Theology Cataloging Bulletin
Vol. 25, No 4 • August 2017 3-3 Section 3

COMMITTEE ON CATALOGING: DESCRIPTION AND ACCESS (CC:DA) REPORT

The CC:DA met on June 21, 2017 in only one session during the ALA Annual Meeting in Chicago. The second session 
usually held by the CC:DA on the Monday morning of an ALA Meeting was cancelled in favor of a special discussion session, 
sponsored by the RDA Steering Committee and designed to gather information and recommendations from members 
of specialist cataloging communities (cartographic, AV, archival, etc.) about RDA’s coverage of their types of materials. 
As changes and revisions to RDA were suspended in April 2017 until the completion of the 3R project (RDA Toolkit 
Restructure and Redesign) next year, there was relatively little new business and the CC:DA had no new discussion papers 
or proposals to work on since the ALA Midwinter meeting in January. Activity reports were presented by representatives 
from the Library of Congress and from the PCC, additional information on which can be found at http://www.loc.gov/ala/ 
and http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/ respectively. Finally, the RDA-Steering Committee (RSC) gave a report of its activities 
between January and June 2017, which can be downloaded here http://www.rda-rsc.org/sites/all/files/CCDA%202017%20
ALA%20Annual.pdf. 

Submitted by
Armin Siedlecki, CC:DA Liaison
Pitts Theology Library,  Candler School of Theology, Emory University

TESTIMONY

THE JOYS OF CARTOGRAPHIC CATALOGING

A Growing Love for Maps

It’s hard to say when my passion for maps began. It seems to have gone hand-in-hand with my passion for seafaring. As 
a teenager, I was obsessed with tales of great sea voyages. Summer afternoons would find me in the hammock, riveted to 
my cherished copy of Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Seven Seas, and it was full of nautical charts. I longed to go to sea, and I 
knew that a sea map would get me where I was going. 

Once I moved to Chicago, I glommed onto any sailing opportunity I could find. First I took a Park District sailing course. 
Then I took a dead-reckoning course at the Adler Planetarium. (Dead reckoning enables one to plot a course on a nautical 
chart.) In the class I met some sailboaters who invited me to join them in sailing Lake Michigan. I got to plot courses on 
a nautical chart and follow them, just like the sea captains of old. Oh, the joy!

By extension, any navigational aids were likewise exciting. My dad gave me his Army compass, and I took it with me 
on overseas trips. At a writers’ conference in Idaho, where our hosts held a Lewis-and-Clark–themed raffle, I won a 
sextant — an instrument for doing celestial navigation. In Morocco I picked up another instrument — a very old Arabic 
astrolabe, which camel caravaneers used to navigate their way through the Sahara Desert. 

Off to the Newberry Map Collections

Fast-forward to my time in library school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The MLIS program 
offered an opportunity called Alternative Spring Break, whereby LIS students spent their break interning in a library 
of their choice. Considering my passion for maps, the choice became obvious: I obtained a placement in the Newberry 
Library’s Map and Cartography Collections. 

My supervisor was Bob Karrow, Curator of Special Collections and Curator of Maps, and I also worked with Patrick 
Morris, Map Cataloger and Reference Librarian. My assigned task was to perform analytic cataloging of an atlas — a 
collection of 33 pre-1789 facsimile maps of Paris (Adolphe Alphand, Atlas des anciens plans de Paris, Paris: Imprimerie 
impériale, 1880).