The first speaker, Andrew Barker from the University of East Anglia, talked us through a reclassification project of epic proportions, and yet somehow managed to make it all seem completely manageable! Andrew described how UEA’s reclassification need was identified during a sustainability survey on their acquisitions process in 2006, which highlighted their bespoke classification scheme as an inefficiency in their workflow that took subject librarians away from their core duties helping users.

UEA adopted a ‘partnered’ approach throughout the project, initially to get long-serving staff on board and then during liaison with the two outsourcing companies used to carry out large parts of the reclassification work. The first step was to move to completely shelf-ready acquisitions in August 2006, with new stock coming in classified using standard Library of Congress schedules (with a local adaptation for suffixes). This made the next phase of the project more urgent as it created dual stock sequences that didn’t encourage browsing and required lots of signage to explain.

Between 2007 and 2009 UEA entered the ‘data phase’ of the project during which Backstage Library Works won the tender to upgrade UEA’s subject headings and reclassify their stock. Over the course of one year 660,000 books were relabeled and 750,000 items were physically moved, using existing space and some temporary shelving to ensure that the library was never closed to users. UEA decided against recruiting a temporary team to carry out the stock relocation and went for the option of outsourcing to Harrow Green who provided project management and with whom Andrew and the UEA team had daily update meetings during the stock move. Andrew estimated that the entire project (the data cleanup for which is still ongoing) ran into the hundreds of thousands, so although this sounds like an incredibly successful project that had little impact on the user experience it seems unlikely that in the current economic climate many universities will be able to commit that level of funding to a reclassification project.

Before lunch Stuart Hunt from the University of Warwick talked about their reclassification project. Like many institutions, Warwick has an array of different classification schemes in use across its many campuses and hopes to standardize practice to a certain extent. Stuart spoke of the “perceived advantages of local knowledge over standards” which definitely struck a chord with me and I’m certain with many of the other cataloguers in the room! The limitations placed on acquisitions workflows by multiple classification schemes was emphasized, as was the impossibility of sharing data with other institutions and using class marks to usefully analyze the content of your collection.

The University of Warwick library had hoped to secure funding from the central university but was turned down as the time taken to show a return on investment would be so long, which forced the team to look at other areas they could take money from – chiefly unspent budgets at the end of the financial year. The team at Warwick analyzed their collection to see which areas could be focused on or even ignored (is it worth reclassifying items kept in store, for example?) and considered whether, in areas with a high turnover of new editions such as law and medicine, the life cycle of the collection would mean that there was little point going to the trouble of reclassifying old stock.

Stuart suggested sending a data sample to outsourcing companies in order to get an idea of cost. Like UEA, Warwick used Backstage Library Works to reclassify their stock and supply new spine labels, with the new class marks sitting in the bibliographic records waiting to be ‘switched on’ when the time for relabeling arrives. Stuart also recommended outsourcing, suggesting that doing this work in house was not economically advantageous.

After lunch, during which the CIG AGM was held, Deborah Lee from the Courtauld Institute of Art described the principles for what she calls ‘guerrilla reclassification’ – targeting problem areas in a series of mini-projects. This approach came about due to the Courtauld’s bespoke classification scheme which had been created at the time of the Institute’s foundation and had been maintained very little since. Inconsistencies in the approach of cataloguers over the years had led to stock on the same subject being shelved in different places, effectively preventing browsing by the user.

Deborah’s team kept a spreadsheet of problem areas in their classification which highlighted the need to attack particular stock first, and Deborah described how this approach had been successful with a collection of exhibition catalogues. The ‘guerrilla’ approach sounds like a great way to achieve a lot with a limited budget and limited staffing, providing the background research into problem areas is done first.

Next, Heather Jardine from City of London libraries talked about what she called a ‘reclassification project gone wrong’, but which really sounded more like a successful ongoing (and Heculean!) task. Like the University of Warwick, the libraries in Heather’s group used a variety of different classification schemes and a project was undertaken to synchronize these as much as possible. The project has over run by six years so far, but a lot has been achieved in that time. An estimated 10-15% of cataloguing resource is put into the reclassification project, with cataloguers dealing with an average of 1500 titles per month each. The standardization was needed to keep up with metadata standards, to improve the service to the libraries’ users by improving browsability both at the shelf and online, and to streamline back office procedures.

