Employer Demands for Cataloger and Cataloger-like Librarians and Implications for LIS

What does it mean to provide bibliographic control in the year 2007? What do catalogers do? What do their employers expect them to do and know? Are they even called catalogers? The work reported here is part one of an exploratory study on the current state of employment involving bibliographic control. This paper describes online employment ads for positions with a cataloging orientation to determine current employer demands. Content analysis was used to categorize the skills and attributes denoted in the ads, and subsequently analyze them with frequency counts and correlations. The results indicate a high demand for a modest amount of previous library experience, knowledge of long-established cataloging standards, subject or domain knowledge, and general skills in communicating and working with people and data. In addition the results indicate only a mild demand for knowledge of e-library and newer technology tools. Introduction: Cataloging Since 1990 Over the last decade the role of catalogers has changed. In the 1990s deep cuts in library budgets pushed many cataloging unit to find alternative ways to maintain or even increase service to their user communities. One of these alternative solutions that met with some success was to contract out, i.e., outsource, some or all of the library's catalog processing. This alternative solution gave the cataloger freedom from many repetitious clerical-type cataloging tasks and an opportunity to refocus his or her attention on more undefined problems including the seemingly boundless challenges of providing bibliographic control within a digital library. Ellen Duranceau claims that outsourcing allowed catalogers to contemplate ". . . our identity as librarians, calling into question our assumptions about our ultimate purpose, our place in the scholarly information chain and how we can best serve our institutions."1 Prognosticators of the 1990s said that catalogers in the future library would be working with the prevalent computer files and digital resources. The catalogers could provide the bridge between the concept space of the systems librarians and the public services librarians. Sheila Intner, in 1 991 , predicted the cataloger's role in organizing information for ease of retrieval would remain valid, but the expanding digital library would require catalogers to have agility with systems architecture and database design so they could lead the way in providing bibliographic control of digital resources.2 Yet others predicted that catalogers would start developing local Web pages, creating electronic finding tools and novel schemes for organizing the bibliographic and authority files in more meaningful ways3, designing helpful interfaces, developing system navigational aids, and determining which elements to index.4 By the turn of the century there were suggestions that catalogers would need to work smarter by continuing to construct bibliographic surrogates while leveraging computational methods and social processes to add value to the bibliographic databases and ease access to meaningful information5. Current and Future Cataloging Digital resources and digital libraries are becoming more prominent and more frequently used in the pursuit of information and knowledge. One scholar tells us that digital libraries are ubiquitous.6 There are roughly 800 publicly accessible digital collections listed on the Web page of the Digital Library Federation, whose mission includes supporting scholarship and learning by providing access to international networks of digital libraries.7 Although this number does not reflect the absolute current number of digital libraries in existence, or even the number of publicly available digital libraries, it does provide us with a ballpark figure from a reputable source. This number is two orders of magnitude greater than "the handful of experimental projects" available in the early 1 990s.8 As of 2005, Lynch predicted digital libraries will become ubiquitous in the next decade. …