Whenever something not-horrific happens to me, I don’t trust it.

Adrian walks through the jewelry store; tilting his head and peering through fingers, he wiggles slightly as he moves his hands up and down, getting an altered view of the scene. This is what he does. This is how he works. At this point, it’s sort of his shtick. We know that this is how he’s going to work the scene—he’ll filter out the clues, the one or two things that don’t belong among the however many other variables in his view. How does he do it? How is he categorizing items so that he knows what belongs, what’s happened, what’s right, and what’s wrong?

Monk’s desire for order, his procedures that veer from the standard routes taken by his colleagues, even his personal relationships—all these have deep connections with tenets and historical facets of library cataloging. The need to divide and separate, to collect, and to create order out of chaos; these have occupied librarians and OCD detectives alike for eons. Monk, you’ll see, is a modern-day Charles Cutter, shown up day after day by his flashier counterpart Melvil Dewey. Monk’s detecting skills mirror the way we assign subject headings. He struggles constantly in his daily quest for control over his environment, while catalogers yearn for Universal Bibliographic Control. All in all, Monk himself could be described through cataloging.

Catalog librarians have been trained to use rules to categorize and sift; in this country they follow stringent rules laid down in Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second edition, 2002 Revision (usually just called AACR2), very soon to be superseded by Resource Description and Access (RDA), they have the Library of Congress Rule Interpretations when they don’t explicitly know how to follow up, and a wealth of sources to use for backup. Monk has Natalie, Captain Stottlemeyer, and Randy Disher, who’s really just about as helpful as a brain-damaged Labrador—goofy and cute to have around, but not about to provide any soul-chilling insights. But Monk, it seems, manages to get the same kind of work done, even without our reference materials, rules, and procedures!

How many professions as a whole relate to Monk? A very good friend of mine regularly calls me Monk, with unrestrained glee in her voice. She’s a licensed psychologist. This concerns me. (More for her paying clients than for myself, since I acknowledge my Monk-like qualities.) I’m primarily a catalog librarian by profession. What’s a catalog librarian? You know how all libraries have these catalogs? They list every single thing in the library; every resource, with lots of information about each one, with a call number that tells you its location on the shelf, something about the topic, other relevant resources, subject headings, and all that good stuff? A catalog librarian figured out and wrote all that, coded it so that the computer could read it for your enjoyment, and did so according to rules that we all share and use consistently with one another.

I organize knowledge, and maybe that means that I inherently relate to the OCD way of life. Things bother me. Usually they’re tiny inconsequential things—things that have absolutely nothing to do with my life or work. For example: it drives me to distraction that paper cups on television never have liquid in them. Watch for it if you’ve never noticed; I think you’ll never be able to un-notice. It’s not something that can be well-acted away—if there’s no liquid, there’s no weight! We notice! Why can’t they put some water in there if they’re worried about hot coffee-related lawsuits? Am I like Monk, foisting my overbearing peevishness on those around me? We both may think we’re sharing righteous outrage and helpfully pointing out glaring inaccuracies, while we’re really just annoying our friends.

I love Monk. He makes me happy. I can’t help but smile back at him in the opening montage when he’s so blissful in his hazmat suit in that gleaming white-on-white clean room. I wish I had one. It looks like heaven. I wonder how many other catalogers watch, smile, relate. Are we all, like me, a little bit like Monk?

Users and Pushers

I don’t want to over-generalize and offend anyone, but of the other catalogers I’ve met, it might be said that we as a group can tend toward the, ummm ... persnickety. It comes with the job; we put things in order, and it’s all so that you, the masses (and yes, some of you are unwashed, but I’m not commenting on that now), can find what you’re looking for. I found myself recently telling a stranger on a plane, trying to describe briefly what I do: “I’m a librarian, but not the kind who helps people.” That’s not exactly true. I do help people; I just don’t do it while they’re there, and they just might not ever know that they’ve been helped, or who did it. In fact, if we as catalogers do our job best, it’s seamless and essentially invisible. We’re not quite Batman, but we catalogers are those people. We are the behind-the-scenes librarians, and we like it that way.⁵⁵

Catalogers obsess over punctuation and coding, true. (This is our version of having to touch the lamppost and the antennae ... that colon is in the wrong place; that field needs a space there; that indicator is wrong: OCD!) But we also obsess over subject access and keywords: we always have the users sitting on our shoulders. What are you thinking of when you’re looking for this book? How would you want to find it? How would you not expect to find it, but be delighted that you did? Most of all, how can I help push this into your greedy little paws, without you having the slightest clue that I was ever back here? I’m the guy behind the curtain. I’m your information pusher-man.