Heather discussed whether it is really worth worrying about classification at all, given that most users (and some librarians!) don’t really understand how powerful a tool it can be for subject grouping and searching. This probably depends on your institution in my opinion; I currently work in a multi-site university with centralized acquisitions which could potentially save a lot of money and time by synchronizing our various classification schemes but I can appreciate that a small, single-site library may not see such benefits.

Heather’s tips for reclassification were to agree levels of specificity and terminology within your team before you start and to avoid giving subject areas to staff members with a specialist interest in them to avoid them getting over-detailed with their classification. She recommended thinking ahead to possible areas in which your collection is likely to expand, and (rather pleasingly) suggested working on the easier numbers in the middle of each subject area first which makes slotting the other stock in around them much simpler. Heather’s presentation was really useful to me –a mixture of practical tips, cautionary advice and sensible consideration of the reasons for reclassification.

Finally, Caroline Kent from the British Library gave a brief overview of WebDewey and the OCLC cataloguing pages, suggesting that if we were considering reclassifying to the new DDC23 standard we should begin by looking at the relocations and discontinuations spreadsheet provided on the OCLC site (which are also available on WebDewey – a subscription only service). Interestingly, WebDewey now contains DDC editions 22 and 23 which means that my institution is now considering purchasing a subscription to the online service rather than buying print copies which should save a few trees!

I can’t stress how valuable this session has been for my own policy development in the area of reclassification. Hearing other people share their experiences has been a great way to get a handle on where to begin thinking about a potential project that really needs attention here (and I’m sure at many other libraries as well.)

I spent Thursday out at our Wimbledon campus. The smallest of the colleges, Wimbledon’s cataloguing is a challenge chiefly because they still use Dewey edition 16 for their classification (I know, I know!) Apart from that though it is all very straightforward, with lots of the stock being additional copies of things held at Chelsea and Camberwell campuses.

The journey to Wimbledon campus takes me two hours (and two hours back) and that’s the only reason I won’t miss going out there so much. The library staff are all lovely though and I will miss them. I’ll miss the library itself too, because it reminds me of the first ever library I worked in at Maidstone which was similarly small and arty.

Today I went out to Camberwell College of Arts for my last day as a peripatetic cataloguer. Due to building works I’ve been unable to visit this campus for weeks, and so a relatively large backlog has built up. I managed to whizz through all but 1.5 shelves of it though, which was very satisfying. Hopefully their Collection Development Librarian will be pleased when he sees how little there is to pack up and send to my new department next week.

I’m not sure whether to be sad or not about the end of my peripatetic life today. I’m starting to feel very tired as a result of all the travel, but visiting  all the sites has enabled me to make lots more contacts than I would have done otherwise and has given me much broader cataloguing experience. I am really looking forward to working in our new centralised department next week though. Onwards and upwards!

First thing I had a chat with the new Assistant Manager of the library, who isn’t technically in post yet but is doing the odd day here and there to get into the swing of how things work at LCF. I’ve been working with her before at the Wimbledon college and I’m pleased I got to see her before my job changes and I’m not out in the colleges any more.

Up until lunch I raced through as much of the book cataloguing as I could so that it could stay at LCF for processing rather than being shipped over to my new office and then sent back once it was shelf ready. I also sent a pestering email to the subject librarians asking them to clear their shelves of any uncatalogued stock so that I could pack it up ready for delivery to my new office next week.

I had lunch with colleagues in the staff room which enabled us to have a good old natter for one last time After lunch I went back to my desk upstairs and began packing up all the uncatalogued stock I could find. This involved taking some of the staff to their shelves and going through the stock there to see what they wanted to keep and what could actually be binned. Some donations had been sitting around for years, so I think there will be some relief that they have been disposed of now. In spite of my bullying tactics a couple of the subject librarians still have uncatalogued stock on their shelves which they will have to box up themselves and send over to me using our inter-site courier service. Pleasingly, all this only resulted in four boxes of stock to be sent to my new department, although three of those boxes contained DVD box sets which will need some considerable patience (and tea!) to get catalogued.

