Anne Welsh is a career-long cataloguer and a life-long writer. Following the success of Practical Cataloguing (London: Facet; Chicago: Neal Schuman, 2012) she focused on academic research and teaching before founding Beginning Cataloguing, which provides consultancy and training for institutions and, increasingly, to individuals preparing their libraries and archives and seeking an institutional home for them.
Our Cataloguing Careers feature has returned to the newsletter this issue, with Harriet Hopkins answering five questions on her interest in cataloguing and metadata.
Harriet is one of the speakers in tomorrow’s seminar on Training Matters. She’s also the recipient of CILIP Cymru Wales’s Kathleen Cooks Fund award to obtain cataloguing training for herself and her staff at Bridgend Library. As Library Manager and Strategic Lead: Programming & Promotion at Awen Cultural Trust, cataloguing is only one of her professional interests, but, as she points out in our newsletter and will no doubt re-iterate tomorrow, it was an area of professional practice that she identified early on as a an “elusive skill that no one seemed to talk about.” Her determination to ensure that she and other branch staff “are able to amend a record, or add a thesis” and her perseverance to do so are, quite frankly, awe-inspiring.
It’s thanks to managers like Harriet that cataloguing is not the lost cause in the public library sector that many believed it was becoming only a few years ago. Huge thanks to Harriet for sharing her journey in the Beginning Cataloguing News Cataloguing Careers feature for November 2021.
CATALOGUING CAREERS – Harriet Hopkins, Awen Cultural Trust.
TYPO TIPOFF
Do you need to manouvre the oeuvres on your catalogue after several upgrades? With thanks to @zemkat’s tweet on “uvres” for prompting me to have a look for its occurrences on WorldCat.
A hiatus in receipt of galleys for new library-set crime novels coincides neatly with requests from 3 readers for recommendations of classic bodies in the library.
Cataloguer Catch-up – highlights from our social media this month.
Seminars – Thanks to the generosity of seminar attendees last year (our first year), we are able to offer this year’s seminars on a “pay what you can” basis. This means that if you can’t afford CPD at the moment, you can come for free – no questions asked. If you can afford to pay £6 or £12, we’ll use your money to pay for next year’s seminars, and so on and so forth into the future. Some seminars will be recorded and available for one month after the event – please check individual pages for details.
Cataloguing Quandary? Launched at the request of clients who need to be able to book fixed-price very bespoke training, whether it’s a question about AACR2, RDA, DCRM or about the business of cataloguing (advocacy, training opportunities, career development) or, if you’re just looking for a confidential sounding board for your work project(s), the Cataloguing Office Hour aims to provide a low-cost, easy-to-access consultancy service: https://beginningcataloguing.teachable.com/p/anne-welsh-office-hour
As is always the way, the best of the discussion happened after the introductory presentation, and it was great to hear from participants what is happening in their corner of the cataloguing and metadata world. The Chatham House Rule applies, and the recording captures only my initial presentation.
In it I talked a little about how cataloguing has changed over the years, beginning with the card catalogue days in which I began my professional career, and examining the core principles by which we still work. Perhaps controversially, I presented a view that while work to add large sets of metadata to catalogues and discovery engines is vital and important, there is still a need for cataloguing at the individual level. There are some materials whose metadata is simply going to be wanted by so few libraries that I believe they will never be cost effective for data suppliers to prioritise other than as a specific project for a specific client. (Note: data and metadata suppliers do undertake such work, and usually with the added benefit that fresh records are added to their wider pool).
We had a look in some detail at Calhoun’s significant report, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools (Library of Congress, 2006), and thought about contexts in which its very true observations about national and academic libraries simply cease to pertain in some other organisations. I highlighted Jewett’s original calculation, that creating a stereotyped catalogue of shared records would still leave around a third of the materials needing to be catalogued by individual libraries – or, at least, by his individual library, the Smithsonian, on which he was basing his calculations (p. x).
We also talked a little about the National Acquisition Group’s report on the Quality of Shelf-ready Metadata (NAG, 2020), and discussed how in it we can see academic libraries following the same cycle we have seen in public libraries over the last 10-15 years.
The news from the public library sector is quite bright, though. As well as the Bridgend Library cataloguing project, about which we’ll hear more on Wednesday, when Harriet Hopkins (Awen Cultural Trust) and Amy Staniforth (CILIP Cymru Wales) are discussing Training Matters with us, there are several library authorities who are in the process of commissioning bespoke training for their staff. Local Studies collections are often the repository of exactly the kind of semi-published and privately printed materials that it can be difficult to locate and download from databases of shared cataloguing. Such materials can often seem more complex to non-cataloguers than many of the standard books for which it’s easy to download a perfect dataset.
I’ll be picking up this refrain in a little more detail in the article I’ve been commissioned to write for the next issue of Catalogue and Index, which, like all their issues, will be available open access. It will also contain a piece by Emma Booth on why Metadata Matters, as well as other articles on advocacy for our area of the information professions. I’ll pop a link to the new issue here, and, of course, in the newsletter when the Catalogue and Index editors let us know it is out.
Cataloguer Catch-up – highlights from our social media this month.
Seminars – Thanks to the generosity of seminar attendees last year (our first year), we are able to offer this year’s seminars on a “pay what you can” basis. This means that if you can’t afford CPD at the moment, you can come for free – no questions asked. If you can afford to pay £6 or £12, we’ll use your money to pay for next year’s seminars, and so on and so forth into the future. Some seminars will be recorded and available for one month after the event – please check individual pages for details.
A busy day today, delivering training to staff at Trinity College Dublin on the latest changes in RDA and the RDA Toolkit. While no library has yet implemented the newest version, it’s important for national libraries to be aware of what’s happening, and this training looked at the 3R Project and more recent updates.
(Often we provide bespoke training under business confidentiality agreements, and so can’t talk about it here, so we’re always especially grateful to organisations who are able to allow us to share that we have provided services to them).
As part of her business Cut the Clutter, Marie Bateson runs a really supportive Facebook group as well as working directly with clients to declutter.
This week they’ve been having a sprint on dealing with books – including the hardest of all to part with: books with a sentimental association. It was really lovely to meet members of the group in tonight’s Facebook Live.