Monk’s method is similar in that he comes at his investigations from a different angle than Stottlemeyer or Disher. In “Mr. Monk and the Bad Girlfriend,” Monk reasons, illogically to most (and most alarmingly to Stottlemeyer, who is trying desperately to prove that his girlfriend isn’t a murderer), that the suspect with no alibi cannot be guilty, based upon the way the killer hid in the victim’s bathroom before striking. Why would someone take the time to hide, unless an alibi were already established for a certain time frame? The suspect without the alibi, in any other case usually the guilty one, therefore had to be innocent. Monk doesn’t follow the straight-line path that the clues may present, but uses reasoning based on people’s actions: what they would do and why. He is user-oriented, only his users happen to be criminals, and we fervently hope ours aren’t.

No One Will Thank You Later

Monk’s recurring insistence of “You’ll thank me later” is particularly resonant with catalogers. We, like Monk, are result-driven. Monk has his detecting, crime-solving process, and he might be the only one to understand it, or he might just have a few people he lets into his inner circle to work with him. That’s okay—he’s going to get the job done his way, and we as an audience trust that; the SFPD must trust that at some level given how much leeway he has (even though he carries an empty badge holder, still, after all these years). Catalogers operate in much the same way: others might not understand exactly what it is that we do, or how we come to accomplish the things we do, but they trust that we’ll do it, and they rely on the end result.

While Monk is satisfying his need for order within chaos, he’s constantly searching for justice for someone else. He’s delightfully (sometimes annoyingly, yes) selfish, but he does care about others ... on his cases. He can be blind to the needs of those closest to him (most regularly Natalie’s financial woes: directly his fault), but astutely observant of his case victims’ needs. Cataloging can be a similarly altruistic and selfish dichotomy. It can be an amazingly fulfilling personal success to finish with a particularly harrowing bibliographic record, or a wrenching struggle to deal with one that becomes a known and hated entity (seriously). When we’ve sent it off, though, we know that it will either serve well to attract users to it, or it will sit unused, because we failed in certain ways. Or because it’s just a crappy book that no one wants to check out. Either way.

We, with Monk, will get made fun of along the way. We’re the nerds of the library world. (I know! You don’t have to point out the irony in that one). Monk works independently without the lockerroom camaraderie of the station house. We’d rather be left alone to do our work with a truck full of books than have to interact with people, even if we sometimes envy the easy interactions reference librarians can pull off. Some of us have been known to shy away from applying for positions that mentioned an hour or two of sitting at the reference desk. The horror! (Can you imagine Monk in a customer-service position? Try. Try harder. Absolute freaking meltdown.) It doesn’t mean that we don’t value making a contribution; just that we love our work in our own way. We’d love to be thanked later. Just maybe not in person. Send a card, maybe. We’ll put it in a file. Alphabetized. Cross-referenced, with subject access. I’m only kidding. Kind of.

I’m Down with OCD, Yeah UBC!

In library school, our beloved silver fox of a reference professor (and you know who I’m talking about, Simmons GSLIS ’98ers)⁵⁶ gave us a charge—that our goal as librarians (cue the Mission Impossible music) should be to strive for Universal Bibliographic Control. Oooooooooooh, I thought. YES. And then: Crap. Sisyphus.

