CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group conference,
10-11 September 2012, Sheffield University
The value of cataloguing
The CIG conference this year was organised around a consideration of what was believed to be the value in cataloguing, and this, naturally, also covered the value of the cataloguer and his/her skills, and how these might be changing and developing. In these challenging economic times it was simply amazing to see over 100 cataloguers (a manifestation? Jardine) gather amongst friends, to consider their role.
The conference was a mixture of longer presentations and short, lightening talks, all on issues of interest to the cataloguing community. The four main themes in this 2-day conference were:
- Working with new standards
- Working co-operatively
- New challenges for cataloguers
- Developing working practices
Grouping talks into themes helped to ensure that a wide range of topics were covered. These included:
- RDA;
- cataloguing in times of change and in times of austerity;
- institutional repositories;
- collaborative working;
- historical perspectives on cataloguing;
- shelf-ready;
- re-classification;
- high visibility/marketing of cataloguing and cataloguers;
- the changing role and the development of cataloguers;
- special library work.
As you might imagine, I have made copious notes and it is going to take me quite some time to work through them all, but I think it will be well worth me reminding myself of things that were said that, for me, ranged from being interesting, through useful, to vital!
So, really I suppose I’m using this particular blog post as a *note to self* and to serve as a reminder of the main things that struck a chord with me, and things I want to follow up. If I get time later, I will report back on selected talks in more detail. So, there are loads of things I want to read up about, there are hundreds of things I want to think about (see my previous blog post on my learning style: This will explain my need to procrastinate!), and there are some potential quick wins, things I think I can start to do more or less straight away.
My action points are to:
- Read the JISC Impact Data blog (I should have done this already as we were a partner institution in Phase 1!)
- Check our new books listing is working and appropriate
- Investigate that stats course!
- Make sure no.3 child uses the library before he goes to uni and it’s too late!
- Decide whether or not to upgrade legacy records when convert to RDA (or maybe the LMS supplier will be able to affect this automatically?)
- Refresh self by reading up on Cutter/Paris principles, FRBR
- Consider the (hidden) cost of (not) implementing RDA
- Consider the cataloguing axiom (discoverability rather than rules) and importance of cataloguer’s judgement
- Investigate Google Refine, Web 3.0
- Consider the rhizome!
- Consider the weeding of videos (in relation to rarity)
- Checkout membership of COPAC
- Participate in the CIG RDA e-forum
- Check progress of our order for toolkit, checkout the “essentials” webinars, the RDA website (LC training is available to us) and Lauren Bradley’s googledoc checklist
- Look out for CILIP VLE, CIG NACO funnel, cat23 (take up that offer of podcasting training)
- Discuss RDA with lots of different people (e.g. suppliers (records, shelf-ready, LMS and RDN), partners, colleagues and library management)
- Checkout library typos of the day
- Consider the idea that “Good enough isn’t good enough”
- Investigate automatically getting our theses records from DORA to the library catalogue
- Get our process instructions onto wiki/libguides etc.
- Measure the “backlog” in book costs (£s)
- Avoid smug tweaking of catalogue records
- Consider the idea that global changes equal consistency
- Consider turning our team delivery plan into a service-level agreement
- Consider the idea of the “do something different day”
- Remember that cataloguing is about increasing access and discoverability
- Remember that implementing RDA is the first step on a road that will lead our data to “play nicely” with other data.
- Checkout the LMS user groups/meetings
- Re-investigate OCLC Classify
- Think about inside-out cataloguing – promoting stuff that our institution produces
- Gather usage stats for streamed videos
Maybe I'll have managed to do all this by the time of the next major CIG conference in 2014! See you there!
Post Script: Remember to check those useful RDA links!
Post Script: Remember to check those useful RDA links!
