Now that VALA Tech Camp is over I have a little more time, and I've made a start on the long-overdue rewrite of the software behind Aus GLAM Blogs. One of the things I noticed quickly after we launched GLAM Blog Club is that despite nearly all the participants being qualified or student Information Management professionals, compliance with the official tag ('GLAM Blog Club' on the post itself and '#GLAMBlogClub' on social media) was patchy at best. I count at least four different variations in the posts ingested into the Aus GLAM Blogs database. I found this mildly surprising, but the process of writing the software, observing how people interact with Blog Club, and now re-writing the software, has made me think more about how we manage metadata in collecting institutions.

My first and only experience of cataloguing in libraries was, ironically, in my very first library position before I was a qualified librarian. Due almost entirely to the fact that at 22 years of age I was at least a decade younger than any of my colleagues, I was given responsibility for purchasing and cataloguing all the compact discs purchased out of the 'teenage collections' budget. It didn't amount to much, but it did allow me to indulge my tastes in electronic and 'alternative' music using ratepayers' money. Having had approximately one hour of cataloguing training, I was one of the worst cataloguers in library history, but my primary problem was that I wanted our catalogue records to be useful to end-users, and the head of cataloguing wanted my records to be standards-compliant. The case that still sticks in my memory was when I was confronted with the Sigur Rós album (). In its original packaging, the album had a removable cover with cutouts of the two parentheses, with the insert completely blank and no title written on the CD itself. I knew that the album was called "()", but the cataloguing boss wouldn't have it, insisting that the catalogue record must list the title as 'untitled'. My protestations that this would make it impossible to find were given short shrift.

Never normalise

I've never stopped thinking about Jarret Drake's talk at the British Colombia Library Association's 2017 meeting since I first read it. In particular, Drake's exhortation to "never normalize" is shocking in its defiance of the norms of library practice. Drake meant it to be so - for us to wake up to the Fascist possibilities of fitting knowledge into easily connected, neat classifications. Drake explicity called for library and archive workers to resist standardisation of metadata in order to make integration between different systems harder:

Local languages, taxonomies, and other forms of knowledge that only people within specific communities can decipher might well be a form of resistance in a country where a president not only advocates for a Muslim database but also for “a lot of systems… beyond databases.” Jarret Drake - How libraries can trump the trend to make America hate again

Drake is coming at this from the Archiving tradition, which has always been more interested than librarianship in retaining metadata as it was at the point of accessioning. But this call to 'Never normalise' is both more radical and more progressive than the occassional moves to change 'offensive' Library of Congress Subject Headings.¹ Emily Drabinski gets to the heart of this in her April 2013 Library Quarterly article, Queering the catalogue: Queer Theory and the politics of correction:

... as we attempt to contain entire fields of knowledge or ways of being in accordance with universalizing systems and structures, we invariably cannot account for knowledges or ways of being that are excess to and discursively produced by those systems ... From a queer perspective, critiques of LCC and LCSH that seek to correct them concede the terms of the knowledge organization project: that a universalizing system of organization and naming is possible and desirable. Emily Drabinski - Queering the catalogue: Queer Theory and the politics of correction

In other words: the problem isn't particular cataloguing terms, but rather the idea that the world can be described using a single, universal ontology. Patri