By Harriet Hopkins, Library Manager and Strategic Lead: Programming & Promotion at Awen Cultural Trust

20 April 2022

In this article, Harriet Hopkins shares the lengths to which she was willing to go to equip her team with core skills in an art-form that many librarians thought was dying.

Do we want to catalogue? Public libraries training is a mixed bag – it’s as important to know how to run a successful bounce and rhyme as it is to help someone complete a housing benefit claim. My colleagues and I have a vast array of courses under our belts, from visual merchandising to code club; alzheimer’s awareness to social media marketing; IOSH to origami.

Our understanding of the LMS isn’t entirely basic – we use its tools to help us serve our customers well. What we don’t have – or, at least we didn’t have at Awen Libraries – was a deeper understanding of the catalogue records themselves. This unknown gave cataloguing an aura of mysticism. Automated systems have removed the requirement and, in our service, it was only Nicola, our Resources Development Manager who needed to know how to add an item from scratch. She had learnt this from crib sheets, practise and a one-off day course that enabled her some further understanding, but not the full scope.

With most cataloguing automated, and Nicola trained, what could we gain from the wider skills? And why would a Branch Manager, moving further into people management than stock management, be so keen to learn it?

What do we want to catalogue?

I don’t need to know how to catalogue the latest James Patterson or Nora Roberts. In public libraries, the bulk of our books have been arriving with shelf-ready metadata for well over a decade.

But that’s not how Local Studies materials tend to get here. Many of the books in Local Studies have been produced locally – printed at the local newspaper offices or in someone’s home office. They don’t have ISBNs, and they don’t show up in the database of records we can download from our suppliers. Most of these titles aren’t held by the National ¬Library of Wales, and some aren’t even in stock in other libraries nearby. We may be the only place that holds some of this material, and when people ask us for it, we may be the only place that they might reasonably expect to have it. And short of memorising the collection item by item ourselves, if something’s not on the catalogue, then even we don’t know it’s on our shelves.

Ten years in libraries

In 2011, I was just joining Bridgend ¬Library and Information Service (now Awen Libraries). I was excited about the career path ahead of me. Armed with an MA in Creative Writing and skills like teaching, events management, customer service and production co-ordination under my belt, I felt confident that all I needed to add was a professional libraries qualification to run a public library in the changing landscape they sat within. However, those qualifications were no longer essential and, though I understood why, I still felt there was a rung missing on the ladder.

Three years after joining libraries, I was handed a thesis by a local graduate. Would we like it for our stock? The team I was leading had been working as Library Assistants for a combined time of 97 years! I turned to them for advice. Could we add it to the catalogue? If yes, how? I was surprised that none of them had the training. Other anomalies popped up over time: a last copy, once deleted, could not be re-added; an item long-overdue that had been wiped in an admin exercise, would be a hassle to re-add; a stock of poetry anthologies published by the local school sat on an office shelf, not available to borrow.

Some of this could be resolved by sending the items to Resources, but if only one person was able to do this work, what happened if they were on annual leave, or ill?

I was resolved. I wanted to know how to catalogue. Surely, there was a way to learn.

Stepping up

Incidentally, the Welsh Public Libraries Framework recommends that “[t]he designated operational manager of the library service shall, either be the holder of recognised qualifications in librarianship, information science or information management, or, have undertaken relevant library management training within the last three years.” The majority of library management roles outside of Public Libraries require that candidates hold a recognised qualification or experience.

We receive a lot of training at Awen Libraries, but opportunities to attend libraries specific training are hard to come by. Research taught me that training in cataloguing was ringfenced for school librarians, or attainable via the MA or Postgraduate Diploma. I can’t afford the latter, and I was not ready to change sector to gain the knowledge, as I’d heard colleagues in other services had done. So I played the long game, keeping an eye out for opportunities, signing up for mailing lists including the CILIP Metadata and Discovery Group.

The email that changed everything

This was the elusive training that I thought would finally make me a ‘real librarian’. I shared it with colleagues, too, and the waiting list of Awen Libraries staff keen for cataloguing knowledge grew by more than 20: a significant chunk for a total staff of 49. There was real appetite for this level of knowledge! If we could get on this webinar, we might all leave with a deeper understanding of those unusual numbers on the LMS.

I was inspired that so many of my colleagues wanted to deepen their understanding of their roles. Why should this skill remain so mysterious? Why shouldn’t Nicola understand the reason as well as the method? We all deserved to be empowered, and this email might just be the key.

In fact, it not only led to my attending a one-hour online webinar on Cataloguing; it connected me to Amy Staniforth, who, with her knowledge of funding available in Wales was able to point us to funding we could use to commission our own, bespoke training designed with and for Awen Libraries staff.