I said my goodbyes and left at 4pm so that I had plenty of time to get to CILIP HQ and hand in my Chartership portfolio. I am so pleased I’ve got this done now and even though I am not totally convinced that it will get through first time I am at least relieved that I can put it out of my mind until the assessors get back to me with the result. As this blog was originally begun to help me through the Chartership process I am going to have to consider what to do with it now. I’ve not been a terribly regular blogger but I do find the process useful so perhaps it will become a way for me to keep up my reflective practice now that my portfolio has been submitted.

This evening I will try to get some of my house buying paperwork filled in before having an early night, because tomorrow I will be travelling out to Wimbledon so will have an early start!

Aww! Aren’t art students nice? This little bit of stencil work is on the pavement outside the entrance to the London College of Communciation at the moment and it makes me smile every time I walk over it.

Following on from yesterday’s office-based day, today I was cataloguing at LCC – the largest college in the University. Being the largest college, LCC also traditionally has the largest cataloguing backlog (7 metres at the start of play today) and at the moment a lot of that backlog is made up of DVDs.

I like cataloguing DVDs normally, but the items I was adding today felt like real end-of-year-spend purchases – the sort of thing you can get from Amazon for a couple of quid, definitely not great cinema or interesting documentaries. The obscure nature of some of the films means that cataloguing them is as much about authority control as anything else, because we give added entries to the director and the main cast (only two or three names) our authority file is huge and unwieldy. To plough through the 35 DVDs above took me right up until lunch, by which point I’d almost lost the will completely.

During the morning I also recieved an email from CILIP about a new executive briefing on Dewey classification and linked data. I really think this is something we could benefit from as an institution, given that we currently use a different version of DDC at each of the six colleges there are obvious time and money savings that could be made here if everyone were to adopt the same, more standard version. However, at a shade over £250 per delegate I already know there is little chance of me going due to our non-existent training budget. Despite this, I forwarded the email on to my line manager and her manager, just in case…

I popped across the road to the Elephant & Castle shopping centre at lunch time, which was about as lovely as you probably imagine it to be. Of all our campuses LCC suffers the most from its location in my opinion – there is very little in the surrounding area of interest and to get decent cake you have to walk up to the Imperial War Museum!

To cheer myself up in the afternoon I moved onto cataloguing monographs which are much simpler, although everything required classification which is unusual at LCC as the subject librarians often pre-classify their stock at the point of order. The afternoon went quite quickly and on my way out I popped in to have a chat with our new Subscriptions and Licensing Librarian, who is lovely and who I’m looking forward to working with from next week.

So all in all a bit of a slow day, made slightly more interesting by virtue of the fact that it was my last day scheduled for cataloguing at that college. Tomorrow will be my last day working at the London College of Fashion – hopefully it will be a bit more dynamic than today was!

Monday 25th July

Mondays traditionally mean that I am working in the department’s office at Elephant & Castle and today is no exception, except that our office is currently being rebuilt in preparation for the launch of the new Acquisitions & Metadata department next week. This means that the whole of Resources & Systems has been relocated to a presentation room within the library of the London College of Communication downstairs. Hopefully by next Monday we’ll have at least a finished room to sit in, even if we don’t have any chairs to sit on yet!

My journey to work was uneventful and I got in at 9 and had a chat with my new line manager. She isn’t technically in post yet, but will be from Monday so has been working in the departmental office on Mondays to get into the swing of things in R&S. Once my PC had booted up and let me log in (an award-winning 22 minutes from pressing the on button to seeing my inbox today) I replied to the JISC email questionnaire on consortium e-book purchasing on behalf of the University. This was trickier than it should have been because our e-book budget isn’t top-sliced, meaning that I can’t give any idea of our budget at all – it is literally whatever the librarians choose to spend from their print book budgets each year. I am responsible for all the ordering and cataloguing of e-books across the University though, so I’m most likely to be able to give some indication of spend based on previous years. The idea of consortium purchasing across all formats really interests me, but particularly for electronic resources. Our take up has been slower than most universities, possibly because academics are reluctant to believe that looking at an image from an e-book can compare to looking at a printed image. Anything that will help increase the availability of high quality information and images to our users must be a bonus though, so hopefully  the JISC project will come through.

