MARC – Beginning Cataloguing

19 April 202122 April 2021

In-Person Training: Testimonial from The National Trust

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).

1 October 202012 October 2020

General Seminar Series Autumn 2020

Our General Seminar Series is ready for booking as a course bundle or individually.

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)

3 August 202016 March 2021

Event Report: Beginning Copy Cataloguing

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?

28 July 202028 July 2020

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.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDLSrlcpQ1Y/

20 July 202021 July 2020

Beginning Data Manipulation

This blog post by Hannah Hillen, University of Manchester, provides a summary of Concetta La Spada’s June Masterclass and some of the things Hannah learned from it.

19 June 20205 August 2020

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.