The problems of cataloguing in Higher Education

Jennie-Claire Perry

Project Co-ordinator: Collection Management

Overview

• About me

• The new HE marketplace

• The cost of cataloguing

• A dying art?

• Evolution vs. extinction

• The value of cataloguers and cataloguing

About me

• PGDip Information Science UCL 2009• MCLIP 2011

• Project co-ordinator, University of Kent – June 2012

• Acquisitions & Metadata Librarian – UAL • Assistant A&ML – UAL• Senior Library Assistant (A&M) – Birkbeck• Sotheby’s Institute of Art, KIAD

The traditional disclaimer…

• All views are my own, NOT that of the

University of Kent or any of my previous

institutions.

• This presentation is based on one given at

CILIP in March 2012 by Robin Armstrong-Viner.

The new HE marketplace

• All courses at

University of Kent:

£9,000

• HEFCE funding cuts

• League tables

• New global

competition

The cost of cataloguing at the University of Kent

• £5 – £11 per item in staff costs (Grades 3 – 7)

• £100,000 worth of purchased items currently ‘In Processing’

• £128,000 worth of gifts currently not on the catalogue

• 17,000 items catalogued in 2010-11 by 5.6 FTE

Is cataloguing a dying art?

http://www.unshelved.com/2010-10-11

Is cataloguing a dying art?

• Cataloguing from scratch for everything

• Spending hours deliberating which MARC field

to use

• Tweaking already decent records

• Manually editing thousands of records in-house

• Unnecessary in-house classification schemes

Evolution, NOT extinction!

• Macro, not micro cataloguing

• Exploit the potential of automating tasks

• Collaboration – sharing of best practice

• Enhancing the functionality of your LMS

• Metadata vs. “traditional” cat & class

• Demonstrating how we add value

The value of cataloguers

• Finding ways to describe new media and new

formats to enable discovery

• Working within multiple systems: catalogues,

repositories, resource discovery layers, media

streaming services, e-resource aggregators…

• Using multiple standards and schemas

(including MARC, DCRM(b), Dublin Core…)

The value of cataloguing

• Increased ease of retrieval

• Better management information for the

collection

• Improved matching and merging of records

• Simpler cross-walking of data

• Ease of sharing data and services

Contact details

j.perry@kent.ac.uk

@evil_jen

01227 827 7095