David W. Bade

Bade is concerned about the degradation of talent and intellectual breadth in the profession of cataloging and the result this has on the accuracy of information in library catalogs. He has written critically of library administrative policies which contribute to the quantity-over-quality mindset in which hiring adequately trained catalogers (particularly those catalogers with subject and language specialty) is not a priority., which he considers to aim at efficiency, not quality. " ==The perfect bibliographic record==

Related to concerns about library policy is a corollary argument about the purpose and product of bibliographic cataloging. The problems of misinformation in cataloging implies that the opposite, perfect information, is the goal of cataloging. Some have argued (see Intner 1990, Hafter 1986, O’Neill 1996, or Deeken 2005 for examples) that this “perfect record” places an impossible task before the cataloger, and thus catalogers and patrons should be content with some appropriate margin of error (also known as “the imperfect record”). Yet in this idea of the “perfect record” Bade finds a straw-man argument which attempts to dismiss, by way of this impossible ideal, any real concerns about “adequacy, fitness to purpose, truth, and usefulness” of bibliographic information (p. 129). Instead, bibliographic records can be understood as having contextual integrity, even perfection, where quality is measured according to the purposes and needs of the cataloging system, The awards panel noted that “others could build upon his methodology to attack other myths and straw men within the world of librarianship.” == References ==