Thanks to Rachel Playforth for asking this question, we are very interested in responses here in the comments or on Twitter to @hvcats
Like many librarians I’m naturally curious, and like many librarians I spend a fair bit of time navel gazing — I mean, contemplating our identity, role and professional future. Library job titles in particular fascinate me. How many other professions are there where you can meet someone performing an almost identical role to yours whose job title is completely different, or conversely someone whose shares your job title but whose actual job bears no resemblance to yours?
This is perhaps particularly noticeable in the world of cataloguing/metadata/bibliographic services etc, so we thought it might be enlightening to get a picture of who is cataloguing and what they’re called while they do it.
There are very few official statistics available on this – the nearest benchmark I could find was an ALA survey from 2004 indicating that about 9% of US library support staff had a cataloguing-related job title (no data was provided on professional staff).
To get a more current (if very limited) snapshot, I reviewed the staff lists of 10 UK/Ireland academic libraries. Five of them had no named cataloguing staff and none had more than 3. For simplicity I restricted the search to job titles specifically mentioning cataloguing, so this isn’t to say that cataloguing isn’t happening under another name…
So now for some more unofficial, unscientific research on the state of the cataloguing art: post your job titles, past and present, in the comments please! In particular we’d be interested to hear if your job title used to mention cataloguing but now doesn’t (or indeed if your job itself used to include cataloguing and now doesn’t…)
Cataloguers on Twitter
High Visibility Cataloguing 
Hello! I was, for a while, a ‘rare books specialist’, and did quite a bit of cataloguing as part of that. And (shameless self-promotion warning) last year I had a look at the range of ‘librarian’ job-titles in general, over here: http://maedchenimmond.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/whats-your-name.html
Well to kick things off, I’m currently a Repository Coordinator (but doing about 50% cataloguing work) and was formerly a Senior Library Assistant – Cataloguing.
My job title is Cataloguing Librarian – and incidentally I work in a UK Academic library and there are currently 7 cataloguing librarians, (two of whom are temporary but are working on specialist collections – rare books/music)
I’m a subject librarian in a conservatoire, so I get my share of the cataloguing – one of the joys of being in a fairly small library. I am the Music and Academic Services Librarian.
I work in the Technical Services section of a UK academic library. I don’t do any cataloguing myself in my current role, but the staff who do are Metadata Librarians.
My job title is Data Quality Manager and Cataloguer and, as you can probably tell, I spend all of my time on cataloguing-related tasks. As an aside, I’m not too keen on this title, it’s too long for my liking, but it had been decided before I took up the post and I think it was intended to reinforce the purpose of the post internally.
My job title is chief cataöoguer and those I supervise are cataloguers although their job titles are plainly Librarian I, Librarian II
I am one of six cataloguers whose job title is Metadata Librarian. We also have two Metadata Assistants, and our manager is the Data Services and Digital Production Manager. So no mention of cataloguing anywhere! I quite often get asked what metadata actually is.
I have also been a Library Assistant who did a lot of cataloguing.
my job is Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian (there are 2 of us, plus 7 cataloguing and information services associates). Job title used to be Librarian, Cataloguing and changed when they added in the Metadata although the job itself did not change.
I work as a cataloguer in a University Library and my job title is Senior Cataloguer – most of my work is cataloguing-related. We have Junior-, Intermediate- and Senior- cataloguers but I’m not sure how helpful these qualifiers are beyond our own department.
I’m an Acquisitions & Metadata Librarian. The role was created during a restructure in which stock purchasing and cataloguing were centralised – the closest job to this prior to restructure was Senior Cataloguer, but this role is much wider so I can see the need for it to change. My department also has 2 Assistant Acquisitions & Metadata Librarians and 4 Collection Development Assistants.
My job title is “Bibliographical Access Manager” (chosen for the acronym as much as anything – KERPOW was a stretch too far), and before that I was “Deputy Bibliographical Services Librarian”. I’ve always been the chief cataloguer but we felt that was rather a restrictive job title, especially given the merging of acquisitions and cataloguing functions. And we wanted to get “Manager” in there, and lose the “Deputy”, as much for political reasons as because of actual job content.
I still think of myself as the chief cataloguer but following a “restructuring” the job now embraces acquisitions, management information and system management as well.
I’m just plain old Library Assistant, but I do a lot of cataloguing. Before that I was a Library Graduate Trainee and did my share of cataloguing, but not as much as I do now.
My job title is Digital Resource Manager, but I catalogue electronic resources when necessary, and I handle the bulk updating of our ejournal records. I also manage the repository, manage usage statistics and update the openurl resolver, along with anything else with a “digital” element. We buy in catalogue records for most of our print resources and any extra cataloguing is done by Acquisitions Assistants.
My job title is Senior Library Assistant (Cataloguing). I mainly do cataloguing – I’m the only person who does it as the main part of their job, but in theory I’m supposed to spend half my time working on the institutional repository – also on the metadata side of things. I also work on the library desk, and do ‘roaming’ around the library and assisting with shelving, and being on working non-cataloguing/metadata-related working groups.
My official job title is simply Assistant Librarian although I work full-time as a cataloguer in a legal deposit (and academic) library. This would be true of all my colleagues also. It’s really only the name of the department – Bibliographic Data Management – which identifies what we do.
My official title is Senior Information Advisor (Bibliographic and Metadata) (bit of a mouthful I know!). My role encompasses both cataloguing and editing work on the Research Repository. I’m not on the “contacts” list for the LRC – might have to consider rectifying that… My job title reflects those of everyone else in that your level comes first and then your department comes after in brackets. The subject teams do a little of the more ‘straightforward’ cataloguing – as most of our stock is shelf-ready, it’s normally the ‘tricky’ stuff that’s left…
I’m Head of Current Cataloguing in an academic library. Our cataloguers are Cataloguers. My boss is Head of Cataloguing Operations (which includes acquisitions and non-current cataloguing). There are other sites and sections of the library where staff also do some cataloguing although cataloguing isn’t part of their job title. There is also the separate repository which deals with non-marc/aacr2 metadata which might count as cataloguing but which doesn’t count as cataloguing, depending on how you look at it: it isn’t called cataloguing here.
I’m a Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian in an academic library. Before that I was an Assistant Cataloguer, but those posts are now titled ‘Library Assistant – Cataloguing’.
Hi! Good question! I was Project Cataloguer, and the my role was almost entirely cataloguing with some outreach and rationalisation work. Then I became Catalogue Librarian which still had pretty high cataloguing targets but also more preservation, space planning, teaching, and outreach. Now I am AssistantLibrarian, Modern Collections in recognition of my changed responsibilities and we are getting a new Project Cataloguer
I was a freelance Library Consultant (= cataloguer), an Inventory Assistant (did lots of cataloguing type work), Deputy College Librarian (50% cataloguing) & now Rare Books & Special Collections Librarian (some cataloguing)!
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