Having worked more closely with bibliographic data than I had ever expected to over the last couple of years, I still can’t quite believe how complicated it can be. I keep holding tight something Karen Coyle told me when I first started at Open Library, that “library metadata is diabolically rational.” Now that I’ve witnessed the cataloging from lots of different sources and am more familiar with the level of detail that’s possible in a library catalog, I have a new fondness for these intensely variegated information systems; at times devilishly detailed, at others wildly incomplete or arcanely abbreviated. Everyone likes to arrange things and classify them into groups. It’s when you try to get people to put things into groups that someone else has come up with that it starts getting messy.

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