Cultural Heritage

A few days ago I gave a talk  on RDA – what it is, how it’s been developed – and also how RDA has influenced changes in MARC 21, the library cataloguing format. It was also an opportunity to reflect how these standards could change, for example, future library OPACs.

I was giving this talk to students taking the cataloguing module of the information management studies courses at London Metropolitan University.  This sort of occasion is always a great opportunity to meet the next generation of professionals in the information sector. These people are right at the beginning of their career and don’t as yet know where this will take them – public libraries, private sector libraries (e.g. law firms, business companies), education (the whole range from schools through to colleges and universities), research or the voluntary sector (charities). The core skills they need will remain the same but the environment in which they use those skills is continuously changing. Drawers of catalogue cards have been replaced by OPACs, library stock is expected to inlcude e-books and e-journals and libraries are using blogs, microblogging and tagging to help users.

Back in the office it’s now down to making my talk more widely available. So I’ve uploaded my slides to my account on Slideshare as well as making them available from the Cultural Heritage and Bibliographic Management areas of the UKOLN web site. The next step is telling people I’ve done this, for instance by doing a short news item for the UKOLN news feed.  And of course writing this blog post – which will potentially  get to a further audience because the RSS feed of this blog feeds into our account (ukolnculture) on twitter.