The view from the centre (of CILIP Cymru Wales) Amy writes:

Meeting Harriet was win win for me. I am CILIP Cymru Wales’ Relationship Manager three days a week and a metadata librarian at Aberystwyth University the other two days a week.

CILIP Cymru Wales manages the Kathleen Cooks Fund, a benevolent fund for librarians and libraries in Wales, and we’ve been trying to raise its profile. So I got to meet a person who was enthusiastic about cataloguing, who worked in public libraries, and who needed financial help to get started. Win, win, and win!

As a cataloguer I know there isn’t a lot of UK-based training beyond the beginner level. I also know what it is like to work via a shared Library Management System (LMS) and almost all of Wales’ public libraries are now using Sirsi-Dynix. While the centralisation of responsibilities involved in a shared LMS can make life difficult for librarians on-the-ground, it can also offer librarians the chance to learn from each other while using their own system.

Between us, Harriet and I decided that remote bespoke training would offer the best learning experience and result in quick practical gains. We contacted Anne Welsh, a consultant who offers bespoke training packages, while Harriet put together a successful application for a grant from the Kathleen Cooks fund to cover the costs.”

Beginning Cataloguing

There was so much more to cataloguing than expected. We learned how to catalogue from first principles, using RDA in MARC. Nicola recorded a video that showed us how to enter and amend data on our system. We provided Anne with a whole stack of things that were not ‘standard’ modern books – they were pamphlets produced by mining societies, old mimeographed locally-produced pieces of research, individual journal articles, maps and mixed media. And together, over eight weeks, we worked our way through the MARC Manual; had a look at the RDA Toolkit; and realised that the reason we sometimes couldn’t find the right Dewey number is because we didn’t have access to WebDewey, the subscription service through which OCLC provides the classification scheme. It’s a lot less stressful using a workaround (thank you, OCLC Classifiy) when you know it’s just a workaround and the reason you feel you can’t see everything is because you haven’t got the subscription.

The impact

Since we received the training, there has been a significant change for those who ¬received it. Our Resources team are more confident in adding items that would have been put to one side and, when time or reason commands, they are able to flesh out sparse records downloaded from our suppliers.

And to come back to the point about wanting to understand why we do things, this is what Anne put first when training us. I came to use that new knowledge just days ¬after the end of the course when a controversial book was popped in my in-tray with the note “Should this be on the shelves?” As a question I have not been asked often during my career so far, ordinarily I would have done some digging on Google and chatted it through with my boss. This time, I turned to the catalogue – not just our own, but also those of other services – and I scoured the available online resources I’d learned about to see what others were doing with the title, before making recommendations that would enable us to adapt rather than censor the item.

Anna, our Local Studies librarian, is now able to add maps, photographs and unusual artefacts that come her way – something she’d not had the learning to do before, and she now better understands what detail to include to add value to the collection. With an expansion of our local studies service on the horizon, the ability to improve our collections by adding and editing records in this way is even more exciting than before.

The learning could have further reach, too. During a seminar with Norena Shopland on LGBTQ+ Language and History, I was able to see the opportunities available to tag items with terms that would support research and improve wellbeing through recognition of identities.

What’s next for us?

In Wales, our shared public libraries LMS means we need a cohesive approach to managing our catalogue. Giving more staff the tools to understand catalogue records more deeply is an important step in enhancing our shared resource discovery experience. Amy reports: “This project has been an effective use of the Kathleen Cooks Fund in many ways already. I hope that CILIP Cymru Wales can help Awen Libraries extend the impact of the work however, by working together with public libraries across Wales to offer further shared training opportunities. We would like to widen the reach of the catalogue training module designed by Anne Welsh and to investigate options for sharing training more widely across an LMS but also across sectors so that we can all benefit from best practice. Harriet and the team at Awen Libraries have illustrated just how empowering the right library training opportunities can prove to be. I hope others will be inspired, and I am already looking forward to those conversations!”

So, why do we want to catalogue?

The course gave me a sense of achievement – being able to support the upskilling of my colleagues through this funding, and to have gained the knowledge without having to wipe out my savings and spare time. It has also given me a thirst for more – there is room to grow in this profession and there are so many routes that I could take. Though I don’t have a certificate of higher education, I feel qualified – I finally feel comfortable calling myself a librarian, because I know. And, if I don’t know, I know how to find out.

Right back at the start, Anne asked me why I wanted to catalogue, and I said jokingly at the time, “It’s the power I crave.” Looking back, I can see it’s certainly increased our customers’ search power, because previously unlisted items are there to be found. And it’s certainly empowered our team.