Hi everybody,

I would just like to briefly introduce myself, too. My name is Iris O’Brien. I manage the day-to-day running of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) at the British Library and the early printed cataloguing team, which mainly works on the ESTC.

As part of my role, I also provide support for early printed resources cataloguing across the British Library, including advising on early printed resources cataloguing guidelines and practices and giving training sessions on early printed resources cataloguing in general.

I am the chair of the UK Bibliographic Standards Committee (BSC) of the CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Group and the British representative on the ACRL/RBMS DCRM-RDA Task Force.

Like Katie, I always wanted to work with rare books and special collections. During my graduate traineeship at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies I gained a lot of practical cataloguing experience but not a lot of rare books cataloguing. I then did the MA in Library & Information Studies at UCL. One of my main reasons for choosing UCL was that the course offered modules in historical bibliography and advanced cataloguing and I was hoping that this would give me a good base for jobs in the special collections sector. My first professional job was as a cataloguer at the Library of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, where I got the chance to catalogue the Institute’s historical collection, which covered a lot of pre-1850 books. My training in historical bibliography was really helpful here as I had to teach myself how to catalogue rare books. When the historical collection moved to the Foyle Special Collections Library at King’s College London, I was lucky to move over with the books and I received a great introduction to working with special collections and rare book cataloguing there. I then took on a project based rare cataloguing post at the British Library before moving on to my current post.