#catbkchat 2012?

Last year we had a successful twitter-based cataloguing book club chat (#catbkchat) about the newly-published Conversations with catalogers in the 21st century (Libraries Unlimited, 2011).

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?

Cataloguing book chat

For those cataloguers/catalogers who choose high visibility on Twitter, you may have already heard that we’re thinking of having a Twitter book club for cataloguing book chat. It started because quite a few of us were excited to be receiving our copy of Conversations with Catalogers in the 21st Century, edited by Elaine R. Sanchez. This isn’t exactly a High Visibility Cataloguing initiative, it just organically grew out of Twitter chat but it’s a great way to promote discussion about our profession and our futures so it seems a great fit for us here.

We would love to attract as many interested people as possible, so we’ll be tweeting our cataloguing book chat using the hashtag #catbkchat (Twapperkeeper archive thanks to Heather Pitts). If you’re not on Twitter, then please feel free to add to the comments here as part of the book discussion or to add links to posts about the book on your own blog (and with your permission we’ll tweet the links too, to reach the Twitter cataloguing people too).

We haven’t tried this before, I think I’m right in saying it’ll be a first Twitter book club for most of the people taking part. We already have cataloguers from the US, Canada and the UK taking part. We’d love you to join in or, if you don’t have the book available, then hope you can follow the discussion and learn something from it or promote more discussion that way.

The book is in sections, so we’ll probably take a section at a time – more details to follow….