Thank you all again for your contributions yesterday. For future reference or if you’re just catching up here’s what we touched on the first day of this e-forum:


Under the caption Recruitment participants shared their experiences of how to land a cataloguing job esp. without previous experience. Quite a number of organisations seem to always train new staff anyway, so the emphasis in judging applicants might be more on aptitude (sometimes tested during the interview), general interest and attention to detail. This obviously depends on the kind of post (e.g. less likely for a temporary contract), and varies between organisations. For employees already working in a library job shadowing a cataloguer would be an option in order to get a foot in the door. Generally, interested parties were encouraged to - obviously - tailor their application to an advertised post but otherwise to just go for it.

Volunteering as a way of learning wasn’t ruled out but also not seen as the best way because paid staff are only able to give their volunteers rather restricted training & support. Similarly, although volunteers maybe seen as a relatively cheap solution for tackling backlogs, uncatalogued pockets of stock etc. they are often not best placed to deal with items that have been left precisely because of their ‘tricky’ nature.

Further posts touched on the erosion of expertise through staff cuts and outsourcing of cataloguing. Some expressed the hope that a decline in professional posts would – eventually – be set off by new, less traditional roles around metadata creation for other resources with different rules, formats, and schemas. 

Reading a bit between the lines there was general consensus that learning to catalogue can only be done by practising it, preferably with background information and comprehensive documentation; and that one has to keep on learning about changes in rules, their application and about the systems with which do that job.


The afternoon session focussed on basic training with RDA/AACR2 and MARC21 for mainstream materials. Participants shared their paths into cataloguing - showing a mixture of compulsory and optional modules in the various library courses. Despite this variation many confirmed that most of the knowledge is acquire once in a post and over time. They also stressed again that cataloguing is far from a finite set of knowledge and skills, but evolving and broadening at an increasing rate.

Although many libraries have implemented RDA now, in-house training still includes some AACR2 because of the legacy data. FRBR doesn't seem to feature highly on the training agenda.


The following links to training materials (RDA in particular) and references mentioned throughout the day were:
http://www.oclc.org/en-US/events/2013/rdawebinar101613.html
http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/our-work/cataloguing
https://cambridgerda.wordpress.com/
http://www.slainte.org.uk/aacr/training.htm
http://www.oclc.org/bibformats/en.html
https://www.coursera.org/#course/metadata
http://www.cilip.org.uk/cataloguing-and-indexing-group/professional-tools-and-resources
Events by CIG in Scotland (CIGS) http://www.cilips.org.uk/cigs-home/
John Bowman's 'Essential Cataloguing'
Ed Jones' 'RDA and serials cataloguing'
Robert L. Maxwell’s ‘Maxwell's Handbook for RDA’
Stephen Miller's 'Metadata for digital resources'
Melissa Parent's 'Implementing RDA in a time of change' 
Anne Welsh's 'Practical Cataloguing'



Here's to day 2!