CILIP CIG Conference 2010
Posted by Brian Kelly on October 7th, 2010
Along with nearly 70 others, I attended the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG) conference which was held on 13 to 15 September 2010 at the University of Exeter. Group and Branch events are a great way to catch up with new developments and meet fellow practitioners. Here’s a quick run through of the programme and slides for the presentations are now available from the conference web site.
Day 1. The Keynote speaker was Biddy Fisher, President of CILIP, who praised those who work behind the scenes and called them the “heart of the profession” and noting that cataloguers “organize chaos”. In the Standards Forum Alan Danskin presented a review of the most recent changes in the MARC 21 formats. This was followed by two talks on RDA. Alan Poulter, the new CILIP representative to the JSC for RDA, set out how he sees his role and his wish to get more interaction from the community. With testing under way, the questions now are ‘what do we do about RDA?”, “what are the major and minor differences with AACR2?” and “what happens if Library of Congress rejects RDA?”. Finally, Alan Danskin reported on the results of the recent survey on potential RDA training needs in the UK. This showed that around 20% of respondents in the UK were expecting to adopt RDA; Alan noted that another recent survey indicated that around 50% of European libraries intended adopting RDA. The evening meal was followed by a quiz.
Day 2. This began with a paper by Gary Steele’s paper on using wisdom of the crowds in choosing LCSH for individual titles. The next two papers focused on workflow management. Stuart Hunt talked about improving performance in cataloguing and technical services workflows by integrating Japanese models. Robin Armstrong Viner’s paper (presented by Alan Danskin as Robin was unexpectedly unable to attend) made many of the same points, illustrated by how this worked at the University of Aberdeen. After lunch, Dunia Garcia-Ontiveros spoke on the continuing need for retrospective cataloguing and the idea of a national register on materials requiring retrospective cataloguing or conversion. Sally Curry of RIN then spoke on cataloguing as a problem to be shared. The day ended with the conference dinner in Reed Hall.
Day 3. The first papers was Alan Poulter on CIDOC CRM, a modelling tool for “exchanging rich cultural heritage data”. Dawn Wood’s talk on repository metadata was on metadata to the learning objects deposited in the Leeds Metropolitan University repository. An ‘open mic’ session replaced the cancelled second paper on repositories and generated some interesting debate. The conference closed at lunchtime, with some delegates visiting either the Met Office Library or Exeter Cathedral Library before travelling home.
For the first time, the conference used a twitter hashtag (#cigx). In retrospect, we (I’m a member of the CIG Committee) should also have thought about archiving the tweets.
CIG sponsored a place for a new professional – read Claire Sewell’s conference blog posts about her experience.
Exeter conference – why I wanted to go
Claire Swell’s conference blog