I can testify to the amount of material that needs to be covered. 6 years ago I taught AACR2 and MARC in 20 hours of practicals and covered theory and other metadata (like DublinCore) in 10 hours of lectures. Those who stayed on for Advanced Cat got 12 more hours on metadata.
Now, we still have 30 contact hours in the core module, which I divide into 10 hours of theory and 20 hours of practicals. This has to include AACR2, RDA, MARC, FRBRised catalogues and now BIBFRAME. Many of our students choose UCL because we give plenty of Cat and Class as core, so not to deliver on the latest developments would really let them down.
I have coped by introducing the extended (or "flipped") classroom for our practicals. Students engage with text-based, video and audio instructional materials - some produced by practitioners like the Cambridge and LOC materials and others produced specifically for them - they get the theory for everything through the 10 hours of plenary sessions and then choose (and let me know) their learning objectives for the practicals. Most this year are focusing on RDA in MARC for their assessment, but are choosing to engage with RDA in BIBFRAME and AACR2 in MARC as well. Others are choosing to be assessed in AACR2 in MARC or simply AACR2 in ISBD ("catalogue card display"), but again are engaging with the others in the practicals. There's only one student who isn't really keen to know a lot about Cataloguing, and they are simply working on their assessment (a cataloguing policy with examples) in AACR2 in ISBD.
Classes are more challenging to teach, as I have to switch between RDA and AACR2 as I move between work groups, and they are a lot noisier, but I think that's a good thing. The students take ownership of their learning and are good about asking questions and bringing in challenging materials to share. This year, I'm trialling Padlet, which allows anyone in the group to share images and links instantly on a shared webpage.
One of my aims in teaching is for each student to feel they have an individualised learning experience within a group setting, and I was scared having to cover so much in so much detail would require going back to drilling everyone in the same examples at the same time. Instead, thanks to technology there is more choice and more chance for each to build on their trainee experience.
This year all the students are helping us to design an Open Educational Resource to teach BIBFRAME: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/research/collaborativeprojects/lobd So we had a session on RDF and a practical using Protege (an ontology editor) to get them up to speed on RDF triples. Then we played around with the LOC and Zepheira's editor, comparison tool and transformations service. It was *brilliant* to hear the students' observations on these - an stunning to see those who had started with no Cataloguing experience and a bit scared of cataloguing feel able to voice their constructive feedback on the tools in beta.
Next year, my teaching goal will be to incorporate more co-creation of knowledge in this way in the second half of the core module. As Debbie Lee pointed out in her paper at the CIG conference this year, the next generation, unburdened of decades of experience using AACR2 don't seem to flounder when faced with new stuff, but, on the contrary, thrive.
I'm going to go away and be quiet again now.
Thanks for all the comments in the for so far - hearing about real-world challenges is a vital part of keeping the cataloguing curriculum up-to-date, and I'm sure other educators are finding the forum as inspiring as I am.
All the best
Anne
Anne Welsh
Programme Director MA LIS
Sent from my iPhone
> On 26 Nov 2014, at 12:20, "Alan MacLennan (abs)" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I teach cataloguing as part of a compulsory Cat & Class module on our MSc Information and Library Studies here at RGU. The arrival of RDA has certainly made it more challenging to fit everything in - well, it's impossible to fit *everything* in, but I'm trying to include a reasonably representative sample of both AACR2 and RDA, because I think many libraries are in transition, and some may not change in the near future, so best to equip students either way. In any case, it's good to know where the rules came from. I thought, when I was nominated to take up the cataloguing aegis from a predecessor, that I was in for an easy life, just the decennial updates to AACR to worry about. Ooops. ;-)
>
> Sorry if this is late, I'm finding even the volume of the digests too hard to keep up with, along with the day job.
>
> Regards,
>
> Alan
>
>
> Dr Alan MacLennan
> Lecturer/Course Leader
> Aberdeen Business School
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