From the catalogs of babes











{December 30, 2008}   Apropos of Autocat

Apropos of my recent post regarding user-driven classification systems, I returned to work after the holidays to find numerous back digests of Autocat, a catalogers’ listserv, in my inbox discussing the very same subject.

I have been an Autocat subscriber since I began cataloging full-time, about 2 years ago. I subscribe to the digest edition as the traffic, though not overwhelming, is fairly high.  I confess that I find much of the mailing list overly argumentative and argumentative. Probably it’s a product of the medium, rather than the message, but I have always felt too intimidated by this tone to join in. From speaking to others, I know I’m not the only person with this impression. I have in fact been called out for not participating when my support of a particular issue might have made a difference.

Finally this time, the topic was too timely and too close to my heart to pass by. What is there to be afraid of? I have plenty of experience in online arguing and sticking my large feet in my mouth. Heck, I’ve decided to do it here, with this blog–to throw my ideas up against the world’s spaghetti pot wall and see what, if anything, sticks. So I figure, if I’m going to say whatever it is I think, then I should say it. I can’t just say it here, into this void of a blog that no one (yet) reads. This “safe zone” is appealing, to be able to post my thoughts openly yet not worry that, since there are no readers, no one will argue or disagree. But it will only get me–and in turn, the people and profession I am interested in helping and improving–so far.

One of my cataloging teachers used to say, “cataloging is not done in a void. ” And so neither can discussion about cataloging. After returning to the overflowing inbox of Autocat messages discussing the feasibility of bookstore and other alternative classification systems for libraries, I felt compelled to contribute. I confess I’m scared as shit. I hate online arguments and I hate confrontation. How are people going to respond? Will they agree? Will they understand? Will they jump down my throat? I don’t know. And because I subscribe to the digest, I won’t even see their responses right away. It seems crazy to think that a simple thing like a mailing list might keep me up all night in anxious worry, but I suppose it’s only human nature to fret about how others see and respond to us. It’s certainly true with regards to fashion.

The one thing I am looking forward to is the possibility of connection. As scary as the thought is, it’s time for my one-way mirror method of lurking to end, and I’m looking forward to establishing connections with new and interesting people. Especially with ALA Midwinter coming up. Even if the number is small, I hope to meet a few people with similar ideas and objectives. I know they are out there; I’ve already met some. I know there have to be other people out there who are interested in exploring new ways to improve library user experiences through cataloging.



Bryan says:

You may start seeing more interest in your blog because it was mentioned at Cataloging Futures (see http://www.catalogingfutures.com/catalogingfutures/), which I see by way of Planet Cataloging (see http://planetcataloging.org/).

You mentioned the possibility of not seeing responses to your posts right away because you subscribe to the digest. Although I still receive the digest, I tend to read AUTOCAT by way of the web archive, which adds new messages to the list almost instantly. You get the advantage of either seeing every message in real time if you want or waiting until enough of them accumulate to see a “digest” of them.

When something interests me, I just read that thread. It’s very easy to
navigate back and forth within the thread or to move on to another topic
altogether. Reading the list through the web archive, using the listserv
options at the top, also gives me the flexibility to sort by topic, author, date, or just see the full table of contents for the week. Many of these options are not available in a static Digest obviously. I also have immediate access to the archive (back to 1991), which is handy when topics carry over from one week to the next or when I want to see something from long ago. I use this same reading strategy for OCLC-CAT, NGC4LIB, and RADCAT, among others.

You might also consider the open version of AUTOCAT at http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.education.libraries.autocat, although only part of the archive is available (back to 2007).



Laura says:

“that no one (yet) reads”

You’ve been noted by cataloging futures.

Say goodbye to security through obscurity.

I’m glad you’re blogging :) welcome to the weird melding of personal and professional space ms anarchivy



Ivy says:

Thanks, Brian. I have used the archive to search for old postings, but never thought to use it for current reading. I’ll give it a shot, as I too would prefer to read by thread.



Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

et cetera
%d bloggers like this:
https://catalogsofbabes.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/35/
catalogsofbabes.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-24
81519
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JSNXIIIKEPT3YQ6XNPYKSUFPXANJV5ND
<urn:uuid:f5fd0dfe-576b-4c10-a823-82afa6db8a87>
2020-05-29T07:21:24Z
192.0.78.12
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:CDP3VGECGQHNIQAFER3KFMOFGCBJQR7S
<urn:uuid:da3b5585-199a-4be8-adce-e75aab7ac044>
https://catalogsofbabes.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/35/
response
<urn:uuid:bdc47ba0-3763-4728-ac12-c8b13256fd63>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-24
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May/June 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-236.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/