catalogs and scholarship: a bit of sentiment

OK, it must be Paul Courant day here or something like that. I was looking at his blog post about the closing and more specifically the removal of the U. Michigan card catalog, and in his discussion of responses to the removal he spoke of his own sentimental response. These are the lines that struck me:

"... I’ll always remember the card catalog as the rich, powerful and brilliant piece of scholarship that it was, and as a place that I visited in eager anticipation of learning something new. I don’t think that I was ever disappointed."

The catalog as a work of scholarship is a view one rarely hears anymore, but it is the correct view of the card catalog of a research university. Those catalogs were the heart of the heart of the university, or the soul in the machine, or whatever lovely, sentimental phrase you most prefer to use. When one was "in" the catalog following a citation or browsing an author's works or perusing a subject, one was in more or less the active mind of the library and thus one could imagine it as the mind or memory of the university or of scholarship itself.

If the catalog was a work of scholarship, then the cataloger was a scholar. And in that I think we can feel the loss that many catalogers feel when they consider the past 30 years and look ahead to the future of cataloging and libraries: their work as scholars is at an end. It is possible to see a descending arc--the catalog as scholarship to the catalog as information repository to the catalog as a database. And the arc descends for the cataloger from scholar to information manager to data assistant. This view is a sentimental one and a depressing one; it is not objectively true, but I know that it feels true to many catalogers. It is part of the sorrow of catalogers that many lament the loss of status as scholars and don't feel any warmth for the status of a data-centric programmer.