Why Appoint Professionals? A Student Cataloguing Project
Students have provided cheap successful labour for routine retrospective cataloguing
projects. The current article examines a library project which went further, using
university students with minimum training to catalogue its undergraduate stock from
the book in hand to AACR2, level 2, allegedly to professional standard. The article discusses the faults made in MARC coding, descriptive cataloguing and subject
cataloguing, noting the nature of the errors and their results. The investigation
concludes that intelligence alone does not guarantee library ability, and that
cataloguing beyond the creation of minimum records is not an intuitive task to be
picked up without training. Hidden expenses are attached. A derisory attitude
towards library skills is unjustified, and a place remains for qualified librarians to do qualified library work.Pre-print of article published in Journal of Librarianship and Information Science,
38(3) (Sept. 2006), 173-85.
Sustainable Development Goals
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picture_as_pdf - why appoint lib professionals_preprint.pdf