IRgrunt
(with a nod to the famous “refgrunts…”)
So I’m working on getting a translation of Eugene Onegin into the repository. I start doing up the metadata, and I think to myself, “Hm. Self, I bet there are a lot of translations of Eugene Onegin in the library catalogue. Rather than reinventing aboutness wheels, why not stand on the shoulders of my cataloguer colleagues?”
So I do a title search, and indeed, the library has quite a few translations. I click on a few, and I immediately notice that no two entries have the same subject headings. Several, in fact, have none at all.
Somebody explain to me how this is a good and useful thing? It violates collocation-by-subject. It means that someone perusing one of the subjects may not realize that Eugene Onegin is in fact highly relevant, because not as many hits will come up as theoretically should. It implies false dichotomies among the different translations (why should one be about “Novels in verse” while another is about Russian society?). It doesn’t, in a word, help users—among which august body I currently count myself.
This isn’t a cataloguer problem. It’s a tools-and-processes problem. Cataloguing tools should have heuristics for recognizing a new translation of Eugene Onegin and pulling up the other records for such translations. Subject assignment at that point should be point-and-click, accept what’s already in the catalogue (with, of course, an option to add new subjects if truly necessary—which I can’t imagine it is terribly often!).
I despair sometimes; I truly do. If cataloguing tools can’t even manage that, how on earth are they going to manage the immensely richer web of relationships implied by the FRBR model?