Cataloguing!

Cataloguing. A word guaranteed to raise the pulse rate of any true librarian.

It’s my core responsibility at work, along with a less well-defined remit for metadata - to be honest, what with cleaning up the standards for “bibliographic metadata” (cataloguing as commonly understood) and looking at new issues like the cataloguing of e-books, I don’t have a great deal of time to address the wider questions of metadata for the institutional repository or other resources across campus.

For all that this is an age of automation, there is a hecka lot going on the metadata creation and management world. A large part of my job is editing professionally-created descriptive metadata, and keeping updated the holdings information for the books we already have. It’s a pretty interesting job as very often there are non-standard items that haven’t been picked up by the big bibliographic utilities and I have to do a little research to track them down or get the full details.

A couple of recent reports, one from RIN here in the U of K, and the other from the world-dominating US OCLC, have agreed that current practices have to change. On the one hand, cataloguing costs a lot in staff hours, and hence salary. On the other, users want more detailed and relevant data.

Creating centralised cataloguing networks and enriching our data and resource discovery environments are big projects. New ways of working and a more IT-friendly profession are going to be needed – plus, we have a lot of financial and institutional capital invested in current systems.

I would personally like very much to update my skills in terms of IT, specifically, ways of linking data from various sources into common systems, as the OCLC report describes. This is an area I think I’ll follow up for my chartership work.