One of the disconcerting facts of growing older is that festschriften, which used to be dedicated to grand old veterans, start being produced for one's near contemporaries. Ruth Carter is slightly older than me, but spent more time on other pursuits, so we both started professional training in 1969 and must have simultaneously discovered the joys of listing things so other people can find them. We are therefore of the last generation for which the individual library's catalogue and classification scheme were vital tools for the retrieval of scholarly information.
Barring an apocalyptic scenario in which the entire internet melts down, leaving us as the only people who know how to manage a large card catalogue [let alone the only people who know how the Surgeon‐General's Index Catalog works] the world is moving towards a situation where the bulk of all recorded information is searchable full‐text. To enable enquirers to locate information, library cataloguing rules really need to be replaced with more sophisticated versions of Google's “do you mean… ?” and synonym‐searching software. Spending hours in a reference library and using its catalogue used to give a clear understanding of the information landscape. “Today there is a real danger that kids are losing such a mental map” (Rowlands, quoted in Gilbert, 2008). A catalogue or even physical presence in a library no longer gives the enquirer such a map.
Ruth Carter was, under various titles, head of the cataloguing department of the University of Pittsburgh, until her last couple of years when she moved to being head of its archives centre and curator of historical collections. She was for 20 years editor of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, and more recently, has been editor‐in‐chief of the Haworth book programme in Library & Information Science. I have to admit to being dubious about this last activity. This series seems to me to contain a lot of material which does not really need to be sandwiched between hard covers and permanently stored on library shelves. In particular, much of it consists of book‐form retreads of minor journals – a form of double publishing which I have always found irritating. There should be a difference between a cohesive book and a journal issue. This series does not seem to me to work well as either. Nevertheless, Ruth Carter's assiduity in digging them out and getting them published is worthy of notice.
This book itself forms a notable example of this peculiar genre. It represents four issues of a specialised journal, and falls into four parts which have very little connection with each other: a section of papers relating to Ruth's life and professional activities, a section of miscellaneous historical studies in librarianship, a section of research papers in library technical services, and a series of “position papers” on cataloguing and information retrieval. The journal claims to be peer reviewed. I wonder which peer reviewed Professor Sheila Inter's lines:
… Ruth knows all about this because tech. services is her beat
And her library is one of our leaders.
She's seen all the changes, first hand, from cards to the “net”
And helped us morph from paper to screen readers
Andrew Motion perhaps? Definitely a candidate for the McGonagall memorial prize for commemorative verse.
Aside from Dr Carter's personal friends and admirers, I am not really sure who will need this book. The first two sections contain assorted material that may be of some interest to historians of libraries and librarianship (“Books… in early Monroe County, Indiana” for example). The second two consist mainly of evanescent or ultra‐specialised technical material that could well have been left to slumber in the decent obscurity of Cataloging and Classification Quarterly (“Error rates in monograph copy cataloguing bibliographic records… at the University of Saskatchewan library”). I would have thought that a better tribute to her would have been to allow her to pick out what she saw as the 20 (one for each year of her editorship) best or most influential papers from the journal and to try to set them into context in the form of a proper book. Nevertheless I am glad to see efforts like hers being commemorated in some way.
