Mad Catalogers

In case you missed it in the L.A. Times or ALA's American Libraries Direct, a happening library event went down recently concerning a Washington DC library, and not the Library of Congress. A group of LibraryThing members, including founder Tim Spalding, cataloged the White House library's 1749 items overnight in what is known in LT as a 'flash mob cataloging' event. They got the job done, and WHLibrary1963 is up as a LibraryThing Legacy Library. The story is interesting: a conservative blogger's ire was stoked when he toured the White House recently and noticed books on socialism in its library. Logic dictated nefarious plotting by the Obamas¹. (Imagine what he might've seen on a tour of our nation's library - gasp!) Actually, the library's been around since Teddy Roosevelt, and was fleshed out in the 1960s at the behest of Jacqueline Kennedy by Yale's University Librarian. Read all about the 'flash mob cataloging' event and the library on Tim Spalding's LibraryThing blog post.

This interests me for several reasons. At Jefferson Library, I'm cataloging in an LT Legacy Library. I think it's a great concept that shows another way LibraryThing is useful to libraries-- specifically academic/research libraries and archives. The flash mob cataloging concept fascinates me too. It sounds a bit like happenings from the 50s-60s, albeit purposeful, and no one chasing you with a lawn mower². I imagine worker ants hefting AACR2s on their backs, loaded on sugar, lots of spiked hair and blasting 80s pop from antiquated boom boxes (surely catalogers embrace their analog magnetic mixtapes?), but this is likely not the case.... It seems that what's important here is that this small group of dedicated folks gets the job done: the data is there, LT's 2.0 portal/wiki modus-operandi continues.


     1 That's a bit unfair. Port's post is unclear about whether or not he misunderstood a WH guide describing the library. Still, quite the leap.

     2 A drama prof at UR described just such a happening from his avant-garde youth. He failed to surmise its artfulness.