Talk about a downer…LOC refers me to Wikipedia!!!

Smoke stacks (LOC)

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a first year MLIS (Library and Information Science) student at Syracuse University. I’m taking a class involving cataloging and metadata principles and am finding out that there are just an inordinate number of cataloging systems. In trying to find out how many of these systems exist, I searched high and low and eventually ended up at the Library of Congress. They HAVE to know, right?

So I reach out via their ‘Ask a Librarian’ link on their website. I’m thinking it might take a day or two, but this is the LOC and they’ll have a wonderful annotated list of resources for me along with an actual number of cataloging systems there are out there.

My first response looked like this:

Hello Joshua Kitlas

Thank you for visiting the Library of Congress Web site.
We suggest that you contact the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at ndmso@loc.gov. They will be able to better assist you with this query.
Best wishes,
The Digital Reference Section/am Library of Congress

That’s fine. I can totally deal with that. Though I did think it a little strange that they didn’t contact them directly in the first place, but anyway, I ask the good people at the Network Development and MARC Standards Office. You want to guess what their response was?

Hello,

There is really no way to know how many standards there are (new standards are created constantly). There is no comprehensive list.

One list I can think of is the Open Metadata Registry, but it is far from complete.

Wikipedia has several helpful articles. Search on terms such as Metadata, Metadata registry or Metadata standards.

Best regards,

NDMSO

WHAT!!! WIKIPEDIA???

Holy crap! This can’t be true. Oh yes boys and girls, it is. So wrong on so many levels – from the Wikipedia nonsense, the initial email ‘handoff’, the complete lack of thoroughness, carelessness and so on. This is exactly NOT what we’re being taught to do as reference librarians. I’m shocked and amazed. Whoever it was that failed me clearly didn’t go to Syracuse I can tell you that.

What makes this especially painful for me is that I just had an AMAZING conversation with Thomas Mann who works at one of the LOC’s reference desks. He’s very awesome and I can’e underscore that enough.