The Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC) has released its position statement on the coverage of cataloguing in courses providing an initial qualification in library and information management.
The statement including an extract from the Educational Policy statements of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services is available from the ACOC site. This extract contains a list of knowledge and skills required for intellectual access and information organization.
“ACOC holds that ALIA-recognised courses must provide their graduates with a “knowledge of cataloguing tools and sources of bibliographic records and how to use them” so that graduates can indeed use key cataloguing tools and apply basic bibliographic standards.” — Position Statement
If you feel all nostalgic about card catalogues and would like an image like this one, head over to the Catalog Card Generator from John Blyberg.
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April 19, 2008 at 10:11
How little graduates know about cataloguing has been forcefully demonstrated to me in the last couple of years, where I have directly employed three new graduates - one had a fairly good grip on cataloguing, but the following two had little or no skills or experience at all (no fault to them, their other skills are marvellous). The funny thing is that it was the library assistants (to whom I’ve taught the rudiments of cataloguing) who ended up “teaching” the qualified staff how to do the basics, before I could even consider delegating higher level cataloguing tasks. It’s frustrating! OK, in the era of supplier assisted acquisitions, in-house cataloguing isn’t going to be that important; but intuitively I know that a sound knowledge of what AACR dictates, and how a MARC record is built up gives me a huge advantage in how I approach a search, and show other people how to search with confidence; keywords are fantastic, granted, but for an alternative when keywords just don’t cut it, you really need to know how LC Subject Headings work. Good on ACOC for stating the obvious.