#uklibchat is a fortnightly discussion group for librarians and information professionals, and on Thursday 23rd February between 6:30 PM and 8:30 PM, we’re going to be talking about cataloguing and classification.

An agenda for the chat is available here and can be added to if you have any questions that you would like to raise during the discussion.

These chats are a great way for librarians to share their ideas about a subject and to find out more about things that they may not often come into direct contact with at work. I’m hoping that this discussion will give people outside of cataloguing a chance to learn more about the importance of cataloguing work, and I’m sure it will also be very interesting for people who work or want to work as cataloguers. Topics to be discussed on the day include the future of cataloguing, training, and how catalogues could be presented to users.

More information about the chat; and summaries of previous chats can be found on our blog (http://uklibchat.wordpress.com/).

The #uklibchat team can be contacted by Twitter through @uklibchat if there’s anything you’d like to ask us.

Here’s a list of people with catalog(u)ing / metadata / systems roles who have signed up for Library Day in the Life Round 8. It’s a rough list, put together from the descriptions people gave on the libday wiki page supplemented by people who contacted us letting us know they were taking part. If you’re involved in something catalog(ue)-related and want to be added here and to our twitterlist, let us know.

• @AhavaCohen (Love in the Library)
• @AnneWelsh (Library Marginalia)
• @Annie_Bob (The Hobbit Hole)
• @archelina (The toast in the machine)
• @bibliosaurusrex (Bibliosaurus Rex: beyond 140 characters)
• @bringyournoise (bringyournoise)
• @ces43 (Librarian in training)
• @cololibrarygirl
• @darklecat (Dark side of the catalogue)
• @evil_jen (Includes bibliographical references and index)
• @Jason_W_Dean (The Dean Files and Jason’s Grey Cells)
• @JohnsanG (Life through a lens)
• @libdespot (245 00 $a Split files : $b a blog)
• @librarianofdoom
• @millieshoes (The Bradford Librarian)
• @sara_mooney (Sara Mooney)
• @sidesmirk
• @slmcdanold (The randomness that is life); also on Google+ and flickr
• @stjerome1st (Blogging cataloguing)
• @ULtower (Discovery)

Image: DC Hero Minifigs (most of them) by Julian Fong. Copyright Commons, some rights reserved.

Library Day in the Life is a fantastic project, now in its 8th round collecting information about librarians’ daily work through blogs, tweets and photos.

We’d love to see more posts about cataloguing and related matters this time – please let us know if you’re signing up and have cataloguing / metadata / systems duties, and we’ll post a round up at the end of the week.

This guest post is from Robin Armstrong-Viner, Head of Collection Management at the University of Kent. It’s an interesting look at how to go about recruiting in a time of almost continuous change, with a bonus job advert at the bottom if anyone’s jobhunting at the moment.  What do you think? What is most important now, specific defined skills or the attitude of the person recruited in the face of changing times? How do you describe what you’re looking for to make sure you get the right candidates? And what skills and attitudes should cataloguers be looking to in their professional development (#catcoders, I’m looking at you – post to follow about that!). Over to Robin…

Like many (if not all) HE institutions the University of Kent is experiencing a period of rapid change. The most obvious driver is the increase in tuition fees for new entrants later this year but there are a number of reasons for this. The need for the University to offer an inspiring student experience and produce innovative world-leading research while operating in an effective, efficient, sustainable and professional manner (three of the key messages from the University’s Plan for 2009-12) creates significant challenges for Information Services including Library Collections.

During 2012-13 we expect to see transformational change within Library Collections as we review each of our core processes including the selection, acquisition, cataloguing, classification, processing, delivery, preservation and disposal of learning and research materials in all formats. We are fortunate in being able to recruit a Project Manager to help lead and support these projects working with the teams involved but there has been much discussion about what should be included in the person specification for that role.

Most of the discussion has been around how to find someone with the right attitude. Naturally job descriptions tend to focus on specific tasks and skills, but is this the best approach in a period of uncertainty and change? What are the skills associated with innovation? Can you write a job description around attitudes such as being keen to explore new ideas and develop new skills? Is it appropriate to demand that candidates are not only comfortable with technology but eager to exploit it to achieve its maximum potential? How do you attract advocates and champions?

And where does this leave traditional library skills? Should a formal qualification in librarianship be an essential criterion? By making it one would we risk creating a barrier to those outside the profession (or even those within it but who haven’t ever taken that final step) who could bring the very attitudes and approaches we need? An understanding of library processes, MARC, etc would help, but could someone who has been involved in process improvement and the transformation and repurposing of data in other contexts use that experience to benefit us?

I don’t know that we’ve found the answer (yet!) but we’ve had a go in the job description we’ve created at http://tinyurl.com/8yrpzgp. And if you’re a High Visibility Cataloguer who is looking for a challenge we’d love to receive an application from you!

It was an interesting initiative, and we all had the best of intentions to follow it up, perhaps with a free publication.

Life got in the way, and it’s 2012 already, with no more cataloguing book club discussions. New year, new resolutions and all that. I’m working on a review of Michael Gorman’s autobiography, Broken pieces: a library life, 1941-1978 (ALA, 2011). It’s not free, but it’s bound to be in libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, and Gorman is, of course, both an iconic cataloguer (editor of AACR) and a writer who has been unafraid to spark debate throughout his long and distinguished career.

If we were to plan a new #catbkchat, would people be interested? Would this be a good (and accessible) title to choose? When would be a good time to do it? February? March? The book is 207 pages long, and, like all Gorman’s work, an easy read.

Perhaps leave a comment here if you would be interested, with an idea of whether you would prefer a day in February or March and which day of the week. Friday, perhaps?

What would your six amazing things be? And how do you describe being a cataloguer when training a new member of staff or talking to students and others new to the library world?

