David W. Bade was a Senior Librarian and Monographic Cataloger at the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library until his retirement in 2014.
[1] He is the author of the 2002 monograph Khubilai Khan and the Beautiful Princess of Tumapel (a study of the medieval Chinese and old Javanese accounts of the Mongolian invasion of Jawa), several bibliographies on Mongolia and the Mongols, a three-volume catalog of the books in African languages in the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University, and several books and articles about linguistics, libraries and librarianship, including Responsible Librarianship: Library Policies for Unreliable Systems published in 2008.
[3] He has written critically of library administrative policies which contribute to the quantity-over-quality mindset in which hiring adequately trained catalogers (particularly those catalogers with subject and language specialty) is not a priority.,[3] and about reports such as the 2008 Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.
Yet in this idea of the “perfect record” Bade finds a straw-man argument which attempts to dismiss, by way of this impossible ideal, any real concerns about “adequacy, fitness to purpose, truth, and usefulness” of bibliographic information (p. 129).
The article in which he develops this argument, "The Perfect Bibliographic Record: Platonic Ideal, Rhetorical Strategy or Nonsense?