#uklibchat Cataloguing and Classification

#uklibchat is a twitter discussion group that began in July 2011 and has been taking place fortnightly ever since.

This Thursday’s chat was on cataloguing and classification, and I’ve been looking through the tweets this morning – although really focusing on question 4 on the agenda:

4. Do you think library schools should be teaching cat & class or is it best learned on the job?

I dipped into the chat near the start, so people knew I was interested and would be following up, but was not taking part:

 

@AnneWelsh Can you take the C&C modules at UCL w/o doing the MA? #uklibchat

— Tina Reynolds (@tinamreynolds) February 23, 2012

At the moment, core modules are not available for short courses. This year, we’ve taught two classes of over thirty Cataloguing & Classification, and as we offer hands-on practicals using groupwork, that’s about the right size for active learning. In the Cataloguing component of Cat & Class 1, there are ten hours of lectures and twenty hours of practicals, across ten weeks.

Each of the lectures include break-out activities – e.g. making a brief mapping from a simple card catalogue entry to MARC coding or discussing IFLA’s tables of national bibliographies and their format (online, microform, paper-based) – and one, on cataloguing policy writing (which is important for the catalogue policy assessment) consists of students assessing existing real-world policies and sharing their evaluations. Cataloguing practicals consist of working through examples (books I have acquired for teaching) using AACR2, in order to become familiar with its layout and application.

Most students seem to enjoy the classes, and reading the tweets it’s nice to see positive statements being made:

#uklibchat Q4.Cat&Class should definitely be taught #libraryschool. I’ve learned so much from those courses.

— Nora Khayi (@No_Kh) February 23, 2012

#uklibchat Q4. Without cat. training as part of degree I don’t think I would ever have learned its importance or investigated deeply.

— Kate W. (@foxesinlove) February 23, 2012

After completing her MA LIS, Kate worked in practice, including reorganising a library’s cataloguing systems, before returning to UCL with AHRC funding for an MPhil/PhD. It was good to see positive responses to her topic from respected colleagues in the UK cataloguing community:

@foxesinlove Wow! I love it! #uklibchat

— Lynne Dyer (@stjerome1st) February 23, 2012

@foxesinlove Wow fascinating stuff! #uklibchat

— Rachel P (@archelina) February 23, 2012

It was also great to hear colleagues calling for more research in practice:

@kmlclifford agree. need more knowledge of how users use the catalogue. where I work we dont’ do nearly enough of that #uklibchat

— Nicky Ransom (@nckyrnsm) February 23, 2012

@kmlclifford shame it doesn’t have higher priority as we coudl learn so much #uklibchat

— Nicky Ransom (@nckyrnsm) February 23, 2012

Apart from supporting evidence-based practice, there is a real need for those of us teaching cataloguing to find out more about current practice, and research by practitioners is a real help for this.

This week a special issue of the Journal of Library Metadata goes to press, and I’m really pleased to have an article in it, co-authored with cataloguers Celine Carty and Helen Williams. It’s a piece of action research based on the emails during last year’s CIG e-forum on RDA. The rest of the issue considers elements of the future of bibliographic control, and we’re particularly glad that issue editor Shawne Miksa has included this report of the baseline attitudes of UK cataloguers towards the upcoming changes.

Cataloguing education should cover the theory and core principles, but it should also prepare students for the on-the-job training that should be the next stage in their apprenticeship. That’s partly the purpose of academic vocational Masters, after all.

——-

Image: chat by rwdownes. Copyright Commons, some rights reserved.

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