Blogging for CILIP

I would like to extend my thanks to CILIP for selecting me as an official blogger. I hope this gives my writing a bigger audience; at the same time, I hope it spurs me to write more and better bloggage, and I welcome comments and criticism!

Now I can attempt to produce some Chartership-worthy professional reflection alongside my meandering commentary on my experience of Chartering.

Firstly, about work – I am quite happily cataloguing away now. There are a few bits and pieces that I need to pick up again; I haven’t done so much cataloguing for about 2 years now and there are DETAILS! I’ve borrowed the office copies of Essential Dewey by the great John Bowman (his dry wit and jaunty writing style make this readable) and the first volume of the Dewey Decimal Classification itself (well, I beleive in ad fontes, getting back to the source).

The occasional German language stuff I’ve been cataloguing is fun too, and often it’s almost totally original cataloguing. Wherever I’ve worked, one bonus has been to use my fluent German skills; cataloguing, making a precis, or doing ad-hoc translation duty! Perhaps my logical next step is a study tour or something in Germany? Or involvement in IFLA?

I wonder what will happen if we go further towards shelf-ready; with the current upheavals in the pulishing industry and electronic information world, I wonder a lot about the future of metadata and cataloguing work in general. As a keen advocate of information literacy and Web 2.0 in library work, I hope we as a profession will go down that route in some shape or form, but I think it will take quite a lot of work and time to get that far.

I was glad to spot a recent Facet publication picking up on Semantic Web and its links to information science - I think a concerted effort to build solid, public links with the “softer” side of IT is long overdue!

In my view, we seriously need to build our staff’s basic and core IT skills at all levels, and probably learn from U.S. practitioners about how to integrate new technologies while remaining true to our professional values – maybe also, from them, how to clearly and unashamedly express those values too!

I’d be interested to read comments and questions related to any of the issues I’ve raised in this post – and also feedback on my style and content. Thanks!