Colorless green ideals in the language of bibliographic description: Making sense and nonsense in libraries

Cataloguing in libraries was formerly done by cataloguers with a wide range of academic backgrounds and linguistic abilities. With the rise of networked databases much of this work is now automated, outsourced to vendors, or done by persons lacking the requisite skills. The removal of this activity from libraries leads to a generic product produced for a generic user, with no possibility for a library-internal evaluation of the product. Librarians demand “a bibliographic record” of a certain form in a manner analogous to the generative grammar’s production of sentences. So long as the form is correct, it is not evaluated for appropriateness or usefulness. The resulting information is often equivalent to colorless green ideas.