If you take a look at Monk’s apartment, you can’t help but notice how well ordered everything is. I love the umbrellas hanging on his entranceway wall. He collocates—an underlying tenet of cataloging: put like with like. Simple, clean, brilliant in its efficacy: we want people to find things together. If you were browsing for umbrellas, you would expect to find another umbrella right next door. Even better if it’s another black umbrella, facing exactly the same way. Monk has perfected the art of collocation in his apartment: take a look at his wall art. He has boxes on his wall, and a row of photographs on another. They are identical, and perfectly spaced. You don’t find the boxes interspersed with the photographs; that would be madness! What kind of fool would do such a thing? Boxes go with boxes, photographs lined up with the photographs. It’s even better if the subject matter is the same (Trudy, Trudy, Trudy, Trudy, Trudy). Monk has a very well-classified system of décor.

It’s when Monk leaves his apartment and seeks to expand his control over the world that he runs into problems. In “Mr. Monk Makes the Playoffs,” when he arrives at a football game tailgate, he asks Stottlemeyer, “Who are all of these people and where are their parents?” I can relate, though I’ve luckily learned to keep (most of) those questions inside my head to keep the dirty looks at bay. Score one for me. He’s clearly out of his comfort zone and would like to impose some order. He finds pleasure, or at least not-anxiety, only when he can exercise control over a situation, create order out of disorder, and analyze a crime scene.

For an example in the library world, take the Online Computer Library Center’s WorldCat or the attempts of Google Books to scan millions of books the world over to make them accessible online. These are larger forays into Universal Bibliographic Control, but the truth is that we’ll never push Sisyphus’s rock all the way up that hill and keep it from toppling back down. It’s far too huge a task. We would never agree on one universal standard for description; one controlled vocabulary (people try to use different words to describe the same thing! Totally unreasonable. It’s a nightmare.); a single authorized database of names. These things are constantly evolving; they exist in other places—libraries use them the world over, make their own choices and share resources, but as the world gets in on the bibliographic game, the rules change and theories for cataloging practices are anyone’s guess. Monk would have a heart attack in our shoes. Mostly because he found himself wearing someone else’s shoes.

I don’t mean to be a naysayer about valiant attempts at universal bibliographic control—I feel like I just told a million budding catalogers that I shot the MARC fairy,⁵⁷ but I can’t even comprehend the idea of a single database with records (and I mean good records, ahem) for every work of intellectual property ever created. Because that’s really what we mean, right? Or do we narrow it down? To everything ever published? Where is that line drawn? Published by whom? Does self-published count? Vanity presses are more ubiquitous than Starbucks now; do they have the same heft as an established publishing house? Who decides? And so I dive into the bushes on my path to let the boulder rumble by on its way back down the hill.

This is where the problems with universal bibliographic control and Monk become one. Within the apartment, or within a single library, we’re both okay. We can function, and breathe freely, without our OCD phobias eating our souls. I have a handle on what cataloging comes to me in small doses; Monk can order his world within his walls. Once the picture expands to include the world at large, we both become Sisyphus, and that rock is just too big to handle. Plus, it’s really dirty. Wipe, please?

Adrian Monk and Charles Cutter: Separated at Birth?

Everyone knows Adrian Monk, while at the same time he’s invisible. How is that? He’s such a quiet person, but his OCD can be overbearing and dominate a room. He’s methodical and prefers to deal with facts rather than emotions, but can get worked up rather quickly over something others consider utterly commonplace. He reminds me in certain ways of my favorite (okay, maybe obsessively favorite) cataloging figure, Charles Ammi Cutter.

They’re both brilliantly observant—everyone knows that Monk is the greatest detective the SFPD has ever had, and even though he’s officially off the force because of his nervous breakdown, it seems that they can’t solve a single serious case without his input. Charles Cutter was the first librarian to decide that library catalogs should be written on index cards instead of in volumes of written books so that acquisitions and withdrawals could be easily entered and deleted. Genius, right? It’s the sort of thing that would seem to be ridiculously obvious these days. Who would create any kind of record-keeping system of a changing entity that was bound, static, and impossible to change without starting from scratch every time? Now we joke about card catalogs and how archaic they are; we buy furniture created to resemble this outdated (therefore fashionably chic for your living room!) mode of information retrieval. Who on earth would have thought that there was a time when the creation of that system was revolutionary? In those days, it absolutely was!

