The Playful Antiquarian

The dangers of a cataloging mind

September 11th, 2003

Last night, after finishing my required reading from Wynar’s Introduction to Cataloging and Classification and the AACR2, I was in the mood to start organizing things. As you can see, one of the things I started to work on was this weblog. My sidebar, for example, has been reorganized quite a bit.Of course, to do this I had to remove some blogs from my blogroll. If your site was removed, please do not take it personally. If you click on the links and subscriptions button in my sidebar, you will find a page listing all of the blogs that I love, adore, and read regularly. Most likely, your blog is there. If not, it will be in a few days when I finish my blog reorganization project.

I am surprised that after one cataloging class (tonight is my second class) I suddenly have a better understanding of and a greater interest in how information is organized. In cataloger mode, I spent hours arranging and rearranging my blogroll, considering the appropriateness and usefulness of various categories, worrying about collocation. I am still not quite happy with the arrangement (and the gratuitous line spacing), but this version, at least, feels much more logical and organized.

In addition to obsessing over organization, my new cataloging mind is noticing all sorts of things. For example, I noticed that the subscription list for Harvard’s weblogs does not ignore initial articles in its index. As a result, La Familia Brophy is filed under L instead of F and The Laughing Librarian is filed under T instead of L. This is something I had not noticed in the six months that I have had a weblog at Harvard, but after reading about indexing and online catalogues, this jumped out at me.

This new way of seeing things could be very dangerous. Who knows what I will notice next…

[Update: "Gratuitous spacing" problem temporarily solved by giving in to a bulleted list format. I just lost all of my links and had to make links for everything again. I am afraid to do anything else at the moment. I know that this is problematic for some browsers and will try to fix this later when I have time. Many apologies to anyone who is having trouble viewing my sidebar right now. Minor formatting frustrations like this make moving to Typepad very tempting. I found their list/sidebar editing nearly idiot-proof--particularly good for the technologically accident-prone like myself.]

Entry Filed under: Administrative Matters