted into the foundational layer of a new technology – online catalogs; providing a new way to interact via a tool with the information deemed important from a previous imaginative vision of how to create and utilize print resources. It is too simplistic to view this change in ideas as the result of the changing superstructure as defined in naïve materialist theoreticians like Marx. Rather the ideas themselves guide the betterment of the system – subject to the potential vices of legalistic, perfectionistic, bibliographic and pragmatic approaches described by Osborn. As new ideas penetrate the practice of cataloging, new conceptions of possible routes to betterment arise as in the case of FRBR and RDA discussed in the video lectures. Seeing a new set of relationship arrangements is not a case of pragmatism, but an impulse to generalize the cataloging into a more basic system of description which while offering up many benefits that can be characterized as pragmatic, mostly arise from a different ideational impulse. The other values are then rhetorically exposed in the attempt to persuade significant embodied institutions of practice and investment to undergo creative destruction based on the faith and persuasive arguments of proponents of a new set of ideas. In fact, pragmatics alone might lead one to conclude that old catalogs existing for various institutions in the past sufficed generally for their purposes and no great expenditure in retraining, reclassifying, and creating new tools would be prudent. Progress slows and halts from the barnacles of legalism, perfectionism, and bibliographic completeness. As a rule of thumb, pragmatics may be the least psychologically stressful, but it may not on its own lead to progress and betterment. Dissatisfaction and imagination are probably both necessary to turn the axle wheel of progress to keep it heading forward and not veering off to impractical fantasies nor the sapping of will from satisficing.
Perhaps the next cataloging insight will be to keep the older classifications intact and encapsulate them with the new classification – making room in one system for both history and progress.
Gorman, M. (1989). Yesterday's heresy–today's orthodoxy: An essay on the changing face of descriptive cataloging. College & Research Libraries, 50(6), 626-634.
Osborn, A. D. (1941). The crisis in cataloging. Library Quarterly, 11(4), 393-411.
Our catalogues, we quite agree,
From faults and errors must be free,
If only we - our way can see
To find the proper rule.