I have wondered lately whether the fundamental goals of cataloging are at odds with the 21st century digital environment? In a digital world, we build networks and networks are for bringing together remote objects. Now it is important to note that it is not simply a transfer of files from one physical location to another, but more of an expression language for telling a narrative (think REST). Those remote objects are more appropriately understood as concepts than physical files. The work is always more important than the document that gives it form.

Elaine Svenonius in The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization traces the timeline of what I would call major missteps that we are only now beginning to recover from in library land. It goes something like this:

1. Cutter stated his cataloging objectives which importantly included what Svenonius calls the collocating objective
2. Lubetzky states his objectives and formally introduces the work/document distinction. His formulation was essentially adopted as the Paris principles.
3. IFLA only corrects this mistake of omission 36 years later

Cutter’s original collocating principle is ignored in favor of a conceptualization that places a heavy emphasis on books/bibliographic items as uniquely identifiable things. It is only later in 1997 that IFLA reformulates and modernizes the objectives, which leads us to the current state of debate over FRBR and the new (old) world of facets. This is the point at which Svenonius hits the nail right on the head:

The traditional finding objective specifies that what is to be found is a particular known document, while the traditional collocating objective specifies that what is to be found is a set of documents, defined by criteria such as author, work, and subject. The first IFLA objective integrates these into a single finding objective. While this is logical and introduces a certain elegance of expression, at the same time it diminishes the importance of the concept of collocation. This concept is well entrenched in bibliographic discourse. It is particularly useful for the emphasis it gives to what in the first instance is the primary act of information organization — bringing like things together. Both for its set-forming connotations and its ties to tradition it is too valuable to lose.

- Chapter 2, section on traditional objectives

The final emphasis is mine. While uniquely identifying an item is important this is going to happen whether we like it or not since it is an inherent feature of any system that functions at the most simplistic level. Now for an incredibly long time leading up to the current era cataloging was rooted in identification of bibliographic items at the expense of collocation of bibliographic items. Adding to the significance of this, during the era of mass digitization of bibliographic records (we can call it the Gorman era), this is the model that was used: identify.

In the past few years we have seen library land, with more tradition, history and rich data than anyone else in the world, get trounced by corporations and mashups who understand that you can get miles farther with vastly simpler description of the physical item if you give people something more important: collocation. People who bought this also bought this.

It boggles my mind why more librarians don’t seem understand this: we will never have to make the sales pitch to other bibliophiles, those people already understand the value of a book or other bibliographic entity. Anyone who obsesses over the edition of a book and who it was that wrote the introduction or preface is probably already sold on the value of libraries. It is the people who don’t understand how rich a library collection is that we need to spend our efforts seducing. We can do that by weaving the web: description should be base on 21st century collocation, not that old sixties issue, identity.

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