Catalogers’ Common Ground and Shared Knowledge

The problem of multiple interpretations of meaning in the indexing process has been mostly avoided by information scientists. Among the few who have addressed this question are Clare Beghtol and Jens Erik Mai. Their findings and findings of other researchers in the area of information science, social psychology, and psycholinguistics indicate that the source of the problem might lie in the background and culture of each indexer or cataloger. Are the catalogers aware of the problem? A general model of the indexing process was developed from observations and interviews of 12 catalogers in three American academic libraries. The model is illustrated with a hypothetical cataloger’s process. The study with catalogers revealed that catalogers are aware of the author’s, the user’s, and their own meaning, but do not try to accommodate them all. On the other hand, they make every effort to build common ground with catalog users by studying documents related to the document being cataloged, and by considering catalog records and subject headings related to the subject identified in the document being cataloged. They try to build common ground with other catalogers by using cataloging tools and by inferring unstated rules of cataloging from examples in the catalogs.