Next I had a look at a new online information resource that my colleague @dramalibrarian and I have been putting together in order to provide a single point of call for the college library staff when they need to know what we do and how we do it. It is hoped that the website will house workflow information, details of our new RFID machines, cataloguing procedures and so on, although at the moment it is mainly dominated by our cataloguing documentation. Although we were tasked with setting up a wiki, it soon became obvious that what we really needed wasn’t wiki in the truest sense of the word and following a lot of research and testing we plumped for a good old WordPress blog instead, planning to use it more as a website than an actual blog. I added some help sheets for e-book troubleshooting to the new website and then had a lovely cup of tea.

At 10am Andy Soanes and Heather Sherman from Dawson came to talk my new manager and me through the setting up of our new centralised ordering system, using their Dawsonenter platform. Currently orders are placed by college staff (using various workflows) directly onto our Voyager LMS and are sent via EDI to Dawson each evening. In the new workflow the college subject librarians will use Dawsonenter to place order proposals which will be checked by the Acquisition & Metadata team before sending direct to Dawson, who will supply and process the items before shipping them to our new office at Elephant & Castle. We will then catalogue them if necessary and send them on to our college libraries. Much less tiring than me schlepping around London to catalogue I’m sure you’ll agree! The meeting with Andy and Heather was very useful and provided me with my main task for the rest of the day – setting up logins for every member of staff that will be placing orders, identifying the location and fund codes they are allowed access to and then linking all that information together. This is easier said than done, given that some sites have over 50 locations and some staff work across multiple sites. Until the restructuring of academic support is complete though we won’t have access to all the fund code information, so for now everyone has a login and access to the appropriate stock locations.

Just before lunch I nipped down to the LCC reprographics department to collect my newly printed Chartership portfolios, which I hope to submit this week. I’ve no idea whether I’ll be admitted to the register, but at least I’m pleased with how they look. Chartership has been quite enjoyable for me actually and I hope to prove wrong the notion that cataloguers can’t Charter. I’ve decided I’d like to become a mentor if I pass because the whole experience has been very valuable for me professionally and I’d like to help other people achieve that too.

Lunch was very quick and dull (salad – boo!) and then I spent the rest of the afternoon working on the Dawsonenter set ups for the college librarians. I may also have snuck upstairs to see how our new office is looking (Bright! Shiny! Empty!) but apart from that it was mostly data entry until home time. A good day Tomorrow holds another trip to Elephant & Castle, but this time to the college library to catalogue.

RDA

Alan Danskin of the British Library gave an excellent overview of how the BL is preparing for the possible implementation of RDA. Although he was unable to give a definite idea of whether the BL would adopt the new standard it does seem that the amount of work being put into testing and training could imply that the decision is perhaps a foregone conclusion (just my opinion of course). Alan was also unable to give a timescale for the potential implementation, but pointed to the results of the American testing committee report (PDF here) which recommended implementation no sooner than 2013 after a list of conditions had been met.

The cost of access to RDA was mentioned and mooted as a potential barrier to adoption. Working at a medium-sized academic library I can imagine that £235 for a site license plus c£40 for each concurrent user would not only have an impact on our budget but also on our workflows. In our new structure (which goes live in two weeks) we have a central cataloguing team with some staff in the colleges adding the odd item here and there. Buying RDA Toolkit licenses for them as well is just another extra cost that we could do without and could lead to either another change in workflow or, and potentially more problematic, cataloguers across the University applying two different standards to our bibliographic records.

Alan then ran through a brief side-by-side comparison of AAC2 and RDA records to highlight the most obvious differences and then moved on to consider the difficulties of mapping between the two standards, concluding that changes to MARC may be needed to fully benefit from RDA/FRBR, and pointed to the Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative recently begun by the LoC.

One of the main issues facing cataloguers at the moment is what happens with RDA and shared data? Using OCLC via Z39.50 I have already encountered several RDA records, but we currently have no policy on what to do with them. Should we edit them to become AACR2 records, or should we leave them – accepting that we will be working in a hybrid environment and that we may potentially adopt RDA ourselves anyway? Providing our LMS (Voyager) can accept the records then I think I’m in the latter camp, although with concerns about what RDA will do to our authority control.

