2017 MLA Annual Conference

Under the leadership of Sanford Berman, Hennepin County Library once devised and maintained its own subject headings system and pioneered practices designed to better facilitate access, often deviating from established standards. When this catalog was dismantled in 2002, the need for standardization and interoperability were cited as the main reasons. Many trends have contributed toward the discouragement of local practices in cataloging: international standardization, consortium catalogs, and decreasing staffing levels. The use of local practices is sometimes disparaged as inefficient and wasteful, but maintaining the capacity for every library to make decisions that best serve its local users is essential. How can we retain, and exercise, local control in a realistic way that centers the needs of our users? It's time for those working with library metadata to challenge the conformist logic of standards, as well as to demand more from library system vendors, in order to transform our catalogs into discovery tools that are flexible and responsive to the varied needs of information seekers.