ABSTRACT
Catalogers and classifiers generate an intellectual instrument whose use devolves on others. They devise classification schemes, modify them when the need for revision becomes manifest, monitor them, maintain and apply them to a vast array of discrete specimens of intellectual workmanship, books. This entire labor is then entrusted to reference librarians to apply in practice in an existential mode, a librarian-in-the-real-world mode, in response to queries like “Where are your books on Polynesian ethnology, computer technology and languages, anorexia nervosa, the Shakespearean sonnet, rock music, and the Secretary of the Interior, Mr. James Watt.”
