The National Acquisitions Group’s QuickStart Cataloguing session for public library workers is now fully booked.
The recording of the hour-long training will be available in the members’ area of the NAG website after the event.
And remember, NAG membership is free at the moment for the public library sector ….
Our final Book History seminar before the summer break addresses a hot topic.
On Monday 17 May, Katie Flanagan will discuss the role of volunteers within historic libraries, and will ask how this affects diversity within the profession and where should the line be drawn?
Katie is a Special Collections Librarian and volunteers as Honorary Librarian at Kedermister Library, a 17th century parish library still in its original setting. A Chartered Librarian with 20 years’ experience working in historic libraries, she also has extensive experience both as a volunteer and managing volunteers.
Details and booking: https://beginningcataloguing.teachable.com/p/bookhistory-seminar-may
This post republishes a piece which was originally commissioned by myVLF and published on their blog as ‘Unpacking Your Library: 10 Top Tips to Organise Your Bookshelves’, myVLF, 3 September 2020.
Whether working, furloughed or simply unable to go out and socialise as much as usual, Covid-19 has given many of us more time at home. Many people have been unpacking their libraries (to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase), building reading nooks and reorganising their shelves. There’s a great tradition of writing to help us in doing this, and especially on the impact that sorting through our books has on us.
If you want to know how to organise your personal library and bookshelves, here are ten top tips based on practical experience and from ten of my favourite books.
Continue reading “Unpacking Your Library”
As both a reader and a writer, I wanted to acknowledge the work of Gwynn GB, Kelly Clayton, and Deborah Carr in creating and managing virtual literary festival platform myVLF, which has sadly had to close its doors.
As well as attending many online events there, I was fortunate enough to gain a paid commission to write a blog post for them in September 2020, giving 10 Top Tips to Organise Your Bookshelves. I’ll republish it on the Beginnings Blog now that myVLF is, sadly, no more.
Writing on their website The Blonde Plotters, Gwynn, Kelly and Deborah said:
“When Covid-19 hit our world, we worked flat-out holding as many events as we could and supporting hundreds of authors with their book launches, as well as helping many physical book festivals to reach new audiences … Unfortunately, the huge workload in running so many events, resulted in us not being able to concentrate on our own writing careers. We live for writing and so regretfully we have decided to close MyVLF so that we can reconnect with our author careers and families.”
Many thanks to Jennie Hillyard for approaching me for the National Acquisitions Group’s programme of online events.
Really looking forward to delivering 2 Quickstart Cataloguing sessions. The first is an introduction to cataloguing for people working in public libraries who come across books that don’t arrive shelf-ready with a pre-made set of metadata.
Note that membership of NAG is currently FREE for public library staff, so do join up to qualify for the member discount and also all the other benefits NAG offers.
Beginning Cataloguing always offers a discounted rate for organisations that support heritage professionals, and I’m particularly pleased to receive this commission from NAG, whose recent report on shelf-ready metadata (authored by Emma Booth) has been such a great contribution to our understanding of cataloguers’ and their institutions’ needs.
Currently reading Chris Oliver’s Introducing RDA: A Guide to the Basics After 3R (ALA Editions, 2021), and surprised to see Practical Cataloguing in the Hybrid Environment advertised on the back cover.
On Monday, Gustavo Grandal Montero (UAL) led a fantastic Book History Seminar in which he asked the question ‘Documentation or Artwork? Neo Avant-gardes and Printed Matter in the 60s and 70s‘.
In it, he shared examples of artists’ books and materials, some of them well-known and in codex form, like Ruscha’s Twenty Six Gasoline Stations and Roth’s Collected Works, and others more experimental, like Aspen’s use of different media to push the magazine form and Lippard’s use of index cards to record the 955,000 Exhibition.
Gustavo made the point that as well as stepping away from the codex form, the 955,000 Exhibition cards moved away from the sequencing of the artists’ book. Lippard included a title page and bibliography, but the cards are unnumbered and contain an instruction to shuffle them, so each time we encounter them, we do so in a different order. On Monday, we saw Gustavo moving through the cards to find these “standard” bibliographic details. If sequencing is a defining feature of the artists’ book as a form, what are Lippard’s cards?
The glib answer would be documentation, but actually, they are not, quite. In March 1969, Lippard wrote to a range of artists asking them to participate “in a large exhibition at the Seattle World’s Fair Pavillion, opening Sept. 4, 1969, it will also go to three other museums on the West Coast.” In the end, the submissions led to exhibitions in Seattle (‘55,087’), Vancouver (‘955,000’), Buenos Aires (‘2,972,453’) and Valencia, California (‘c.7,500′). Lippard took the titles from the cities’ population figures, and described how “Each of the catalogues consist of randomly arranged index cards designed by the artists themselves.”
Gustavo described how the cards are, in fact, more than catalogues. As we can see from Lippard’s original invitation, she asked conceptual artists to supply her with instructions she could “execute with the help of friends and volunteers,” and her intention was always that “projects can be changed for each city … (cards will probably be added each place)”. Cards were most definitely added, and given that she assured artists they could “tell me how you’d like what information and reproduction on your card”, it’s clear that the cards themselves are artworks constituting part of a larger artwork that is the 955,000 Exhibition.
