I saw an item that was cataloged correctly

Context
I was looking at new children's books in my library's catalog and noticed that two picture books had parts of their titles on the spine labels instead of parts of their author's last name. Using the title on a spine label is a standard practice for items where no single author is immediately obvious, but since I could see the author's name in the same catalog record, I didn't understand why it wasn't being used.

When I asked the head cataloger about the discrepancy, she said they were marked that way because the "author" was an illustrator, not a writer, and "the rules" said that was how she was supposed to do it. After some discussion we decided to throw out the rules in favor of letting these very similar books be next to each other on the shelf.

Commentary
Have your eyes glazed over yet? I told you it takes special skills to be a librarian, one of which is actually caring about this stuff! And if you want to see some people who really care, you should take a look at the recent PUBLIB discussion on "Dewey or don't we?" (starts here, ongoing as of this writing).

I believe my discussion with the head cataloger today was generally more rational and fruitful than the Dewey discussion, which got me thinking about how people argue (Yay, she's not going to talk about cataloging anymore!). A lot of the Dewey discussion seems to follow this template: "X is what happens to me when I go to a bookstore; this experience should cause all public libraries to respond by doing Y."

I'm not saying that talking about one's own experience is bad; I'm confused by the assumption that personal experience is so generalizable. Why do we believe, despite mounds of contrary evidence, that other people experience things the exact same way we do? I didn't go to the head cataloger today and say, "I couldn't find both of these books when I wanted them; we must recatalog them right away!" Conversely, she didn't say, "when I go to libraries that don't catalog by the rules I can't find anything!" Instead we discussed what the rule was and whether we thought it would generally be helpful to bend it under this particular circumstance.

This kind of tunnel vision not only makes it hard to find solutions, it can make it difficult to see that you're even having a disagreement. I've had this exchange with more than one person:

Me - My opinion on this matter is different from yours.

Not Me - No, no, I'm just not explaining myself properly. What I mean to say is . . .

Me - I understand what you're saying. I just disagree with you.

Now, I see that this may just be good manners at work, a belief that it's not polite to argue with someone. But I also see an undercurrent of "any rational person possessed of the same facts I have would come to the same conclusion." I think it's related to the instinct people have to say, when confronted with the fact that I'm anti-death penalty, "but what if someone murdered your loved one? Wouldn't you want revenge?" When I'm in a certain mood I'm tempted to reply, "Oh my God! I've never thought of that! You've completely opened my eyes! Thank you, thank you, thank you!"

What did you see today?