"Plug and Play"

I recently served as a guinea pig for a training session on the Library of Congress Classification system. It was great! I learned a lot, and gained a degree of confidence in poring through the schedules. The course is to be offered at the next conference of the American Library Association. The instructor/enabler asked me if I would take a picture of some books for her powerpoint presentation. Specifically, the spines, showing the LC call numbers. I happily complied. As I wandered through the library looking for the right shot, I thought about how I would catalog the picture. Would I merely provide a description, or would I provide links to the books in the picture? How much would be enough? Catalogers must often decide what a book is about. What a book is mainly about. How would one class a book on the philosophy of metadata creation translated into an artificial language based on a stage production of a short story inspired by by an anecdotal recounting in digital audio format? How about the reprint of same? It's not always so simple. Lori had a great way to describe how cataloging often is not.