Continuing Professional Development

Opportunities to attend events to enhance one's professional development might be seen as one of the foremost purposes for belonging to any professional group. CIG has benefited from being one of the more ‘technical’ of the special interest groups, in that many LIS practitioners who did cataloguing etc as part of their professional qualification may have lost touch with it till they suddenly have to do some. Even those of us still in that line of work can struggle to keep up with developments at times. While we cannot compete in running basic cataloguing and classification courses (the number of effective and available tutors for these can be counted on very few fingers and are already committed) CIG has a good record for (now) biennial residential conferences on a wide range of topics. Our last major conference covered everything from the cataloguing for research use of music performance programmes to the theory and practice of the semantic web.

The call for papers for Exeter in September 2010 says “What are cataloguers doing to get through these days of recession and financial stringency? Some of us are under clouds and some of us are computing in them. The 2010 Cataloguing and Indexing Group conference will look at the pressures facing the cataloguing community and how people are working through them. Some current developments may have come out of difficult circumstances but may signal the way of the future. e.g. Management initiatives (reducing cost, increasing efficiency, doing more with less, etc); cataloguing developments and changes (automated metadata extraction, harvesting, re-purposing and re-use); technical developments (shared services, cloud solutions, vertical search, etc); new standards and protocols - not just RDA (Resource Description and Access)!; standardisation etc etc.”

In the ‘off year’ we have almost always been part of CILIP's Umbrella conference. We see this as a way to get to people who may not be part of the regular cataloguing community but can catch up on what is occurring.

In between we run events at a lower level such as authority control, image cataloguing and (in 2010 if all goes according to plan) cataloguing for distributed user groups and distance learning. From time to time we also run visits to LIS collections where there is a particular cataloguing interest or focus. The Law Society is on our list for the future.

Standards

Part of the ‘technical’ aspect of CIG's area of influence are the many standards with which cataloguers have to deal. Dewey, AACR2 (soon Resource Description and Access – RDA http://www.rda-jsc.org/ ), MARC, Dublin Core and others. We are CILIP's ‘go to’ group on many of these issues and make, or are involved in, the nomination of representatives on groups such as the CILIP/BL committee on RDA and the CILIP Dewey Decimal committee. Both of these and the BIC (Book Industry Communication) Bibliographic Standards Committee are the recognised UK consultative bodies for the standards in question. Not every member of these bodies is a member of the CIG committee and from time to time we will be looking for volunteers. Although even MARC has more or less been swept up into the US version, now known as MARC21, the UK voice is still quite strong in all these areas. The chair of the Dewey Editorial Policy Committee is from the British Library as is the chair of the RDA Joint Steering Committee.

We get reports on developments on these and other standards at CIG committee meetings. More importantly, perhaps, we have for some years organised an annual ‘standards forum’, usually repeated in at least two venues, to bring anyone who is interested up-to-date with the latest developments. These fora have featured rare books cataloguing, public library categorisation schemes as well as the standards mentioned above – we are always open to suggestions.

One other body to which we appoint is the Wheatley Medal committee, run by the Society of Indexers who have been kind enough to recognise our involvement and enable us to participate in the judging of their award for back-of-the book indexing.

Networking

Good practice and maintaining communities of practice and networks go together in many ways, so far as our activities are concerned. We publish what is now an e-journal ‘Catalogue and Index’. It is available only to paid up members of the group for a year and after that goes on open access. The print edition (the last of which appeared earlier this year) will be digitised, we hope in 2010, also on fully open access through our pages on the CILIP website (http://www.cilip.org.uk/GET-INVOLVED/SPECIAL-INTEREST-GROUPS/CATALOGUING-INDEXING/Pages/default.aspx)

We are also running a blog at http://communities.cilip.org.uk/blogs/catalogueandindex/default.aspx and anyone can see and contribute to that. Comments are moderated. While we currently have many posts we are trying to encourage more comments and debate.

Much of what we can do about practice involves informal networking. Apart from the blog, where we have posted some ‘how can I?’ queries with some success, the committee and ex-members cover a large range of experience. So if you get a problem in our area it may be worth asking us as well as colleagues in your own sector.

Finally it may be worth saying that we try to play our part in what CILIP is doing through its policy and management structures. There seems to be a loyal and relatively large number of people still interested in what we do. Our membership has, in common with most of the other SIGs, fallen over the last few years, but latest figures still put us in the top 10 for membership numbers. We would like to keep it that way and we certainly think that the issues for cataloguers and allied trades will not diminish with the rise of the internet etc. Indeed they are likely to become more complex. If you are a member, drop us a line about what we ought to be doing. If you are not a member look at the blog and keep in touch and do consider joining us!