Gustavo highlighted other artworks from Chelsea’s collections, and given that we planned this talk during lockdown when we thought it may have to be more conceptual itself, it was wonderful to see shelves of artists’ books over his shoulder in the special collections room, and even better to see him turn the pages, unfold the posters and, indeed, shuffle the cards of the printed matter he’d selected for us.
Image: shelves glimpsed over Gustavo’s shoulder at Chelsea, over my computer screen (which clearly needed a bit of a clean – sorry).
Our general seminar for May will be led by Beginning Cataloguing Associate Binni Brynolf, on the ever-green topic of ‘Systems Matters.’
Binni has worked in libraries for more than twenty years, mostly in systems and team leadership roles, and is currently employed as a Digital Resources Librarian.
They have a track record in selecting and implementing new library management systems and over the years have established strong relationships with software providers, and in the seminar they will discuss the things we need to consider when choosing, designing or updating our library systems in order to ensure all our services are accessible and inclusive.
Details and booking: https://beginningcataloguing.teachable.com/p/general-seminar-may.
As lockdown continues to ease, I’m grateful to Yvonne Lewis for this testimonial from the bespoke training I designed and delivered to staff at The National Trust.
“Anne designed a day’s cataloguing training for the National Trust. She worked with a small group of hand-picked property staff with considerable experience of object cataloguing on our bespoke library and museum system. Anne provided workbooks to take them through the fundamental principles behind book cataloguing and basic MARC fields. Everyone also worked through several examples, with a few tricky ones thrown in to show how judgement can still be required when dealing with your institutions needs from the catalogue.
The team had a lovely time on the day. Many questions were asked and answered. Anne also provided an element of post-training support to deal with those odd questions which always come up once you’ve left the building. Using the new trainees as fully as we would have liked has been paused due to COVID-19. We are hoping to re-start cataloguing projects slowly in 2021/22 as circumstance permit. Once we have seen how successfully the training has been, we will be considering when and how to extend the programme.”
The National Trust has its own bespoke library management system and catalogues using AACR2 in MARC, across both modern and pre-1950 books. I’m grateful to Yvonne not only for this testimonial, but also for briefing me fully on their LMS, which can only be accessed on-site, and supplying me with screenshots of the entry screens to add to the workbooks. I’m also grateful to HQ staff for printing the workbooks so that I did not have to carry them into Central London alongside my suitcase of example books for trainees to catalogue.
Bookings for in-person training is brisk – so far we have both paid and pro bono workshops booked in through to April 2022, and we are open to more. You can book a discovery meeting at https://calendly.com/annew-discoverymeeting or contact info@beginningcataloguing.com if you want to start a discussion.
Yvonne’s testimonial is available on linkedin (scroll down to “Recommendations”. Note: an odd glitch has me showing up as a client of Yvonne’s rather than the other way round).
This month’s Beginning Cataloguing Monthly has just been sent to subscribers.
CONTENTS
BEGINNINGS BOOKSHELVES
Metadata Must-read – Chela Scott Weber, Martha O’Hara Conway, Nicholas Martin, Gioia Stevens and Brigitte C. Kamsler, Total Cost of Stewardship: Responsible Collection Building in Archives and Special Collections, Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research, 2021, https://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2021/oclcresearch- total-cost-of-stewardship.html.
Bodies in the Library – Holly Danvers, Murder at the Lakeside Library, London: Crooked Lane, July 2021.
Tidy Reading – a link to Sarah Howley’s ‘Recommendations from the APDO Bookclub Bookshelf’ on the APDO Blog; this month’s book club read, Death and Decluttering (McGovern Books, 2020), and my own favourite, Orsola de Castro’s Loved Clothes Last (Penguin Life, 2021), which I offered as a prize in Tidy Beginnings’s first ever giveaway, timed to coincide with APDO’s Spring Clearing Week campaign.
BEGINNING CATALOGUING LISTINGS
New Publications – Helen O’Neill, Anne Welsh, David A. Smith, Glenn Roe and Melissa Terras, ‘Text Mining Mill: Computationally Detecting Influence in the Writings of John Stuart Mill from Library records’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, online ahead of print 27 February 2021, https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc/fqab010/6153976; and open access at https://melissaterras.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/textminingmill_oneill_roe_smith_welsh_terras.pdf.
Anne Welsh, ‘Book Review: McLeish, Simon (2020, ed.) Resource Discovery for the Twenty-First Century Library. London: Facet. xxxii, 203 p. ISBN 9781783301386′, Catalogue & Index 202, 2021: 57-58, https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.cilip.org.uk/resource/collection/CC45A47F-BE48-4BA1-B6D4-25BF10F1BC41/C&I_202.pdf.
Cataloguer Catch-up – highlights from our social media this month.
Seminars – Gustavo Grandal Montero on ‘Documentation or Artwork?’ and Ash Green on Creative Digital Experiments with Collections. Current seminars open for booking: https://beginningcataloguing.teachable.com/courses/category/seminars.
Courses – Beginning Bibliography; Beginning Cataloguing Rare Books; Masterclasses with Concetta La Spada. See all current asynchronous courses at https://beginningcataloguing.teachable.com/courses/category/asynchronous.
If you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here.
