A week in the life of a cataloguer, sort of
Right, where to start. At the beginning I suppose. I work as a cataloguer in the Bibliographic Data Management Department (I know, quite a mouthful) of Trinity College Library Dublin. I’ve been working here, oh, roughly seven years and in that time I’ve acquired some modest cataloguing skills. My work is quite interesting and varied - chiefly because the material I work with is and if you kindly keep reading I’ll attempt to explain what exactly I get up to of a bog standard week.
Trinity if you are not aware is a legal deposit library, which basically means we get a copy of every book published in Great Britain and Ireland. This is both a gift (hey, we have everything!) and a burden (er, where do I put this?). As part of a famous and mysterious Memorandum of Agreement signed in our distant and glorious past, the honour of cataloguing all these books is shared unequally between the various legal deposit libraries - thank you British Library. Being librarians, the allocation was done alphabetically – we got the letter d. As a result I have acquired an expertise in the cataloguing of books on death, depression, diets, databases and dogs.
For most people the week begins on Monday but for me it begins on Thursday, for that is the day when we receive our weekly tranche of books in dire need of a bibliographical record. We are informed how many we have to do (usually between 20-30) and we proceed in a civilised and orderly fashion to share the material fairly and equally. Actually, that’s a complete a lie. There’s usually a mad scramble to get your hands on a bunch of half decent books. There is an unwritten rule in cataloguing: the thinner and more insubstantial something is, the more tedious and painstaking it will be to catalogue. Many’s the day I have arrived late on the scene to be greeted by a dispiriting bundle of government reports (see Fig.1).
The good news is that we also catalogue everything published in Ireland, both north and south (this means our allocation extends to the whole alphabet). In cataloguing these books I pay extra attention to our authority files – if an author is not established in the Library of Congress I make a NACO submission. This is oddly satisfying, but I can’t really explain why. Occasionally I make a SACO submission – this is not quite as straightforward a process as sometimes LC will say no. A former colleague had a long and trying correspondence with LC in his attempt to have the term “real ale” established as a separate and distinct subject heading. Happily he was successful!
In addition to creating original catalogue records the other main thing that I do is classify material to go on the open shelves (the vast majority of our books go to stacks). In Trinity we create shelfmarks using a combination of Dewey and Ranganathan strings which make absolutely no sense to anybody. Each cataloguer looks after certain subject areas. For years I looked after physics, chemistry and computer science but just recently I have been reassigned to film studies, history of art and English literature. For a cataloguer with an arts degree this is the equivalent of having died and gone to heaven.
Over the course of one week I could literally handle hundreds of books. There are records available for most books – it’s rare that you will not find some kind of a record either in OCLC or RLUK. In recent times I have begun cataloguing DVDs which I have discovered to be a complete minefield bibliographically speaking. I’m really hoping RDA will bring some clarity to the situation.
So, having explained, very briefly, my core cataloguing duties I thought I might conclude by listing some of the other bits and pieces I do: I maintain and update the department website; teach information skills; give enthusiastic library tours; serve on several library committees; moderate the tagging function on our Stella catalogue (named after one of Jonathan Swift’s girlfriends, don’t ask me why!) and create podcasts of varying quality for our library website.
Okay, that’s it for now, more pics ‘n stuff to come, thank you for reading!
PS. Quick plug, for my sins I am currently Secretary of the Library Association of Ireland’s CIG – our annual seminar is coming up soon, details here:
http://www.supersaas.com/schedule/LAICIG/Seminar
Fig. 1 Dispiriting bundle of government reports
Fig. 2 Current state of my desk
