INDEPTH
Why do we want to catalogue?
In this article, Harriet Hopkins shares the lengths to which she was willing to go to equip her team with core skills in an art-form that many librarians thought was dying.
DO we want to catalogue? Public libraries training is a mixed bag – it’s as important to know how to run a successful bounce and rhyme as it is to help someone complete a housing benefit claim. My colleagues and I have a vast array of courses under our belts, from visual merchandising to code club; alzheimer’s awareness to social media marketing; IOSH to origami. Our understanding of the LMS isn’t entirely basic – we use its tools to help us serve our customers well. What we don’t have – or, at least we didn’t have at Awen Libraries – was a deeper understanding of the catalogue records themselves. This unknown gave cataloguing an aura of mysticism. Automated systems have removed the requirement and, in our service, it was only Nicola, our Re- sources Development Manager who needed to know how to add an item from scratch. She had learnt this from crib sheets, practise and a one-off day course that enabled her some further understanding, but not the full scope. With most cataloguing automated, and Nicola
trained, what could we gain from the wider skills? And why would a Branch Manager, moving further into people management than stock management, be so keen to learn it?
What do we want to catalogue? I don’t need to know how to catalogue the latest James Patterson or Nora Roberts. In public libraries, the bulk of our books have been arriving with shelf-ready metadata for well over a decade. But that’s not how Local Studies materials tend to get here. Many of the books in Local Studies have been produced locally – printed at the local newspaper offices or in someone’s home office. They don’t have ISBNs, and they don’t show up in the database of records
38 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Harriet Hopkins Awen Cultural Trust.
we can download from our suppliers. Most of these titles aren’t held by the National Library of Wales, and some aren’t even in stock in other libraries nearby. We may be the only place that holds some of this material, and when people ask us for it, we may be the only place that they might reasonably expect to have it. And short of memorising the collection item by item ourselves, if something’s not on the catalogue, then even we don’t know it’s on our shelves.
Ten years in libraries
In 2011, I was just joining Bridgend Library and Information Service (now Awen Libraries). I was excited about the career path ahead of me. Armed with an MA in Creative Writing and skills like teaching, events management, customer service and production co-ordination under my belt, I felt confident that all I needed to add was a professional libraries qualification to run a public library in the changing landscape they sat within. However, those qualifica- tions were no longer essential and, though I understood why, I still felt there was a rung missing on the ladder.
Three years after joining libraries, I was handed a thesis by a local graduate. Would we like it for our stock? The team I was
March 2022
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