Cutter also wrote about the future of libraries and envisioned the need for environmental controls, including moisture, lighting, and temperature regulation, down to the degree—he even differentiated between the heating levels allowed for the reading room and for the stacks. He went on to specify measurements of stack height for ease of reaching books, and numerous other visions for the future in “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983,” a speech he delivered to the opening of the Sixth General Meeting of the American Library Association at Buffalo in 1883. While he was a great advocate for opening the doors and expanding the use of libraries to educational outreach, our Monk of the 1880s let his OCD hang out a tad when he wrote about how he envisioned this library’s use:

Every one must be admitted into the delivery-room, but from the reading-rooms the great unwashed are shut out altogether or put in rooms by themselves. Luckily public opinion sustains us thoroughly in their exclusion or seclusion.⁵⁸

Don’t you think Monk would love to envision a future in which he could exclude the unwashed? I’m sure he does, daily. But to write and publish such a vision for his professional life, along with a list of demands including strict space measurements and precise calculations for temperature, air quality (Cutter mentions “evil dust,” I’m not joking), and the exact layout of subject material of his dream space, with assigned professionals to handle everything in each area, and then to have it all well-received and applauded? I think that’s an entire dream session with his therapist, in a nutshell. And Cutter lived in that shining limelight.

Briefly.

Harold Krenshaw Is ... Melvil Dewey?

You might notice that no one talks much about Charles Cutter or makes Cutter librarian jokes like they do about Dewey. If you’re not a librarian, or even if you are, you might not even have heard of him before. The way I see it, Cutter’s the man in the way Monk is the man. Dewey, on the other hand, is Harold Fricking Krenshaw. Some biographical accounts gloss it all over and have Cutter and Dewey as friends. I imagine some random football players would think Adrian and Harold were friends. We know better. Yes, they are contemporaries. Yes, they share traits and some interests or ... commonalities. Dewey and Cutter founded the American Library Association (ALA), together with another hundred or so people. This doesn’t make them buddies. I doubt anyone ever saw them going out for a beer together.

Cutter and Dewey devised two completely different sets of classification systems. Cutter’s was alpha-numeric, called the “Expansive Classification Scheme,” and intended to be completed in seven distinct stages, in increasing complexity and highly customizable according to the size of the library using it. It was left incomplete, open on his desk to the seventh stage at the time of his death, much like Monk’s one historic, glaring, as-yet-unsolved case of Trudy’s murder as we enter the last season. Dewey’s classification was numeric only, finished quickly, and less complex. Many would say it was more suited to public and smaller libraries as opposed to larger academic or research libraries, and it was widely adopted soon after its completion. Dewey got famous; Cutter didn’t.

While both men were certainly dedicated to their profession, I feel that Monk-like tug toward Cutter. He’s got that quiet, tireless OCD feel to him while Dewey is a little bit ... flashy and icky. What kind of OCD cataloger-type detective-ish guy would be committed to actively deconstructing the English language? As one of the founding members of the Simplified Spelling Board, Dewey nearly changed his own name to “Melvil Dui.” Seriously. It was bad enough to chop down Melville to Melvil. Can you imagine Monk trying to decode one of Dewey’s “simpler spelin” notes? I want to see that episode.

Dewey founded a club in Lake Placid that denied membership to Jews and he may have been one of the first to take advantage of the annual American Library Association conference to get overly friendly with women librarians, something that eventually got him in a bit of trouble and limited his professional ALA involvement. Good reason to start up a national association, Dewey! I wouldn’t denigrate Harold so far as to say that he resembles Dewey in these respects; I just mean to highlight the differences between Dewey and Cutter (and because no one really talks about the dark side of Dewey).

