2 - Panta Rei

Summary

Nothing ever stays the same, or, as Heraclitus put it, panta rei – everything flows.

2.1 Metanoia

For at least two decades, cataloguing has been experiencing a second cultural and technological revolution after that of the 1970s. It is characterised by the transition from the paper paradigm to the automation paradigm. Understanding what cataloguing means today, in the digital environment, requires those who are starting to learn it to have an attitude of great attention: its procedures are complex and are being redesigned. For those already familiar with cataloguing, the new digital context requires a further paradigm shift: it requires metanoia, ‘a change of mind’, an open intellectual disposition; a conscious disposition and one not conditioned by conventions, which are always provisional.

Rethinking the cataloguing tradition serves:

• • to understand which procedures are worth continuing and developing and

• • which procedures were innovative in their time but exhausted their ‘driving force’.

The web has changed the reader's behaviour and has therefore affected the user functions, the ways of finding, identifying, selecting and obtaining information and resources, the ways of exploring the bibliographic universe. The web is the place where most searches take place. Many readers have perceived the distance between the bibliographic universe surveyed by the catalogues and the enormous amount of information available online and accessible through search engines. Therefore, users start – and often conclude – their research without consulting catalogues (Dunsire and Willer, 2013).

We can identify four macro contexts in which the web has made a significant change:

• 1 technological context: the advent of the web, in particular the Semantic Web, offers different tools, with new possibilities for formalising and using data

• 2 social context: the users prefer using search engines as the main tools in finding information for their bibliographic researches. They demand to be able to move and interact with the catalogues with the same autonomy and independence used on the web

• 3 information context: the proliferation of new types of digital resources that the traditional catalogue is no longer able to manage

• 4 general cultural context: many users have lost the sense of the qualitative hierarchy of sources and that of the provenance of cultural information, of any kind. In everyday contexts, there is a tendency not to verify whether a source is authoritative and if its provenance is reliable.