Standard Cataloging for School and Public Libraries Book

This book serves a role and a purpose and I want to begin this review with the positive by saying that I'm glad there is a text for cataloging.

Now, having said that, this book did little to actually help me appreciate and understand the process and purpose of cataloging, and I suspect it's because much of what it had to offer I already knew. I work in a library where my supervisor taught me the basics of the cataloging system, and over the last year, I've been working on cataloging our local history and genealogy room. I thought that this book would help me, but it did not. The writing dense to the point of being near incomprehensible at times, there doesn't appear to be a solid organization, it bounces between trying to be a history of cataloging and a practical guide. What can be said in the books favor is that it provides visual examples of what catalog fields and actual MARC systems look like visually, but even then it doesn't provide a good enough context so that these examples seem relevant and applicable.

Cataloging is hard enough already, and as computers are revolutionizing library catalogs the world over, books about beginning a catalog, or else books designed to give the total facts need to to be approachable tools for librarians and library employees and this book did not deliver that.

In the end my real world experience, and having a great supervisor who had training already helped me far more. But like I said, I am glad that a contemporary book exists, even if it's not everything I wanted it to be.