Literary genre cataloging: why is it such a mess?
Ages ago I wondered about the tendency of novelists to subtitle their books, redundantly, “A Novel,” as if the reader is incapable of picking the book up and looking at the back cover, or the blurb on the inside front flap.
I’ll never complain about that again. Why? Well, try doing a ton of author searches in WorldCat for writers who write in multiple genres, and then try to figure out from the record list which books are poetry, which books are fiction, and which books are something else again. See if you can count the ways in which literary genres are cataloged: in the Notes field, in the subject headings, or most commonly, not at all. “A Novel” starts to look like a welcome bit of metadata rather than an annoyance. (For extra added bonus fun, see if you can spot how many books subtitled “Poems” have been assigned a “Fiction” subject heading. Go on. I dare you!)
I can already tell I’m going to have a lot of questions whenever I take Cataloging…
This post brought to you by the last stubborn pages of the paper I’m procrastinating writing. But after Thursday the quarter’s over, I’m going out of town for a couple of days, and life will be blissfully homework-free for two weeks.
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