Another Perspective on the Harvard Reorganization

I'm still catching up with posts in my Google Reader (now nearing those posted near the end of January!) and came across this piece by "looty." The post fits a piece of the puzzle that I think has been missing from the larger professional discussion, i.e. libraries with large backlogs (and especially those ARL libraries with special collections and archival backlogs) should think seriously about redeploying technical services personnel, especially catalogers, towards the continued work of uncovering "hidden collections." The backlog for my unit alone includes some 60-70,000 uncataloged books, many of them acquired in the 1970s and 1980s and for which there is a barebones bibliographic record in our catalog. Add to this a mass of material from the 150 or so special collections that I oversee and it doesn't take a genius to see that there's plenty of work to do. So why not move TS staff to this new area of endeavor and engage them in work that will help us as content creators associated with rare materials make this "stuff" available for use?