The issue of training staff in preparation for RDA was covered too. At the BL they have a team made up of staff in various roles who are working on RDA and I think this idea would be a good opportunity for our new centralised cataloguing team to keep up links with the colleges – going out and explaining how RDA will affect us as an institution. Of particular interest to the audience was that the BL cataloguers now have dual-screen workstations so that they can have their cataloguing page open on one side and the RDA toolkit/WebDewey open on the other. I am jealous of this simply because people with two screens look somehow Much More Important than other staff. However, as a reason for purchasing an extra screen for me I can see that it probably wouldn’t cut much ice with my manager…

DDC23

When DDC23 was released in May of this year my then line manager and I tried (and failed) to attend the webinar outlining the changes. Since then, no real thought has been given to DDC23 in my department, which didn’t bother me until I attended Caroline Kent’s presentation last night.

Effectively Caroline’s message seemed to be that there were no massive changes but that the introduction had been rewritten in plainer, more up-to-date English and some terminology has also been changed for this reason (goodbye “Kinds of persons”, hello “Groups of people”). Users of WebDewey will already have been using the new numbers, the publication of DDC23 in print will just bring those new numbers to offline users.Caroline was keen to stress that implementation of DDC23 wouldn’t require lots of extra training for staff as although some of the numbers have been altered the method of applying them remains the same.

However, Caroline did give a brief outline of the main number changes. Apologies if I have missed any, I was mainly scribbling notes for the numbers most relevant to my institution. Anyway:

004-6: Obviously lots of change needed here to keep pace with computing developments, including a number for Cloud computing. There is a good summary at the DDC blog.

100: Some revisions to philosophy numbers.

200: Updates to coverage of the Eastern church and to Islam.

300: Changes here to do with changes in how to deal with groups of people.

600: New areas for nutrition and therapy.

690: Changed from “Buildings” to “Construction of buildings” for clarity.

700s: Lots of changes here (the area we use most at my Institution). 710 has changed from “Civic Art” to “Area planning and landscape architecture”, 721 has become “Architectural materials”, lots of changes and movements between the 740s and 760s  (graphic and decorative arts, including prints and printmaking – enormous areas for us), and a new number for cinematography at 777 to allow expansion of the subject.

Pleasingly for me there is a new number for Electronica at 781.648, so I can reclassify all our Gary Numan A spreadsheet of relocations can be found on the OCLC site.

Caroline also mentioned that WebDewey will no longer be accessed via OCLC Connexion but will be on a standalone site. The OCLC pages will remain for the time being, but will only show DDC22, so if you want 23 you’ll need to use the new interface.

So now I need to go back to my new manager and suggest possible revisions to our schedules. As we currently use a different version of DDC at each of our six colleges this could be an opportunity to achieve some standardisation at least in a few areas (this may be hopeless optimism though…)

I’m really looking forward to taking part in CPD 23 things. Just by having encouraged me to write this the programme has fulfilled one of my reasons for joining in – I already have a blog but seldom get around to posting on it and I need to rectify that, especially as I am meant to be a CILIP blogger!

The weeks looking at marketing yourself online, getting involved in professional organisations and reflective writing are going to be brilliant help for my ongoing Chartership preparation, and I am also excited to be finding out about web tools that I don’t currently use such as Pushnote and Prezi (okay, I’ll admit to having a go at making a Prezi but then getting the hump and deleting the whole thing!)

I’ve been suggesting 23 things to some of my colleagues in the University’s Chartership support group, so I’m hoping to stumble across some of their blogs whilst working on Thing 2 – my blogroll.

Despite this, after chatting to some of the other library staff working in their first professional posts it became clear that several of them had also been mulling over the possibility of Chartership, but hadn’t got around to it due to the pressures of work and in some cases due to a bit of uncertainty of how to get started. Gradually it became clear that we all needed to meet up and discuss how to proceed. Unfortunately it is quite difficult to get staff from across the service to meet (we have seven sites for starters!) and so we decided to formalize the meetings as a workplace peer-support group for those staff working towards or considering Chartership.

Then the fight against bureaucracy began! To be allowed to meet as a group we needed to get the agreement of the Senior Management Team, which we did with the help of the Learning Resources Manager at one of the University colleges. Senior Management Team gave us the go ahead to meet and discuss what sort of support we would need from them. The group met for the first time at the end of last year to draw up a list of ideas which were submitted at the next SMT meeting and partially approved (unsurprisingly in the current economic climate anything that involved a financial commitment wasn’t possible – we had suspected this might be the case but thought that there was probably no harm in asking … )

Subsequent to gaining the support of our senior managers the group has met twice more and has also visited the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the London College of Communication, with a program of possible visits and talks lined up for the coming year. The meetings are held termly with the organisational duties rotated among the group members and are always well attended – so far there are thirteen people on the mailing list, a number I find both surprising and exciting.

