Slow Metadata

Abstract

The Bibliographic Records in Libraries' Searchable Online Public Access Catalogs (Opac) Have Recently Taken on a New Role as a source of bibliographic data that can be aggregated, shared, circulated, manipulated, transformed, studied, and interpreted. Scholars' new awareness of library catalogs not just as aids to locating books and other materials but as sources of bibliographic information that researchers can manipulate and transform has inspired new scholarship on the history of the catalog and a new focus on how the catalog, in both its analog and digital forms, shapes bibliographic knowledge. Our Early Novels Dataset (END) project, for example, uses methods from book history, library science, and literary studies to think about the shape and history of the bibliographic metadata in the library catalog. Our research group's collective experiments with bibliographic metadata ask what happens when we look at the library catalog record not just as a utilitarian aid for searching or as an object of critique, but also as a work in progress with a literary character of its own. We ask what we can learn from the shape given to bibliographic information by the earlier catalogers whose records our project inherited and on whose expertise we draw. We also ask how the familiar languages of the library catalog record and the controlled bibliographic description might help make new forms of knowledge about books. And we press on the inevitable and generative tension between the particular perspective of the library catalogers who transform specific copies of physical books into bibliographic data and the informational fields dictated by machine-readable cataloging (MARC) descriptive standards.