The Honcho received an email message today from a cataloger in our consortium. This professional person, who shall remain nameless, stated that she plans to attend a workshop regarding the changes that were made by OCLC resulting in the new Dewey Decimal Classification—DDC22, which was released in July, 2003. According to the message, the workshop attendees are to bring "their Dewey" to the workshop. This "cataloger" noticed that our library "has the update" (i.e. is in possession of DDC22, as opposed to DDC21, which it replaced), and wanted to know if she could BORROW OUR COPY FOR THE WORKSHOP. We could send it to her on the delivery van, she wrote, and she'd return it by van on the day following the workshop.
1. What does she think we'd use as a reference for cataloging during the week we'd be without it, counting on 3 days for delivery each way and 1 day for her to use it?
2. What does she think we (i.e. the other cataloger in my library and I) would use at the workshop, if we were going to attend, as "our Dewey"?
3. Why has she not felt compelled to ACQUIRE the new Dewey for her own library, since the update has been available for six months?
This raises several other issues of professionalism that I hadn't intended to address, much less upon which to riff, but really. My library was the first library in the NIC consortium to catalog DDC22. Does that mean that no other library in NIC has it? Or have they just not cataloged it yet? Or do they not intend to catalog it? And for all of our (i.e. the consortium's, and especially the cataloging group's) bitching about specificity and accuracy, what are they doing using an old classification system? Particularly some of the more vehement (read: blowhardish) members of the group?!
In her response to the email message, my Head Banana wrote that we would not be able to send our Deweys for the workshop. The implication was that the other library should buy its own.
Duh.
