Cataloging Library Resources: An Introduction

Abstract

The fundamentals of MARC cataloging have not changed in about fifty years. These fundamentals
are described soundly in this textbook by Marie Keen Shaw. I can see the years of work and training on which this book is based, but as a professional cataloger with almost two decades of experience working with library, archive, and museum metadata, I can also see where this textbook went wrong as Shaw seeks to make sense of library-managed metadata through a MARC-based framework. MARC is necessary knowledge for anyone working with library metadata, but it is not a good framework from which to understand the increasingly interoperable future of library cataloging.