Just before Easter the Bibliographic Services Team opened
its office doors and invited staff from other parts of the library to come and
see what actually goes on in the team: A little bit of demystifying can work
wonders for cross-library working relationships!
Our Open Day advertising was based around our
READ-ability Initiative and our PIC Project, and ensured that we focussed on
showcasing many of the things we do that other library staff perhaps didn’t
realise we did! Previous open days have usually been based around the route of the
book (from order to shelf), or journals work, so this latest venture was a bit
of a departure for us.
Here’s the blurb:
Down in the
fusty, dusty basement, cataloguing staff have their noses in great tomes of
wonder - the manuals of AACR2, RDA LCSH and MARC21 and the Dewey classification
schedules! True? Well, yes, at least partially!
We do indeed live in the basement, but it certainly is not fusty and dusty! We have windows – although they don’t actually open, and look out on to the pavement – and because of the fast throughput in the office, there is little in the way of dust! Although cataloguers by name, we do so much more, and we shook off our old mantle years ago – where were you when we moved to online manuals and online Dewey schedules, got involved in Twitter chats, mashdmu events and raised our heads above the parapet?
So come on down
to our office and learn about:
· our READ-ability
Initiative - committing to improving the experience of students and other
library users when interacting with the library catalogue and the library
stock, helping them to find that elusive piece of information they need. It is
about articulating and understanding what we do and how it can help users, and
telling everyone!
· our PIC
Project - pulling together much of the work performed around cataloguing in
Bibliographic Services, and recognises that much of this work helps to PIC!!
· the more
traditional activities associated with a thriving Bibliographic Services
operation, like journals work, ordering, financial controls and much, much
more!
Intrigued? Want
to know more? Then abandon the arena of user activity and bound down to the
basement to learn about the creation of metadata and keyword consistency to
ensure discoverability of our resources!
We made an early decision to limit the number of
participants to each open day to 15, given that there were five major topics we
wanted to cover, and each demo would be around someone’s workstation. We also
decided to go the speed-dating way – five groups of three people stopping at
each of five demos, each demo being no more than 15 minutes long! This meant we
could show more of what we do, but in less detail, so nothing should have been
too technical!
The idea of only being able to share tiny snippets of what
we do may sound a bit limiting, but the initial greeting and the final goodbye
stressed the idea that nothing was too much trouble for us and if anybody
wanted to know about more detail about anything they’d seen then we were happy
to get a phone call, an email or a personal visit and would go into as much
detail as required! Also, if there was something we hadn’t covered at all, we’d
be happy to do more tailored sessions.
Every member of the team who was available in the office on
the day of the open day (i.e. not on a service point, on leave, poorly, or not
scheduled to be at work) had a part to play and showcased some part of Bib
Services work to the visitors. My own role was simply to keep an eye on the time
and make sure groups moved on as soon as their 15 minutes was up! That proved
quite challenging and I’ve since invested in a handbell!
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| Party bag! |
