In the Eye of the Beholder

We often focus our professional attention on what happens within libraries on libraries similar to our own. Looking to other public libraries, we seek inspiration, new ideas, and innovative approaches to enhancing our own readers' advisory service. Rather than taking a traditional approach, this article seeks to explore the role cataloging and the cataloger can play in enhancing readers' services. Victoria Caplinger, cataloging supervisor at NoveList, explores how NoveList, working together with leading professionals in our field, created appeals terminology for inclusion in bibliographic records; in essence, creating a new controlled vocabulary focusing on readers' needs for library catalogs. Throughout this article, Ms. Caplinger explores the many ways cataloging professionals and NoveList enhance, support, and promote a new level of remote readers' services in public libraries.--Editor Extending the boundaries of readers' advisory (RA) into online environments is an increasingly important topic in the RA field, as changing technology and new frameworks for library service make clear. As Barry Trott says, "The Library 2.0 movement is centered on using technology to build a more user-focused library and to promote the development and expansion of communities into the virtual world." (1) Where the library goes, readers' advisory service must follow. This topic surfaces in a number of contexts, from discussions of form-based readers' advisory to online book communities such as Goodreads or LibraryThing, to the importance of library websites and catalogs in connecting with our users. I was fortunate enough to attend the Public Library Association (PLA) 2012 conference in Philadelphia and heard a number of conversations about the role of the catalog as an arena for presenting library patrons with RA service. In the Readers' Advisory Toolkit panel, Neal Wyatt encouraged her audience to "saturate the bib record" with RA material; when Bill Ptacek was asked in the Readers as Leaders session where the future of library service lay, he said of the library catalog, "It's our theory of knowledge, but can be so much more" (Presentations given at PLA, Philadelphia, PA, 2012). Trott notes that "the library catalog is the one place where almost all library users interact with the library at some point." (2) When considering the importance of the catalog--how many user holds are placed remotely, and how patrons visit the catalog even more than the library website--it's exciting to think about new possibilities related to the way we share and display our readers' advisory material. One under-explored avenue of readers' advisory potential lies in the art of cataloging, particularly as it relates to fiction and narrative nonfiction. In her 2007 article, "An RA Big Think," Neal Wyatt quotes Ike Pulver saying how great it would be if we "could classify books--fiction especially--by 'feeling' rather than by subject, or adjectivally (big, fast, exciting, intricate, thought-provoking) instead of nominally (horse, houses, shops, satellites, cheese)." (3) In a 2007 post to Fiction-L, Jessica Zellers notes that "it's nearly impossible to get good results by searching for 'grim tone and lush prose.'" (4) Approaching books in this subjective manner is a topic that often arises in articles about social tagging but far less often, if at all, in the context of cataloging with controlled vocabularies. Neil Hollands and Jessica Moyer put forward the need for better-defined appeal terminology, stating that "definitions within our vocabulary of appeal need to become more exact, and broad categories of appeal must be broken down into component parts.... A more exact vocabulary will pave the way for better communication between professionals and open the door to classification systems that go beyond content-focused subject headings." (5) This impulse to standardize and quantify what is essentially subjective territory is a daunting challenge, but one that is also extremely exciting for its potential to open a new avenue of communication with library patrons. …