Is There a Catalog in Your Future? Access to Information in the Year 2006

In 1957, the founding year of RTSD, the focus was clearly on the catalog. It was the eve of the Stanford Institute that preceded AACR1.1 It was a time for reappraisal of the physical form of the catalog and the prelude to an era of intense concentration on international agreement and standardization.2 Just prior to this Strout, in a paper on the “Development of the Catalog and Cataloging Codes,” had expressed the view that in the past, while librarians had been “intelligent and serious scholars,” they had also been very “short sighted.”3 Reflecting on this, she challenged her audience to rethink principles and practices anew, lest they take for granted things that some day “might look equally ridiculous to another age.” She warned: We may be so blinded by . . . firmly established customs that we are incapable of seeing some utterly simple alternatives which might quickly resolve our problems, and which will some day look so easy and obvious that our descendants will in turn look upon us as unseeing and unimaginative.