If you are thinking about starting up a similar group in your workplace you should definitely go for it – I can honestly say that without the support of my colleagues in the group my Chartership progress would have been much slower. The group has also allowed cross-college communication at a sub-management level, which was invaluable during our recent service restructure. Here’s hoping it will encourage a greater appreciation of Chartership as a professional standard within our University!

Background

The University of the Arts London is Europe’s largest specialist provider of arts education. Consisting of six colleges the University currently offers seven main library spaces (shortly to become six with the move of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design to a new campus at Kings Cross), an archive and special collections centre and the Learning Zone – a flexible work and study space carrying only core texts and providing access to computing and software facilities to students from all colleges. Registered library users can visit any of the sites to use the collections and to borrow items, which can then be returned at any other University library.

The move to peripatetic cataloguing

With such a wide variety of spaces spread across the capital the provision of consistent library and information services presents a clear challenge. Following a restructure of Library and Learning Resources in 2007 the decision was made to centralise the management of cataloguing and classification in the new Resources & Systems team, based at the London College of Communication but providing bibliographic services and electronic resources to the all colleges. Prior to this, cataloguing and classification had been carried out in the individual colleges using a wide variety of standards and classification schemes and it was anticipated that the new workflow would encourage de-duplication of tasks and allow college-based staff to concentrate on service delivery. Two trained staff members from the Resources & Systems team currently work as peripatetic cataloguers, moving between the sites according to a rota based on cataloguing volumes, adding stock to the library management system using cataloguing procedures agreed by cross-college consultation alongside local classification schemes. The cataloguing rota is manager by the Senior Cataloguer who is based in the Resources & Systems office.

The benefits of peripatetic cataloguing

As a peripatetic cataloguer at the University of the Arts London I have had the opportunity to work at five of the six colleges and have experienced both the benefits and the drawbacks of this method of working. The main benefit of peripatetic working is an increase in the profile of cataloguers within the department. Rather than being hidden in a back office, the current rota system enables cataloguers to work more closely with academic liaison staff in the various college libraries, becoming part of the library teams as well as being part of the central Resources & Systems team. College library staff at all levels are now not only more aware of the cataloguing process but also know who they can contact if they have a cataloguing issue to resolve or need expert advice on a metadata question. In single-site libraries this may not necessarily be an issue but when trying to co-ordinate practice across multiple sites it can certainly be a problem knowing exactly who to approach, especially for non-management level staff who currently have limited contact with their colleagues working in the other library spaces.

The enhanced profile that cataloguing staff have enjoyed through peripatetic working has also brought with it opportunities for the cataloguers to participate in cross-college projects, including the current project to select a resource discovery platform, with the non-peripatetic members of the Resources & Systems team drawing on the cataloguers more in-depth knowledge of the individual needs of each college library. Cataloguing staff have been invited to participate in college library team meetings and team building days, something that would not have happened had the cataloguers not been a physical presence in the site libraries. The forging of professional relationships across all grades of staff has brought undoubted benefits outside the acquisitions and metadata workflow too. Last year cataloguing staff realised a need for a peer support for new professionals within the University libraries and with the help of the librarian at the London College of Fashion began a Chartership support group, bringing together staff from all sites to support each other though the Chartership process. Last but not least of course, one of the main benefits for the peripatetic workers is that they get to eat seven times as much cake as the office based staff!

The future at UAL

A recent review of technical services at the University recommended further streamlining of our acquisitions and cataloguing processes, with the peripatetic cataloguing rota coming to an end this summer. This will certainly help move us closer to achieving consistent cataloguing practice, enabling the two cataloguers to liaise with each other and with their line manager about procedure more easily. This workflow change has also prompted much-needed discussions across the service about potential standardisation of processing levels, classification and acquisitions procedure, all of which have the potential to save time and money before the stock reaches the shelves and will also help to give students across all the colleges parity of experience in the library. In addition, time will be saved by not needing to manage a complicated rota system for the peripatetic staff. This is currently a major part of the Senior Cataloguer’s role as all time taken by staff training, sickness and annual leave needs to be evened out across the colleges.

