Rebel with a Cause

I don’t discuss my job much, simply because it’s not often relevant to any topic that I’m discussing; or rather, it’s not relevant to tell people what my job is because I can (hopefully) get my point across regardless. With respect to this post, however, it wouldn’t make much sense to not mention what I do.

I work as a public school librarian—or library media specialist, which is the current catchy title—and over the last few months I’ve come to realize that I’ve helped to misinform my patrons (read: students who are supposed to look to me for guidance on book-related issues and proper research etiquette) dozens of times with the full support of the people in control.

What I’m referring to is the asinine approach to cataloging books, namely the rule regarding capitalization of book titles.

Since the majority of people who might be reading this (as if anyone reads it) aren’t librarians, I’ll put it in lay terms: when entering information on a book into a cataloging program, book titles are—as a rule—supposed to have capitalized first words and any proper noun that might follow. Everything else is supposed to be lower-case.

For instance, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun would be entered as: Johnny got his gun. It’s referred to as “sentence case,” and it has, alas, helped to confuse my students and resulted in routine mistakes on the make-or-break standardized tests that, according to the No Child Left Behind doctrine, let us know if we’re actually educating the students.

Because some data have helped to show me that I’ve successfully confused several students, I’ve made a conscious decision to break the rules; from now on I’m entering book titles the way that they’re supposed to be written: with all major words capitalized.

My students routinely search for book titles on the library computers, and they routinely see “sentence case” used. If the librarian is using it that way, they seem to figure, that must be the correct way. Unfortunately it’s not the correct way, and unfortunately I’ve helped to bring down a few test scores simply by following the cataloging rules.

That has come to an end. While I don’t have time to go back and edit all the uploaded records from the book vendors that I use (their records follow the “sentence case” rule), I’ve made sure that all books that I enter by hand use the capitalization rule that is preached to the students: when writing book titles, capitalize the first word, all major words, and use lower-case for the “common” words (e.g., a, of, with, the, and, etc.).

I happily discovered that I wasn’t alone in my thinking. In June 2008, Library Journal published a column by Roy Tennant entitled “Why Sentence Case for Titles?” In it, he stated:

At a program I was moderating at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim this weekend (“The Ultimate Debate: There’s No Catalog Like No Catalog”), Karen Coyle, who was one of the panelists, brought up a topic that has been a pet peeve of mine for years.

She wondered aloud why we insist on changing the title of a book from title case (where typically all significant words are capitalized) to sentence case (where mainly only the initial word(s) and proper nouns are capitalized) when cataloging a book. Apparently she had been asking this question recently and getting mostly the verbal equivalent of blank stares and “that’s how we’ve always done it.” Of course this probably stems from International Standard Book Description (ISBD) practice, but the reasons appear to be hazy (I await enlightenment on this point from my readers—the few and the brave).

Even though I was smiling after I finished reading this, since I didn’t feel so alone in my thinking anymore, I wasn’t shocked to hear that a few fellow librarians would resort to the that’s-how-we’ve-always-done-it philosophy. I encountered this quite a bit during graduate school, mainly from a few professors, who held out hope that computers and the Internet were passing fads and that paper-based books would again reign supreme (as well as paper-based card catalogs). Perhaps; and perhaps the Commodore 64 will see a resurgence and be a death knell for the Wii, Xbox, and PlayStation franchises.

What’s interesting is that this has been a topic for quite some time. While researching this topic, I came across a 1940 Library Quarterly piece entitled “Capital Punishment for Catalogers?” by Seymour Lubetzky in which he writes:

The basic rule, as it still stands in the code, is properly an epitome of the rules which obtain in grammar and standard use and says in essence: Capitalize proper names, their derivatives, and substitutes. In practice, however, the cataloger, relying increasingly on Library of Congress cards, was confronted with an original capitalization, one which denied his very guiding principle and, indeed, the natural right of a people, though its representative grammarians, to decide the capitalization of its language. It was, in effect, an orthographical coup by a radical minority of catalogers who undertook to carry through an unproclaimed slogan: “Down with the capitals!”

Considering the well-established rights and intrenched position of the capitals, the radical enemies could not hope to succeed in a frontal attack and settled down to a long and relentless campaign of propaganda and sniping. They denounced capitals as “confusing” to the reader’s mind, “unsightly” to the aesthetic eye, and generally obtrusive to all concerned; and they carried on a determined and tireless sniping through space and time, picking off capitals from mountains and valleys, rivers and islands, historical epochs and world-shaking events.

This isn’t a journal essay; it’s poetry.

Indeed, a school librarian should both educate and make their patrons’ experience in the library as good as it can possibly be. By utilizing an approach that is more common sense than rule-driven to the point of anal retentiveness, I’ll hopefully achieve both of these goals. We’ll no doubt see over the next few years if the students get the habit of writing book titles—and movie titles, for that matter—using sentence case out of their systems. I fear that it’s something that won’t happen overnight.

With this major hurdle out of the way, now I can focus my attention on trying to figure out why Junie B. Jones books are as popular as they are.

References

Lubetzky, Seymour. “Capital Punishment for Catalogers?” The Library Quarterly. Vol. 10, No. 3. Jul. 1940. Pp. 350-360.

Tennant, Roy. “Why Sentence Case for Titles?” Library Journal. 30 Jun. 2008.

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