As demonstrated by the recent ‘anatomy of a cataloguer’ debate, the thing we most love about our job isn’t pinning down bibliographic details with merciless accuracy just to appease our uptight personalities, but the fact that what we do helps people find stuff. More than that, without us they may never find it at all. So I just wanted to share a recent experience that warmed my heart and shows how a catalogue record created in the UK can lead, in less than 72 hours, to a satisfied patron with an item on their desk in India.

At the British Library for Development Studies we catalogue (index) individual journal articles from about 160 journals, many of which aren’t indexed by any other A&I services. Once an article is added to our OPAC it is harvested by our ‘Updates’ service, which sends out subject-specific notifications of our new acquisitions to subscribers via email or RSS on a fortnightly basis.

Subscribers (who may be individual researchers, librarians or other staff working on sourcing information for research institutes, universities, NGOs etc) can then request any item in their Update via our document delivery service.

In this case, I catalogued an article from The Indian Journal of Economics on Wednesday, taking care to add relevant subject descriptors (from the catchily named OECD Macrothesaurus for Information Processing in the Field of Economic and Social Development). It was then harvested and sent as part of our ‘Governance, civil society and democratisation’ Update on Thursday. One of our email subscribers, who also has a document delivery account with us, requested it on Friday morning and I duly scanned and delivered the full text of the article to his email inbox on Friday afternoon.

I’d say that was pretty good customer service and an excellent use of the cataloguer’s art (or is it a science? or a craft?) And while it may be unusual for a cataloguer to also be involved with document supply and hence see both ends of the process, as it were, it’s definitely not unusual for us to go out of our way to make things findable, whether from India or anywhere else.

Are you a cataloguer, or someone who works with metadata, in Wales? Would you like to meet up with other likeminded souls? I am hoping to organize a day/half-day seminar featuring presentations from cataloguers in Wales, and to enable a networking occasion. Can you please contact me if you are a) theoretically interested in attending such an event and b) willing to give a presentation at this event

I am looking for presentations on any of the following themes: special projects, reclassification, retrospective projects, working as a sole cataloguer/one-man band, preparing for RDA, collaborative cataloguing… but am quite happy to have anything suggested!

• Venue: Cardiff University
• Date: January/February 2012
• Cost: Free (or low cost) – this will be a zero budget event, I just want people to get together in a conducive atmosphere

Please contact me on PierceKF@Cardiff.ac.uk or leave a comment on my blog post http://darksideofthecatalogue.wordpress.com/ Feel free to disseminate this to anyone you think might be interested. Although I am focusing on people who work in Wales (because that is where I am based, and because I think a regional focus will be interesting), I am happy for people who live outside Wales to attend (the more the merrier).

In a way it is good that we are being stirred into having this debate. The old stereotypes of cataloguers “off in their own little nooks/rooms, with unprocessed, not-quite-alive materials” absolutely needs to be challenged. As Céline Carty points out in her response to Theresa’s post the profession as a whole is trying to break out of the echo chamber and prove these outdated stereotypes wrong.

That doesn’t mean to say that I haven’t worked in institutions where what Theresa describes was largely the case in the past, but as with everything in librarianship roles are constantly evolving and changing to meet the needs of our institutions and users. From a personal perspective I’ve seen my job title change from ‘Cataloguer’ to ‘Bibliographic Services Librarian’ and then to ‘Acquisitions and Metadata Librarian’ in the last 3 years alone and as my role develops further I expect more change. Many people who have cataloguing as part of their job description also staff issue and enquiry points, write code, contribute metadata to institutional repositories and other electronic objects, think strategically about service-wide workflows, liaise with suppliers of material in a myriad of formats and then work out how to describe these items so that people can find them when they need to. There are a doubtless hundreds more diverse aspects to the cataloguer’s role that have been missed out here – feel free to add yours in the comments because it is important to explain to each other, to other librarians and to the world at large the scope of what we actually do.

The idea that cataloguing doesn’t involve a lot of change is something I absolutely disagree with – and I think most people currently trying to keep up with the pace of change in the metadata sphere right now will disagree too. At the moment cataloguers are writing policies to cover RDA, DDC23, whatever might replace MARC21, RFID, how we manipulate freely available data in a variety of standards to be of use to us, how our catalogues will work with newly purchased resource discovery platforms, and how we can mine our data more effectively to give better results to our users and better statistics to our colleagues.

Perhaps part of the difficulty in battling the stereotypes expressed in Theresa’s post lies with the traditionally back office nature of the cataloguers role. The idea that cataloguing isn’t a high-visibility role needs to change, which is why this blog exists in the first place – so that cataloguers and metadata practitioners have a place to demonstrate and share all the ways that we have broken out of the ‘cataloguing echo chamber’ and proven our value as a branch of librarianship to colleagues who might still cling to the outdated vision of cataloguers hiding behind piles of books, not engaging with our users.

Finally though, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of what can be said in a 300 word guest blog post and that the spirit I suspect Theresa had hoped her post would be read in just doesn’t have much chance to come through in such a short piece. Hopefully the debate that has ensued will lead to more cataloguers becoming vocal and visible, which can only be a good thing for us and the profession as a whole.

The list provides a simple and quick way to find cataloguing Tweeps to follow, and can be found here. Follow it (and @HVCats) to keep up to date with what is being discussed in the metadata world and hopefully get some high visibility ideas too. Most of you who already use Twitter will be aware of the Magical Metadata Fairies Twitter list (formerly called Troublesome Catalogers) maintained by Becky Yoose (@yo_bj) which is also a great source of twitter cataloguing discussion. Our list probably has more of a UK bias at the moment (though we’re hoping that will change over time) and also only includes people who have specifically requested to be added.

If you’d like to be included on the list please message @HVCats.