At the third and final public meeting of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control on July 9, Bob Nardini of Coutts Information Services represented the views of the vendor community to this important and influential working group, whose conclusions are likely to have far reaching impact on the wider library world.

‘I tried to say that vendors are already major players in cataloging and bibliographic control, although not fully acknowledged ones, and that we might play a larger role in the future, in order to relieve some of the pressure on the Library of Congress and on libraries generally. But the economics of bibliographic control would need to change.’

Bob, who is Group Director for Client Integration and Head Bibliographer at Coutts, spoke for the whole vendor community: ‘The role we vendors play has not always been fully acknowledged in the larger bibliographic world. The scale on which we operate here might surprise some people. The company I work for, Coutts Information Services, is the smallest of the three largest companies who supply English-language books to academic libraries in North America. Even so, I would be fairly certain that Coutts employs more degreed catalogers than all but a handful of libraries in the United States and Canada. In 2007 we’ll provide about 280,000 cataloging records of one sort or another to our customers in these two countries.’

To read the full text of Bob Nardini’s presentation, click here.

To see other contributions and to connect to the Working Group website click here. For more comment and debate, click here and here.