Just Wondering - Who is Cataloging Really For?

This post by Manitowoc (WI) Public Library Youth Librarian and YSS Board Member Susie Menk explores staff vs patron needs in placement of books in the collection. And she's wondering....what do you think? 

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

So I would like to pose a question to you today.  In libraries, the recent trend has been to make collections more user friendly.  Go to subject headings and groupings of books by topics instead of by authors.  Hence our recently completed picture book city cataloguing project.  We want our patrons to find the library easy to use so we have adapted many of our traditions of cataloguing in favor of colorful, eye catching labels and topical groupings similar to bookstores. 

I am all for doing this to make our library a friendly place for users.  We want them to come in and browse.  We want the parents and children and teens to be able to find books easily and without always asking a service desk staff person.  We want our BIPOC populations and people with disabilities to enter our library and feel comfortable searching our shelves.  We want people who are struggling with personal issues to find materials privately and be able to come and go without having to interact with staff if they choose not to.

So… when does what we do with cataloguing become more about the patron and less about the staff and traditional library practices.  Let me give you an example---I have been working at re-cataloguing our youth graphic novel collection.  If you have been following publishing trends, you know that graphic novels for youth have been exploding onto the library scene.  There are fiction books that now have a graphic novel counterpart. There are graphic novel series that are historical or biographical in nature.   There are even science comics and fairy tale graphic novels. 

While working on this project, I found that we owned several graphic novels that were biographies.  Since I also worked on the picture book city project, I naturally leaned toward putting the biographies together in a group—just like we do in the 921’s and the way that I did in the picture book collection.  But then I ran into a small roadblock.  One of our catalogers was not a fan of making our graphic novels into subject groupings.  Creating multiple headings that needed to be entered into the catalog software would require extra work on the part of the staff.  Plus this person was not comfortable with making another collection subject based.  (In retrospect, I realized that most of the cataloguing projects in the youth collection were my idea—not helpful ☺) I wanted to make browsing simpler for the patrons and this person wanted to follow traditional cataloguing rules. 

My question then is this:  when does doing what makes library browsing easier for the patrons overrule the work the staff must do to ensure the patrons have a great experience?  When is customer service more important than traditional methods of cataloguing?