By increasing the visibility of cataloguers through peripatetic working, relationships have been forged that will prove valuable in ensuring that the new centralised acquisitions and metadata workflows meet the needs and expectations of the academic liaison library staff in the University’s colleges. Keeping these relationships up will be an important part of making sure that college staff do not feel excluded from the new processes and that they feel able to raise any issues and ideas with the staff in the Resources & Systems team. On a personal level, whilst being peripatetic has been a physically tiring and sometimes complicated experience I will definitely miss the close working relationships I currently have with my college colleagues. Oh, and obviously I’ll miss the extra cake too!

Thursday 26th January 2011

Another day and something different again! Today was spent at an all-day training course organised by the University finance department on budget management. It was pretty full-on but incredibly useful and will doubtless become even more so when our acquisitions are all centralized later this year because if I actually get a job in the new department then I’ll definitely need to know much more about this sort of thing.

The course took place at the University’s head office on High Holborn, in the super-swanky 9th floor boardroom complete with its gorgeous works of art and rather lovely balcony with accompanying magnificent views of London.

(Apologies for the not-so-great phone camera picture, but you get the idea.)

I won’t go into any more detail on the course content unless you are especially interested in virements and the like. Back for my final #libday6 post tomorrow, which will be reassuringly cataloguing based

Wednesday 26th January 2011

Much like yesterday, today was all about cataloguing – today at the London College of Communication at Elephant & Castle. LCC pre-classify almost everything which makes it easy to zip through their new stock and by the time I left for home @dramalibrarian and I had ploughed through over 4 metres of cataloguing. Not terribly exciting but massively satisfying

The most exciting things today were the Assistant Systems Librarian finally fixing a problem with our Voyager tag tables that has dragged on for 10 months and getting to catalogue The Very Hungry Caterpillar (not the most intellectual item, I grant you!)

Tomorrow will not be about cataloguing (promise!) as I’m going to a training course at head office, for which I need to prepare now so I can pretend to know about budget management…

Tuesday 25th January 2011

After yesterday’s venture out of my cataloguing zone, today I’m back doing what I do most of the time – cataloguing art and design books. Today I worked at Camberwell College of Arts, which I visit 3 days a month. My journey to Camberwell isn’t the longest in my rota (a mere 1 and a half hours each way) but it is definitely the most convoluted, taking a bus, two tubes, another bus and a bit of a walk to get there! I left the house at 7.30am and got to the library just before 9 when I dealt with my email inbox before getting stuck into the new acquisitions. My inbox only contained the minutes of the meeting I missed yesterday afternoon and an invoice for an e-Book, which I sneakily catalogued before doing Camberwell work. This is one of the downsides of my peripatetic working life, I always feel bad about doing work that isn’t directly related to the college I’m working in that day because it eats into their cataloguing time, which they get little enough of as it is.

All this will change soon due to a radical restructure that has been proposed for Information Services at the University, which will see cataloguing and acquisitions for all formats carried out at a central location (hopefully by me and @dramalibrarian but we won’t know that for a few weeks yet). This is causing a lot of worry across all the sites because there will definitely be job losses and lots of my colleagues will have to re-interview for fewer posts. Today, Camberwell had a team meeting about the proposals but because I don’t work there I didn’t get invited – I could hear bits of what was said because they were sitting just outside the office, but not enough to really know what is going on which was very frustrating. I guess it will just be a case of wait and see…

Anyway, back to the excitement of cataloguing! Camberwell’s new acquisitions took up most of the day despite quite a lot of it being copy cataloguing of items I added to the database at the Wimbledon campus last week. Much of the stock was pre-classified, but where it wasn’t I used their heavily modified version of DDC21 to give the items a classmark. Because the vast majority of the stock across the University of the Arts falls into the Dewey 700s all the colleges have their own version of different editions of DDC, which causes no end of confusion for the users (and no small amount of difficulty for the cataloguers either!) I dream of a world in which they all use the same classification scheme, but that is never going to happen sadly. The most difficult campus in this respect is Wimbledon, which uses DDC 16 (!) published in 1953 and which therefore has no numbers for subjects such as computing, social science and artistic photography, thus making classification of their stock an exercise in extreme dedication and patience

At around 3.30pm I ran out of new acquisitions and so moved on to cataloguing some artists’ books for the Special Collection. One item was a small box containing 40-odd printed luggage labels, another took the form of an old-school brown issue tray with tickets and labels which was a challenge to describe. Making sure to use appropriate subject headings is so important for these items – otherwise there is no way the students would ever stumble across them in their research. We use LCSH but our authority file has never really had enough work done on it – something I hope to tackle in the future.

