Hi! I am a fellow library student, so I don't really have much input except for recommending you to follow this great group on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/161813927168408/ They seem a fun crowd!
I am just taking my intro cataloging course now, and while I like the subject, I don't particularly like the professor's style, so I haven't yet made my mind. But from the job ads I see I can tell you have to be much more technical than just knowing MARC/RDA, you can't do without metadata standards, XML, databases etc. So if you are interested in technical services, it may be a good idea to take an intro cataloging course early, so that you can fit in as many technical courses as you can in these short two years.
I've been a cataloguer for over thirty years (a little over one year shared between three small public libraries, just shy of two decades in a community college, and the past eleven years as head of a book wholesaler's cataloguing dept.) so I guess I should be able to answer a question or two ... ;-) I'm a library technician rather than a librarian (I'm in Canada), though I do supervise some librarians in my current position. I began my career back when card catalogues were the norm and only a few major public and university libraries were venturing into marc and computerized catalogues (I learned marc by reading the manual cover-to-cover three years into my college job ... I had one week to master it so I could start training others how to use the shiny new library software). And I can honestly say that after all these years cataloguing is still a lot of fun.
Speaking as someone who oversees a dozen or so other cataloguers while also carrying a full cataloguing workload of my own: yes, good cataloguers are very hard to come by
( ... )
And even if you don't choose to go into cataloguing, knowing how it works will help you excel at reference/public service/collection development because you'll understand the structure behind the database and public catalogue and will thus have superior searching skills.
Yesss. And if you go into systems, like I did, you really have to understand how cataloguing works.
(Hah, small world - we totally buy books through you, jlsjlsjls. Though not cataloguing, which we don't outsource (yet, anyway).)
A very small world indeed! It's always nice to "meet" one of our customers! ;-)
And you're right ... systems folk also benefit from knowing cataloguing; I've always enjoyed getting heads together with them to figure out how make everything work for the users. There's nothing like the joy of "I found this cool useful extra thing I can put in the marc if we can make the public catalogue do "x" to use it!" And we usually did manage to make "x" function.
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I am just taking my intro cataloging course now, and while I like the subject, I don't particularly like the professor's style, so I haven't yet made my mind. But from the job ads I see I can tell you have to be much more technical than just knowing MARC/RDA, you can't do without metadata standards, XML, databases etc. So if you are interested in technical services, it may be a good idea to take an intro cataloging course early, so that you can fit in as many technical courses as you can in these short two years.
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Speaking as someone who oversees a dozen or so other cataloguers while also carrying a full cataloguing workload of my own: yes, good cataloguers are very hard to come by ( ... )
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Yesss. And if you go into systems, like I did, you really have to understand how cataloguing works.
(Hah, small world - we totally buy books through you, jlsjlsjls. Though not cataloguing, which we don't outsource (yet, anyway).)
Reply
And you're right ... systems folk also benefit from knowing cataloguing; I've always enjoyed getting heads together with them to figure out how make everything work for the users. There's nothing like the joy of "I found this cool useful extra thing I can put in the marc if we can make the public catalogue do "x" to use it!" And we usually did manage to make "x" function.
Reply
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