Speak Up, Sandy: Ethics and Social Responsibility in Technical Services

10/28/2003
NELA Annual Conference
Worcester, MA

Sandy Berman's lively talk focused on issues of equity, equality and social responsibility in relation to the traditional work of technical services staff. The effect of technical services decisions on public services and access to information was a key concept of his presentation, and was amply illustrated by numerous examples from actual Library of Congress cataloging examples. He stressed that ethical professional librarians do not blindly follow standard practices, but rather should do what they need to do to serve the public and information desk colleagues. Sandy exhorted us to follow the credo of intelligibility, findability and fairness. Based on these principles, he provided examples of subject headings that would not or should not have been assigned, but were because catalogers succumbed to simply following the rules. Throughout his talk Sandy reminded us that blaming controlled vocabulary as the reason one cannot find information is not justified. It is the ethical professional's responsibility to provide references where there are none so as to facilitate access.

Sandy gave us some particularly wonderful examples of misleading, wrong and/or inadequate subject headings assigned to books. Most notable was his dramatic reading of "Tricky Dick" which was actually sent to the Children's Program for cataloging, when in fact even the briefest page-flipping would show it to be political satire, not "Stories in rhyme" and "Conduct of Life-Fiction." In many of the real examples Sandy provided, the cataloging actually obstructed access. He also cited various examples of catalog records with numerous headings but none that actually described what the books were about. Basically, Sandy advocated the ethical responsibility of catalogers to add subject headings or to notify the Library of Congress of the need for a particular heading. We need to increase access to our holdings as well as to provide subject headings in familiar, unbiased and timely terminology. There is also the obvious issue of financial constraints faced by many institutions. However, Sandy strongly believes this should not be a reason for overlooking the issue of inadequate subject coverage completely. Ideally, changes should result from discussion among staff, because decision by fiat suffers from the lack of expertise and knowledge among the staff.

If, for example, a library budget is decreased by 10%, staff need to fight to maintain access to collections and they need to consult with their shareholders as to how to do this. Sandy argued that it is actually a cost-saving measure to enhance access to resources rather than an expenditure. Findability is cost effective - if someone can find a book, then the money spent on its purchase is money well spent. Along these same lines, Sandy advocates providing non-standard cross-references, for example from Columbia to Colombia, because that is often how people think the name is spelled.

During the question and answer session, Sandy was asked a wide range of questions including "what skills do new librarians need?" His answer: curiosity, enthusiasm, critical thinking skills, candor, collegiality and a revulsion against censorship. He also noted that library school curricula fails to support non-managers - he sees it as "boss education," not "worker education." And when asked the "if you could do this over" question, Sandy replied that while chance directed his career path, yes, he would do it again. Nothing has been more satisfying.

The presentation was a particularly appropriate finale to the Annual Conference.

Reported by Karen Carlson Young
Database Management
Harvard College Library Technical Services