In any case, Adrian v. Harold and Cutter v. Dewey offer a few parallels, even if Harold isn’t a racist slut. (Are they saving that for the last season? Twist!) Monk is always working away when he feels that Harold comes swooping in to steal his thunder. Remember when Harold was briefly the Frisco Fly in “Mr. Monk and the Daredevil”? It drove Monk nuts when he couldn’t prove to the public that Harold wasn’t this superstar death-defying daredevil—not just because it brought Harold fame and adoration, but because it meant that Harold had finally overcome all of his paralyzing phobias while Monk was still painfully in the grip of his and had never made any real progress. As long as they remained in lockstep and didn’t make progress together, Monk could cope. But if Harold had really been cured and left Monk in the dust, it would truly have crushed him.

I really don’t know if Cutter felt that way about Dewey, but it seems to me that he must have. Cutter’s classification system was much more intricate than Dewey’s, and yet Dewey’s was widespread before Cutter could finish his. Unless you go looking for the history, no one today really acknowledges the fact that the Library of Congress Classification system is based in part on Cutter’s scheme, and that our “Cutter number,” a part of the larger class number, is a direct result of his work. We talk about him a little bit in library school, and move on, when he’s one of the really major figures in our history. While Dewey’s classification system is certainly still in wide use today, mostly by public and smaller libraries, the Library of Congress system is a widespread standard in the United States at least, and is constantly being built upon and expanded, thanks to the initial framework laid out by Cutter’s system. Sigh. Poor, poor Cutter. So tossed aside. I think Monk worries that this is going to be his fate whenever Harold Krenshaw steps into the picture. Even when Monk has shown conclusively that Harold is not the Frisco Fly, Harold manages to fall off another building, opening his parachute and accidentally letting the public believe once again that he is, indeed. Or, as in “Mr. Monk Fights City Hall,” Harold tricks Natalie into finally spilling the beans on the name of Monk’s new shrink. Adrian had managed to keep it a closely guarded secret for nearly a season! Aaargh, Harold Krenshaw! Flashy, thunder-stealing, Melvil Dui-like Harold Krenshaw. Go spell something wrong, why don’t you!

Disorder and Confusion Everywhere

Monk and Cutter both contribute an incredible amount that we don’t ever notice. Monk’s detection skills are renowned, and those closest to him grow accustomed to his work style and his ... habits. We get to know him and start anticipating what he’s going to see, how he’s going to solve this case. We think we might know how he thinks. We’re probably wrong, but we try our best to get into his head.

Cutter wrote Rules for a Dictionary Catalog in 1876, laying out some basic ideas that came to form some of the major theoretical framework of cataloging as we know it today. The book was really the first to address the idea of adding subject access and addressing the primary goal of cataloging: access. We want these things to be found. In Monk’s case, he needs to find these things. The theory of access and of keeping the user in mind is revolutionary for the time. I’ve added an excerpt from the fourth edition of Cutter’s Rules, including his Objects, Means, and Reasons for Choice.

The theory of access drives cataloging, but Cutter was the one to really highlight subject access, and this is what orders our world, and Monk’s. When we make a decision to assign particular subject headings to a book’s bibliographic record, or to classify it in a particular place so that it sits on the shelf near others with the same primary subject heading, we are exercising control over how that book is best going to be found. We’re collocating and ordering, by broader subjects or narrower, sorting and sifting, and we’re doing our best to make it seamless. If all goes as planned, you’ll walk into a library and never know we were there. We want you, the washed and unwashed masses, to see the world as Monk sees it, with our help but without knowing you’ve had our help. Monk would find his umbrellas in perfect order just where he’d expect to, and maybe even discover some new ones—he might find out he likes a different color, or maybe a new style. One with a pattern, or automatic opening, or an ornately carved handle. He just wouldn’t know that we’d put them there for his discovery.

Cutter’s Reasons for Choice are the most illuminating and interesting, particularly the first one—to “choose that entry that will probably be first looked under by the class of people who use the library.”⁵⁹ This is the sort of profoundly difficult yet obvious statement I can hear Monk making in an investigation, while Stottlemeyer mumbles around and Randy stands in the corner trying to have a conversation with a robot. Of course you’d want to choose the terms that your users would choose, right? Why not? But how are you going to determine that? Who are your users? What do they think? How do they search? See Monk start to wiggle his fingers?

