ABSTRACT
If any single event may be said to have precipitated a deep concern with the impact of technical services on public services it was the publication of the second edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2). Despite the furor raised by AACR2, there are other issues affecting or likely to affect the nature of interactions between technical services and public services, and they may be more important in terms of the improvement of public services than the rules for descriptive cataloging: (1) the growing dissatisfaction with Library of Congress subject headings (perhaps not so much a dissatisfaction with subject headings, which is nothing new, as the growing conviction that something really should be done, and can be done, to improve them), (2) the rise of the online catalog, with its promise of improved access systems and new search capabilities, (3) the well-known evidence of catalog search failures as reported in the classic catalog use studies, and (4) the indication, from more recent studies, that sophisticated users of libraries are more likely to make extensive subject searches in an online catalog (whereas the number of searches in the card catalog correlates negatively with the degree of subject specialization and subject expertise of the searcher). The impact of these issues, we believe, will lead to an emphasis on the analysis and improvement of systems of subject organization and access, two areas in which there has been remarkably little change and virtually no major innovations in over fifty years (rather, there have been many innovations in classification and vocabulary control, but they have not been incorporated into our traditional systems for the most part). Nevertheless, it was AACR2 that was the catalyst that raised grave concerns about the bibliographic tools produced by technical service departments in conjunction with agencies of centralized cataloging. What have not yet been sorted out are criticisms based on the cost of implementing ACCR2 and those that relate quite specifically to the structure of given rules—the administrative concern with the economic impact of the new code seems to have tended to preclude a fair evaluation of the code as a code.
