It’s really interesting hearing how much in-house training people (have to) do. I’m really getting the impression that people who want to embark on a cataloguing career only really need to show an interest and a willingness to put the hours in, and most of the training can/will be done in-house or is self-taught anyway.

Helen.

Hi

We implemented RDA at Glasgow earlier in 2014. I used all of the materials mentioned below in familiarising myself with RDA and for compiling training for our staff. In particular the Cambridge,  Oxford, & LC training materials were invaluable and saved me a  huge amount of time. Like most who have implemented, we still catalogue with AACR2 when we cannot get a good quality RDA record, but increasingly cataloguers are converting these records to RDA.

I included a presentation on FRBR for our cataloguers, but I’m not convinced that 6 -9 months down the line they have retained this background or find it helpful in their cataloguing. However they have adapted very quickly to RDA, much more quickly than I anticipated. Problems that have arisen for mainstream materials tended to be problems that cropped up even when using AACR2. We have used the transition to RDA to address some cataloguing practices.

We have moved on now from mainstream materials to e-resources, videorecordings, and are looking currently at music scores and sound recordings. Interestingly when doing some cataloguing of e-videos, we found it easier to catalogue with RDA than AACR2.

As to training still in AACR2. This is a difficult one, but since cataloguers have still to deal with AACR2 for different types of resources as well as retro cataloguing, we still have to cover both. We had a new member of staff just around the time we implemented, and I found that there really was no option but to do this. She coped very well.

Cataloguers, on the whole, are not using the toolkit, they find it is difficult to navigate and to get answers for even simple questions. We did our own simplified instructions and have also found some materials on the web from other institutions helpful, particularly for non-book materials, e.g Stanford & Yale produce good documentation.

Regards

Rosemary

Rosemary Stenson

Head of Metadata Services

Direct Line: +44 (0)141 330 6777

Fax: +44 (0)141 330 4952

University of Glasgow Library

Hillhead Street

Glasgow G12 8QE

http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/library/

http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/library/mobile/

The University of Glasgow, Charity no. SC004401

John Bowman's 'Essential Cataloguing'

Ed Jones' 'RDA and serials cataloguing'

Stephen Miller's 'Metadata for digital resources'

Anne Welsh's 'Practical Cataloguing'