OBJECTS.*

1. To enable a person to find a book of which either

2. To show the library has

(D) by a given author

(E) on a given subject

(F) in a given kind of literature

3. To assist in the choice of a book

(G) as to its edition (bibliography).

(H) as to its character (literary or topical).

MEANS.

1. Author-entry with the necessary references (for A and D).

2. Title-entry or title-reference (for B).

3. Subject-entry, cross references, and classed subject-table (for C and E).

4. Form-entry and language-entry (for F).

5. Giving edition and imprint, with notes where necessary (for G).

6. Notes (for H).

REASONS FOR CHOICE

Among the several possible methods of attainng the OBJECTS, other things being equal, schoose that entry

1. That will probably be first looked under by the class of people who use the library;

2. That is consistent with other entries, so that one principle can cover all;

3. That will mass entries least in places where it is difficult to so arrange them that they can be readily found, as under names of nations or cities.

This applies very slightly to enties under first words, because it is easy and sufficient to arrange them by the alphabet.

Note to second edition. This statement of Objects and Means has been criticized; but as it has also been frequently quoted, usually without change or credit, in the prefaces of catalogs and elsewhere, I suppose it has on the whole been approved.

This is what Monk does best, and where Cutter shines. The others kind of fade into the background, scuffing their feet on the ground looking for clues, taking pictures, talking to witnesses. The most variable, and arguably most difficult part of any cataloging record is providing subject access—the first thing, Cutter posits, is that we need to know our users. They’re constantly evolving. How they search today isn’t even close to how they searched in Cutter’s time, or even ten years ago. These days they evolve at the speed of light. Our vocabularies don’t keep up and our databases certainly don’t. There are constantly new trends in cataloging interfaces to help keep up with what users expect from technology and searching. Some will overlay a database to help pull out our data and allow user tagging to share thoughts and keywords when our subject headings are inadequate or outdated. Tagging by users can only go so far, though—if someone has decided that their personal preference for a keyword is better applied to a book, do we as catalogers have an obligation to take that keyword and apply it to every other book that carries the same subject headings? How much more would that serve our users? Where would they expect to find that keyword? That’s what makes Cutter’s vision so profound, so stark, and so timeless. And so unbelievably difficult to accomplish. Sometimes we catalogers could really use Monk’s help.

Here’s What Happened

I don’t so much mind being called Monk. My psychologist friend laughs at me but she also asks me for help: one day she asked me to come over to help “sort her files.” I arrived to find boxes full of mail, receipts, paid bills, life-related detritus. I happily dug in, creating a system and organizing her life. I find great pleasure in being useful, as I suspect other catalogers, organizers, and vaguely (or distinctly) OCD enjoyers of Monk do. Sure, it still bothers me that there are empty coffee cups on TV, but as long as I’m free to yell about it every time I see it, I’m okay.

Monk wraps up each case with a happily pronounced “here’s what happened” to an ostensibly perplexed audience, usually including his fellow investigators. No one cares if I expound on how I came to a particular classification number after a long wrestle with it, and if I tried to explain, I might be written up with some kind of restraining order. Once in a great while I get to share the joy—this summer I had a cataloging intern, and I got to explain in rapturous fits and starts the wonders of MARC coding and the reasons for cataloging vagaries. If only life were like Monk and I could do it regularly, with a captive audience, every week. Sigh. Would that be my white room in my hazmat suit? Maybe temporarily, but luckily for me, and for Monk, there’s always another case to solve.

I’m delighted that Monk is echoed in cataloging, and cataloging is echoed in Monk. We catalogers like to stay in the back rooms and out of view, but it’s nice to see a part of what we do dramatized, recognized, and appreciated! I take great pleasure in watching him detect using his style that mimics some of what we do in cataloging: we organize, we categorize, we help; we think of the user’s needs, and from their perspectives; he thinks of the victim’s needs, and from the criminal’s point of view. If Monk retires at the end of the show, he has a new career path perfectly laid out ahead of him: cataloger. He would love it!