Irresponsible Librarianship: a critique of the Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, with thoughts on how to proceed

This paper discusses the three guiding principles of the report of the LC Working Group and discusses some of the contradictions and problems with the recommendations. The Report focuses entirely on technical systems and does not deal at all with problems of human communication. The Report urges reuse of metadata but legacy data is a continuing problem rather than a solution. The report urges cooperation but offers a model of exploitation and reliance. The report assumes that all differences in information creation and use will be no problem for if we demand that everyone accept our (?) standards we can accept metadata as is. The report denies that service to sophisticated users is of value to the larger community. The paper closes with remarks on the future of music librarianship.