The book is divided into four sections. The first section is on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition (AACR2) and Resource Description and Access (RDA).1 The authors of the three chapters in this section raise substantive concerns about the practicality of RDA. The authors wrote their chapters, however, before RDA was published and before the announcement of the U.S. RDA test results. Nevertheless, some of the authors’ concerns also were expressed by the testing librarians, resulting in the decision by the U.S. national libraries not to implement RDA until its instructions are rewritten in “clear, unambiguous, plain English.”² Also in this section Elaine Sanchez, editor of the book, reports on her extensive survey of 459 respondents (91 percent from U.S. libraries) about their views of the new cataloging code, the training that would be needed to implement it, its cost and cost effectiveness, and whether AACR2 should be maintained in parallel with RDA. In this chapter I first noticed my one criticism of the book: some of the figures have print so small they are difficult to read.

Although I found useful ideas in all five chapters of the next section, “Visions: New Ideas for Bibliographic Control and Catalogs,” I will limit my discussion to just three contributions. Ed Jones makes a strong case for the importance of identifiers in library catalogs. He uses the definition of an identifier found in the 2009 Statement of International Cataloguing Principles: “A number, code, word, phrase, logo, device, etc., that is uniquely associated with an entity, and serves to differentiate that entity from other entities within the domain in which the identifier is assigned.”³ The earliest identifiers and the ones all catalogers will be familiar with are Library of Congress Control Numbers and International Standard Book Numbers. Jones states that while identifiers are now used to satisfy two of the user tasks outlined in the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records—that is, find and identify—“with the growing integration of OPACs into the World Wide Web, they would soon satisfy all four (find, identify, select, and obtain)” (99).

Also in the second section is a chapter by Bernhard Eversberg in which he outlines a new format to replace MARC for both bibliographic and authority data. He has implemented the format using the Allegro software package, and he provides a link to sample records in a demonstration database. I particularly noticed his use of single quote marks around initial articles in titles to remove the article from indexing. With MARC, initial articles can be coded to be skipped only when they begin a field; Eversberg's method allows initial articles to be skipped when they begin subfields as well.

Martha Yee contributes to this section by looking into the future and seeing the benefits of a single shared catalog. Neither WorldCat nor the Semantic Web meets the eight specifications that she outlines. Her specifications are complex, and I will not attempt to summarize them here, but I hope that the designers of next-generation catalogs will consult this chapter. The programmers for OCLC WorldCat also could find new directions for development.

It is inevitable in a collection like this that the various authors do not always agree with each other. For instance, Eversberg states that “display ought to be a matter of programming; logically, it ought not to be mixed up with internal formatting” (117). Yee on the other hand worries that “everything we call cataloging (effective indexing and effective displays) is pushed out of RDA and into ‘application’ or ‘implementation’” (129). Yee cautions the authors of RDA not to forget about the user “since, from the catalog user's point of view, cataloging is display design” (129). Both authors do, however, agree on the importance of indexing. While Eversberg does not see indexing as part of the format definition, he does criticize RDA for continuing “in the AACR tradition of not bothering with filing” (112).

“The Cataloging World in Transition” is the title of the third section of the book. I thoroughly enjoyed the insights presented by all six chapter authors. I especially liked John Myers's observation about standards. They are not “masters to intimidate us, but are instead our servants in the pursuit of our larger ideals” (179). I also found the chapter by Christine Schwartz to be particularly relevant to the stage of transition experienced by my own department. Over the past five years we have taken on the new technically challenging roles of designing and implementing batch load processes, and doing quality control by creating data sets and manipulating them in batches. I found her “Metadata Skill Set” very apt. We need in particular staff who “have traditional cataloging skills as well as database … skills” (184).

The final section of the book is “Cataloging and Metadata Librarians: Research, Education, Training and Recruitment.” Janet Swan Hill wonders how the profession can attract new librarians to the specialization of cataloging, and two other authors discuss their ideas for education and training. The book editor closes this section with two bibliographies. An afterword by Sheila Intner and Susan Lazinger does an excellent job of summing up the contents, although I dislike their metaphorical characterization of the book's mood as “fear of flying” (269). I did not perceive fear of the future or fear of change in these chapters, but rather a reminder that we must stay focused on providing accurate and standardized metadata so our users can find, identify, select, and obtain the information they want. I found many stimulating ideas in this book, and I heartily recommend it to other twenty-first-century catalogers.