I didn’t introduce myself yesterday – only having time to catch up with the discussions later in the day. My name is Joanne Fitton – I am Special Collections Manager at the University of Leeds (you all heard from my colleague Rhiannon yesterday).
I trained as an Archivist and like many people have ended up with wider responsibilities, including rare books. I have not had much chance for practical day to day experience of cataloguing rare books but I am involved in discussions about the approach we
take, how we prioritise work and how this feeds into wider resource discovery and collections management for all special collections materials.
I completed the Dundee distance learning module that was mentioned yesterday and for anyone finding themselves in a similar position to me I would recommend it. It gave me a broad introduction to rare books management and I found many
of the issues paralleled my experience as an archivist. The course gave some practical opportunities to mark up catalogues and provided lots of useful insight into the history of the book – as someone without a grounding in print cataloguing this was all useful.
However, this was only ever an introduction and quite quickly the practical challenges being faced to record copy specific information at Leeds in the wider University Library context and within the systems we have adopted became clear…. some of which Rhiannon
has mentioned.
The first day of the forum has been very useful to see how others are tackling some of the more knotty problems… it gives us lots of food for thought. So, thank you everybody!
Joanne Fitton
Special Collections Manager
Brotherton Library, University of Leeds
Leeds
LS2 9JT
T: 44 (0)11334 36387/ 35518
http://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections
https://twitter.com/#!/LULSpColl