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.
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.
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.
“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.”
With some people working from home, some wanting to leave face-to-face services with customers who are not compliant with social distancing rules, and some staring down the barrel of redundancy, there have possibly never been more information professionals contemplating self-employment. Here are some tips and resources from my experience this year setting up Beginning Cataloguing.
2020 was a busy and creative time for Ash. As well as helping get Beginning Cataloguing off the ground and running our first online workshop, they collaborated with lots of other people, some of whom they mention in their end-of-year round-up.
Here are some blog posts that Ash wrote or co-wrote last year, which, although completed outside their role as a Beginning Cataloguing Associate, may well be of interest to you:
Anne Welsh‘s latest publication is a blog post at myVLF.com sharing top tips on how to organise your library.
You can read the tips in full on the myVFLF Blog (update: myVLF ceased trading in 2021, and the blog is republished here) alongside lots of other bookish posts. Librarian to the core, we thought it might be helpful to share a bibliography of the books and articles mentioned. Wherever possible, we’ve shared links to fulltext, WorldCat libraries, the original publisher, and secondhand sellers, in that order.
The Bookseller has published an opinion piece on serendipitous discovery and how bookshops are fuelling that adrenaline buzz for buyers. Based on research for Beginning Cataloguing (forthcoming from Routledge), it highlights four elements that create the feeling of serendipity and ways in which these are used by bookshops.
Addendum, 2022: with the redesign of The Bookseller website, my blog post has disappeared. Here’s the text of it:
With some bookshops set to reopen in June, it’s a good time to think about some of the lockdown actions that have kept shops afloat and why they work on buyers.
At their best, bookshops are both scientific and magic. Certain elements are theorised extensively – look at the consideration that goes into store layout. It’s no coincidence that many shops have poetry and gardening sections abutting each other and a conveniently placed comfy chair on which to make decisions after we browse. In most, every inch of shelf-space is maximised so customers can find what we want – and what we didn’t know we wanted until we wandered round the store.
This second element is where we often find the magic – and it’s this that bookbuyers are missing since shops had to close their physical doors. While we can request specific books via phone, email or the shops’ websites, we lack the opportunity to browse their shelves and happen upon something new and wonderful and surprising.
In both libraries and bookshops, the holy grail of online discovery is not search and retrieval of items the seeker already knows, but serendipity – a word itself invented by incurable bibliophile Horace Walpole, based, he said, on a tale called The Three Princes of Serendip – “as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”
Nearly fifty years ago, Philip M. Morse identified browsing as “a search, hopefully serendipitous.” Research continues into “information encountering” – the idea that we often enjoy discovering new ideas in a less direct way than typing search terms into a box, or asking a bookseller for a specific title. In particular, there are four approaches that we can see at work in some of the successful lockdown activities of many shops. Each contributes to a sensation of serendipity for the customer – the discovery of happy accidental knowledge.
1. Serendipity is something that can be triggered. Lori McCay-Peet and Elaine G. Toms talk about “trigger-rich environments” – places that allow people to “brush up against information and ideas they may not have otherwise encountered.”
2. Triggers can be highlighted. We might be open to new ideas, and even seeking them out, but it can help if someone shows us potential stimuli.
3. Encouraging people to think about the triggers can lead them to make connections from their known interests to things they may have dismissed as outside their scope.
4. In the academic language “enabling follow-up” leading to a “valuable outcome” translates in bookselling terms to getting the books and other merchandise to the customer. In other words, sales.
It’s obvious to see how, in the physical bookshop, the classic techniques of handselling tick each of these boxes, moving the buyer from passively encountering a new publication by showing us new things, chatting to us, and also having us speak as we form connections in our minds. It’s those connections that lead to desire for the new book, seeing it as a lucky find.
It’s luck based on the customer’s open mind and the bookseller’s knowledge of us. There’s no coincidence that bookshops quick to dive into trying out new things online in the last few weeks had confidence in knowing their regulars and what they would be missing. “Success” for most didn’t just come from tooling up online – learning to Zoom for events (without leaving themselves open to hacking). It came from the sense of community they had built up – sometimes quickly, and sometimes over a period of decades.
The Second Shelf was founded in 2018 and already has 26.5 thousand followers on Twitter and 18.8 thousand on Instagram. It’s not the numbers, but the quality of interaction that counts. Pulling together a new merchandise campaign to tide them over lockdown was possible by drawing on a suggestion a year ago, from a community as committed to discovering women writers as bookshop founder Allison Devers.
The toughest element to crack is the last – making the sale. Often online attendees of the virtual festivals have bemoaned the absence of a “signed copies table”, only for event organisers and others to suggest independent bookshops. But how have booksellers ensured theirs is the one to supply their customers?
Pan Macmillan’s Virtually Together festival is an online author tour of high street bookshops (Bookseller, 18 May). In this case, the publisher is creating the trigger-rich environment, the bookshops are highlighting it, and then working with authors they know to form connections for customers. After these tweets from the Imagined Things Bookshop and Fiona Cummins, where would you choose to buy a signed copy of her new book?
Here we can see a major publisher sparking serendipity – and it’s working in two different ways. The serendipity I am feeling is finding out about a new-to-me bookshop in Harrogate – a place I should have been this week for a conference. It feels “meant” for me to buy a book from Imagined Things.
We can’t talk about signings without mentioning Goldsboro Books. I’ll never forget how they burst into Cecil Court back in 1999 with a completely fresh approach, centred on signed editions. It’s one that’s caught the Zeitgeist now – their post about their cancelled Romance in the Court Festival is a great example of using a simple online post to close some serendipitous sales for themselves, while sharing the outcome by also suggesting Hive.
Not all approaches to lockdown have been hi-tech – nor need they be. Boasting on its website “No robots since 1997,” Bookseller Crow on the Hill loves and is loved by Crystal Palace residents, yet managed to send this East Londoner the most serendipitous of the lockdown book boxes for which I signed up. No candles, no chocolates, no fancy wrapping. Just Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, a book anyone else would think I’d have read already. How did the bookseller know I hadn’t? Magic. Serendipity. Skill.