The evening contained a vicious pilates class (I think the teacher is trying to kill me!) and some more films. Not very rock n’ roll!

Monday 24th January 2011

I work as a peripatetic cataloguer for the University of the Arts London. The peripatetic part of my job title means that rather than the stock for our seven sites across the city coming to me, I have to go to the different sites to catalogue their stock in situ. In theory I also spend one day each week in my home office which is in the Resources & Systems team at our Elephant & Castle campus (although in practice I’m usually sent to one of the campuses to do extra cataloguing as our team is very small for the amount of work we have to do!) Today however I actually DID get to visit my own desk, so this post will be about what happens when I’m not actually cataloguing stock.

Despite getting out of the house on time for my 9am start the Central Line meant that I eventually got into the office at 9.15am. I made my mint tea and sat down to check my email inbox, which isn’t usually too bad on a Monday morning. I like to keep my inbox practically empty, so I whittled down the contents until I had a small list of action points. Most of the emails concern a current departmental project to select a new Resource Discovery platform to cover our e-library and possibly our OPAC too. The project has been more stressful than I had initially anticipated as the college procurement department insisted that it went out to European tender – a scary practice that was handled by our E-info managers which has had an effect on the project timescales that means everything seems to be happening in a bit of a rush.

Once the emails were dealt with I spoke with my colleague (the only other peripatetic cataloguer) to discuss how were were going to approach the main task of the day – collating feedback from the Resource Discovery supplier presentations and from the proof of concept testing that was carried out last week. Once we’d formulated a strategy it was just a question of totting up the marks and adding them to a spreadsheet; a pretty repetitive task but also quite fun in a nerdy sort of way. This took me up until lunch time, although it was interspersed with a visit from a librarian colleague from the college library downstairs and several interruptions from my line manager who has to wrangle my nightmarish work schedule and had a few requests for extra cataloguing time to deal with.

I took half an hour for lunch at my desk (parsnip soup – very nice thank you!) and then carried on with the Resource Discovery project work until 2pm. At this point I should have been at a meeting for the ARLIS committee that I am currently secretary for, but my project work had to take precedence this time and I had already sent my apologies.

The rest of the afternoon was taken up with work on our project to upgrade our serials catalogue records in order that we can reach the standards set by SUNCAT, which the University joined last year. If I’m honest, this work is incredibly tedious and is going rather slower than it should. It involves calling up journal records on the cataloguing module of our LMS, then remotely searching the OCLC database to see whether their record is of a higher quality and if it is then merging the data to create one much nicer record. It is being combined with efforts in the colleges to standardise the format of our holding records – this is a massive undertaking, which is why the project is taking place over two (long) years.

During my afternoon break I checked Twitter and emailed a colleague in one of the colleges to invite her to a training session I’ve organized on reflective practice for our workplace Chartership support group. This is quite a new thing and is taking up quite a lot of my time at the moment. I’m hoping that once it has taken off a bit more that other members will take on more of the organizational duties.

Finally, just before leaving for home at 4:30pm a member of the Systems team came over to break the news of a fairly serious data problem that he had unwittingly caused whilst trying to help sort out an ongoing issue with the display of our 773/774 fields on the OPAC. It appears that the links between the parent and child records have somehow spontaneously corrupted and will require manual editing to rectify the problem. This isn’t as urgent as it sounds, but will involve manual edits to around 500 records which will take quite a lot of time. I add it to my ever-growing to-do list and leave for the day.

This evening will mostly involve writing up #libday6 and searching for suitable courses for our Chartership group on the annotated CVs that have to go in our portfolios, which are causing some members a bit of worry. Other than that I’ll be watching some films and probably falling asleep on the sofa!