The Future of Cataloging

The technical staff in our library recently had a meeting to discuss our library website's new interface, particularly the search functions.

One of the issues a colleague raised was the absence of the hyphen between the subject heading and the subject subdivision, e.g. Hospitality industry--Management appears on the screen as Hospitality industry Management. She then turned to me and asked me whether this bothered me at all. I matter-of-factly answered "No" although from a strictly cataloger's point of view, it does.

The way the subject term is presented is not pleasant to the eye what with the capital M in management following a small i in industry. It simply doesnt' make sense to me. It's like a sentence with a wrong punctuation. And it's confusing, too. To the average user, it may seem that the subject of the book covers the hospitality industry and management when in fact it covers the management of the hospitality industry.

I have nothing against changing the way subject headings are used to keep up with the times like tags, labels or keywords just as long as they're sensible. In fact, having been an indexer for close to a decade, I have always been for free-language indexing because it makes for simpler assignment of headings and searching. So it is with bated breath that I await the results of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) that the Joint Committee for Revision of AACR is working on, as well as that of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.