Dr Ahava Cohen on Internationalising RDA

Ahava Cohen

Our final General Seminar of 2020 will be led by Dr Ahava Cohen, on Internationalising RDA.

Ahava Cohen leads the Hebrew Cataloguing Department at the National Library of Israel and is in charge of Hebrew policy for Mazal, Israel’s multilingual, multiscript authority database. As such she has a deep interest in making formerly Anglo-American cataloguing codes work for a broader range of languages and cultures. In 2019 she wrote a report for the RSC on the Western and Christian bias of the cataloguing guidelines; the report was accepted as part of the RSC’s focus on removing such biases and internationalising RDA. Ahava will discuss the work involved in identifying bias in cataloguing guidelines and the emotional labour of trying to reconcile the varying needs of language and cultural groups.

Ahava Cohen (Dr. RDA) is chair of the European RDA Interest Group (EURIG) and the backup European Region representative to the RDA Steering Committee (RSC). She graduated with a certificate in LIS in 2013 and her 2019 doctorate focused on the localization of RDA to a country which catalogues in four languages, three of which have yet to benefit from a translation of RDA. Her professional interest lies in balancing international standards with decolonizing and deassimilating the catalogue while maintaining the high production output required by busy cataloguing departments.

Registration: https://beginningcataloguing.teachable.com/p/general-seminar-december/

Printmaking Techniques in Book Illustration

Join us online on Tuesday 8 December for our next Book History Seminar, in which Krystle Attard Trevisan will share her curatorial and research expertise in printmaking techniques in book illustration.

Krystle is the first art historian in Malta specializing in historical prints and book illustration. Her ongoing doctoral research includes cataloguing and studying the only intact 18th century print collection in a public museum of over 4,500 prints amassed by one man. She has also started hunting for Incunabula in Malta with a team of other researchers. She has recently joined MUŻA, the Malta National Community Art Museum that houses the national collection of art, where one of her tasks is to research the prints and rare books that have remained unstudied for years. Her passion is to teach about the importance of printmaking in the history of art and of the book through public outreach and object-based study.

This is a live-only seminar – no preparation in advance (except for the speaker, obviously), no recordings afterwards, just an expert speaker talking on Zoom for around half and hour followed by group discussion and chat.

Full details and registration: https://beginningcataloguing.teachable.com/p/bookhistory-seminar-december

Making Manuscripts (Book History Seminar)

Last week saw the first of our Book History Seminars, led by Sara Charles (Teaching Manuscripts) and I took the Chair’s prerogative to write the event report.

Sara is part of a growing number of researchers who unite their love of making and their love of research by using historical remaking in their academic work. From Alan May’s experiments in making printing presses through Joumana Medlej’s Inks and Paints of the Middle East (and her forthcoming Wild Colours: Seasonal Inks and Paints) to Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen’s Hortus Floridus Iessi, people are finding more and more imaginative methods to engage with the ways in which early books were made.

Continue reading “Making Manuscripts (Book History Seminar)”

Event Report: Metadata Matters

Our General Seminar Series launched in style with Emma Booth‘s call to action on Metadata Matters. In this event report, Robert Drinkwater, University of Salford, shares a couple of items he has added to his to do list as a result.

This session was led by Emma Booth of the University of Manchester, formerly of King’s College London and the LSE and author of the recent NAG report on Quality of Shelf Ready Metadata. Emma started by outlining her experience at Manchester and went on to talk about standards and systems and their bearing on the discovery experience of users. The presentation concluded with a discussion of the need and efficacy of advocating for metadata quality. Listening to this presentation and participating in the ensuing discussion gave me cause to reflect on my own habits, workflows and dependencies as a Cataloguer. I took away a number of actions and reminders for myself, a couple of which I’ve outlined here:

Continue reading “Event Report: Metadata Matters”

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Metadata Matters

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✨✨✨Huge thanks to Emma Booth for her brilliant lunchtime seminar on Metadata Matters. ✨✨✨ There’s so much Emma has learned in her cataloguing career since I took this photo a few years ago, and so many great projects she’s worked on @officialuom. I think you can see the focus and attention to detail even back then in this old photo. Heather Jardine (retired Head of Bibliographic Services at the City of London) always said cataloguing is about the attitude, and I think we saw that today – in Emma and in all the seminar participants. The passion for helping other people find things keeps our eyes on the details some others miss! Link to Emma’s Twitter in bio – she’s always happy to chat metadata and I can not recommend her highly enough as a presenter and seminar host. #inspiringcolleagues #metadatamatters #metadata #cataloguing #cataloging #cataloguer #cataloger #catalogersofinstagram #lunchtimelearning #ilovemyjob #beginningcataloguingseminars #beginningcataloguingonlineschool #beginningcataloguing

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Making Manuscripts with Sara Charles

Announcing the first of our Book History Seminar Series.

In this online seminar, Sara will explore the physical relationship between the animals and the human hands that made medieval manuscripts, and how our natural environment can produce all we need for the creation of a book. She will also talk about how going through the processes of manuscript production has enabled her to codicologically ‘read’ a manuscript much more effectively, and offer pointers for ways into historical remaking.

Sara Charles (Teaching Manuscripts) is a qualified librarian who is completing a PhD on Usuard martyrologies at the Institute of English Studies. Having first studied Codicology during her MA Library and Information Studies, she further developed her skills during her MRes in Book History, and began historical remaking as part of her PhD methodology in order to gain a deeper insight into the conditions under which the manuscripts she is studying were created. Since founding Teaching Manuscripts just over a year ago, she has given demonstrations and led workshops for schools, universities and the general public, and this year received funding from the Being Human Festival to deliver an online seminar and workshop on making iron gall ink.

Full details and registration.

General Seminar Series Autumn 2020

23 October: Metadata Matters, led by Emma Booth

Emma will draw not only on her experience writing the National Acquisitions Group Quality of Shelf-ready Metadata report but also on her experience as eResources Metadata Specialist at University of Manchester.

If you love (or loathe!) e-resources, cataloguing standards, library management systems, or “marketing” library services to your users (and senior management), join us to hear Emma’s current thoughts on why what we do is vitally important, and to share your own ideas in the discussion.

Emma Booth is e-Resources Metadata Specialist at the University of Manchester Library, and the author of the National Acquisition Group’s report, Quality of Shelf-ready Metadata.

Full details and registration.

Note: Subscribers to October’s Beginning Cataloguing Monthly should remember they have a 50% off coupon code in the newsletter.

19 November: The Unwritten Book, led by Yvonne Lewis

Yvonne Lewis is the longest-serving member of the National Trust’s team of book curators. As such, she has encountered just about every form of evidence of book collecting you can imagine. In this seminar, she’s going to present on John Bankes’s travels in Egypt, Syria and Palestine (c. 1815-17), which he meant to write up but never got round to. Yvonne will discuss his notes, drawings and a lovely set of litho stones held at NT Kingston Lacy.

Yvonne has worked in historic collections since graduating with her MA LIS in 1992. Over the years, she has taught hundreds of people how to catalogue and supervised many work placement students, often providing them with their first introduction to special collections librarianship.

Her research interests include 17th and 18th century private libraries, book ownership, the reading experience, and maps and globes. She has contributed many entries to the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) and recently added to her knowledge of Bibliography and Book History by completing an MRes in Book History at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

You can find out more about Yvonne on her profile page at beginningcataloguing.com

Full details and registration.

Subscribe to Beginning Cataloguing Monthly before Thursday 15 October to receive the subscriber’s 50% off coupon code in the newsletter.

9 December 2020, led by Ahava Cohen

Does RDA represent your culture?

Ahava Cohen leads the Hebrew Cataloguing Department at the National Library of Israel and is in charge of Hebrew policy for Mazal, Israel’s multilingual, multiscript authority database. As such she has a deep interest in making formerly Anglo-American cataloguing codes work for a broader range of languages and cultures. In 2019 she wrote a report for the RSC on the Western and Christian bias of the cataloguing guidelines; the report was accepted as part of the RSC’s focus on removing such biases and internationalising RDA. Ahava will discuss the work involved in identifying bias in cataloguing guidelines and the emotional labour of trying to reconcile the varying needs of language and cultural groups.

Ahava Cohen (Dr. RDA) is chair of the European RDA Interest Group (EURIG) and the backup European Region representative to the RDA Steering Committee (RSC). She graduated with a certificate in LIS in 2013 and her 2019 doctorate focused on the localization of RDA to a country which catalogues in four languages, three of which have yet to benefit from a translation of RDA. Her professional interest lies in balancing international standards with decolonizing and deassimilating the catalogue while maintaining the high production output required by busy cataloguing departments.

Full details and registration.

Book all three seminars for £30 (including VAT)

Beginning Cataloguing Rare Books: Ten Free Resources

With new course Beginning Cataloguing Rare Books launching on Monday, I thought it would be useful to highlight some free resources for cataloguing rare books.

1. Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books) (DCRM(B)). The main standard for rare books cataloguing is maintained by the Rare Books and Materials Section (RBMS) of the Association of College & Research Libraries and is available to download in pdf form for free.

Continue reading “Beginning Cataloguing Rare Books: Ten Free Resources”
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