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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:

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Event Report: Beginning Copy Cataloguing

Jennie-Claire Kent

In her blog post on Concetta La Spada’s July Masterclass, Jennie-Claire Crate, University of Kent, reflects that there is always something new to learn in the world of metadata.

I started working in academic libraries 17 years ago, moving into my first metadata role after 3 years. It is well over a decade since I graduated from UCL’s Information Science course, and in that time I’ve managed a metadata team, written papers, delivered training on cataloguing, and presented at conferences. What would I find of interest in a beginner’s class on copy cataloguing?

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Beginning Copy Cataloguing

An event report for Concetta‘s July Masterclass is under preparation by one of the attendees, but for now you can see her presentation (registration required), read the live tweets with links to the tools she covered, and book her August Masterclass, Beginning Cataloguing Ebooks, which takes place on 10 August.

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Live and Open for Booking

The Beginning Cataloguing Online School is now live and open for bookings on teachable.com. As it’s the first time we’re using the technology, our first offering is FREE.

Other events, including our first course, Beginning Bibliographic Models, open for booking next week.

Masterclasses with Concetta La Spada, Summer 2020

This Summer, Beginning Cataloguing is delighted to host three masterclasses with our Associate Concetta La Spada, who is Senior Metadata Librarian at Cambridge University Press. As a librarian working in the publishing industry, Concetta uses a range of tools to maintain and update the press’s many online products.

Taking place via Zoom, each masterclass will consist of a presentation (20-25 minutes) followed by questions and discussion. They are an opportunity for you to find out more about the standards and tools Concetta is using, and also to let us know if there are any on which you would like her to run a “how to” class in future.

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BIC Library Metadata Group

Congratulations to Concetta La Spada on her appointment as the CILIP Cataloguing & Indexing Group representative to the BIC Library Metadata Group.

At her first meeting on Wednesday, she will join colleagues Natasha Aburrow-Jones (Faculty of Advocates), Niamh Doran (Civica), Gwyneth Morgan (Nielson BookData), Anne Welsh (Beginning Cataloguing), Dominic Wilson (Dawson Books), Jenny Wright (BDS), Siu Ying Yip (University of the Arts London) and Chair Thurstan Young (British Library).

The group promotes bibliographic standards, and is the UK Advisory Group to the British Library for the revision of MARC 21, and as such, we look at the discussion and proposal papers for the American Library Association’s MARC Advisory Committee (MAC), which meets twice yearly. If you are interested in MAC proposals, you can see them on the Library of Congress’s MARC Development page.

You can find out more about the BIC Library Metadata Group (including how to submit proposals for MARC Development) on its website.

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Data Manipulation Using MarcEdit

Concetta La Spada‘s latest article has been published in Catalogue & Index 199 (June 2020). As the title implies, it’s a case study of some of the data manipulation she performs in her role at Cambridge University Press.

MarcEdit has been rightfully popular with cataloguers since Terry Reese first made it available twenty years ago. Unlike most library management systems, it is free and allows us to export, manipulate and import our data. Concetta’s article provides an overview of how it helps her in her work for one of the world’s major academic publishers.

Catalogue & Index, the journal of the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group, is open access, so you can read Concetta’s article for free:

Concetta La Spada (2020). ‘Data Manipulation Using MarcEdit’, Catalogue & Index 199: 27-33, https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.cilip.org.uk/resource/collection/5F814B6D-500C-42B2-9D5F-E6E3C550C24A/C&I199La_Spada_Data_manipulation_using_MarcEdit.pdf.