What do you think?
Rate this book
Broken Pieces: A Library Life, 1941-1978
From his earliest reading memories in wartime Britain through five decades of librarianship, eminent librarian and former ALA President Michael Gorman offers insights from his extraordinary career in this new memoir. Gorman relates his personal and professional journey in prose that is by turns charming, opinioned, and revealing. He made perhaps his most significant contribution to librarianship as editor of the 1978 Anglo- American Cataloguing Rules, a major development that receives detailed attention here. The debates and arguments that would shape professional practice for years to come are dramatically presented, with a vivid cast of characters including leading librarians from two continents. Broken Pieces, Gorman's account of being on the front lines of many of the most important decisions made in librarianship during his career, is a timely and entertaining read.
248 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2011
2 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 24, 2012
Michael Gorman's career impacted my professional life as a cataloger from day one. The advent of AACR2 coupled with MARC records (a pilot project at the LC law collection in 1968) changed basic practices and to this day determines bibliographic access.
His autobiography thus brought back many names in the library field whose work I read in professional journals. It was also interesting to hear his opinion of Univ. of Illinois libraries with which I'm familiar.
p.xi: "Nothing in this book is derived from Wikipedia or from the use of Google."
p.28: "It was also a time in which the public library...became the center of my life and my escape from the petty miseries of my increasingly alienated existence."
p.68: "This taught me a lot about the local library as a social center--a place for those who could probably have afforded the cost of their own copy of their favorite newspaper...but chose the informal community of the daily struggle in the library. ...Nothing in life is exactly what it seems, and the library was more than just a purveyor of reading matter to those retired people."
p.193: "...the worst was the ALA cataloging rules of 1949..." AMEN
p.203: "Instead, the talk used to be of AACR3 and now is of RDA...revolutionary breaks with AACR2 justified...by the changed nature of the bibliographic world and the difficulty of cataloging electronic resources. This view is never expressed with clarity and is largely based on trendy chatter, gaseous assertions, and untested assumptions or on the search for the philosopher's stone of bibliography--high-quality cataloguing with no or little expense. These are poor foundations for the complex, lengthy, and expensive process of cataloguing code revision."
His autobiography thus brought back many names in the library field whose work I read in professional journals. It was also interesting to hear his opinion of Univ. of Illinois libraries with which I'm familiar.
p.xi: "Nothing in this book is derived from Wikipedia or from the use of Google."
p.28: "It was also a time in which the public library...became the center of my life and my escape from the petty miseries of my increasingly alienated existence."
p.68: "This taught me a lot about the local library as a social center--a place for those who could probably have afforded the cost of their own copy of their favorite newspaper...but chose the informal community of the daily struggle in the library. ...Nothing in life is exactly what it seems, and the library was more than just a purveyor of reading matter to those retired people."
p.193: "...the worst was the ALA cataloging rules of 1949..." AMEN
p.203: "Instead, the talk used to be of AACR3 and now is of RDA...revolutionary breaks with AACR2 justified...by the changed nature of the bibliographic world and the difficulty of cataloging electronic resources. This view is never expressed with clarity and is largely based on trendy chatter, gaseous assertions, and untested assumptions or on the search for the philosopher's stone of bibliography--high-quality cataloguing with no or little expense. These are poor foundations for the complex, lengthy, and expensive process of cataloguing code revision."
March 7, 2015
If you are or have ever been a bookish person, a librarian, or an Anglophile, you will find something to like in this book. (I am all three.) There are those who consider Gorman to be hopelessly retrograde and curmudgeonly these days -- and he has some choice words for what he considers misguided trends in contemporary librarianship -- but it's important to remember that he has always been guided by the public service spirit of Ranganathan's five laws of library science. He admits that possibly no one but catalogers will read his chapter 12, on the battles over the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2nd edition (AACR2), but if you do, you will see that what animated him was "saving the time of the reader."
October 2, 2012
I adore Michael Gorman and always have. He is the ultimate Librarian's Librarian; Cataloger's Cataloger. His autobiography is as interesting as he is wonderful.
December 7, 2011
Reading the memoir of my dear friend was an odd experience. I remembered many of the incidents and even conversations he described, and had met many of the key library characters. I am actually mentioned several times toward the end of the book. Even if I were not such an old friend of the author, I would have found it a charming, often funny, touching and revealing look at a key time, and a key player in library history.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews