Teaching cataloguing after RDA 3R project: Lessons learned
From Firenze University Press Journal: JLIS.it, an Italian journal of Library Science, Archival Science and Information Science
Konstantinos Kyprianos, University of West Attica
Foteini Efthymiou, University of West Attica
Georgia Katsira, University of West Attica
Cataloguing and classification are considered the two pillars of librarianship and they have always been at the very heart of library and information work (Sibiya & Shongwe, 2018). This could be attributed to the fact that a quality catalogue will help patrons search, retrieve, identify, locate, and effectively use library resources. Cataloguing has arguably become increasingly vital as technology has become omnipresent and libraries have evolved into technological hubs, yet job postings for cataloguers do not appear to be diminishing (Turner, 2020). In this direction, several Library and Information Science (LIS) schools are offering cataloguing courses into their curricula and it is considered a core course in the discipline (Chen & Joyce, 2019). It is a complex and challenging course in which students must comprehend and use various tools and instructions. More specifically, future cataloguers must use a variety of cataloguing stan-dards to create descriptive records (the well-known surrogates) for items in the library collection (e.g. Resource Description and Access — RDA, MAchine Readable Cataloguing — MARC, Library of Congress Subject Headings — LCSH, etc.). An additional challenge that adds to the complexity of the course is the fact that there is an extra difficulty in understanding, using and studying these tools and guides, especially for people whose first language is not English. For example, in Greece, there is no official translation of the basic tools for cataloguing.Cataloguing is not a new course in library and information studies curricula (Snow & Hoffman, 2015). Some principles or rules for the description and categorisation of library items and collec-tions appeared from the beginning of their development. This became even more pronounced with the emergence of the discipline in the late 19th century. Over the years, the cataloguing rules and the tools used have evolved to better meet the needs of describing items in library collections and thus facilitate users in searching and retrieving information.Nowadays, with the advancement of technology and the creation of new forms of resources (e.g., electronic publications, video, websites, and diverse continuing resources, etc.) and new ways of de-scribing knowledge (e.g., Resource Description and Framework — RDF, etc.), cataloguing standards and rules had to be updated and amended to satisfy the changing needs of users. In this context, the cataloguing guidelines and the RDA Toolkit were redesigned entirely in 2020 in both the soft-ware and the content (the so-called Resource Description and Access Restructure and Redesign (RDA 3R) project). The project resulted in the substitution of the previous edition of the RDA Toolkit (called from now on original RDA Toolkit) and the new RDA Toolkit took the name official RDA Toolkit. The new RDA guidelines (official RDA) are based on the most recent bibliographic conceptual model, the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM) standard, and its structure differs from that of its predecessors, which included many numbered rules and explicit instructions. The instructions are now more abstract, giving the cataloguer more flexibility in representing the re-source information. Hence, cataloguing guidelines have been restructured and redesigned in such a way that cataloguing courses must be updated to reflect these changes. A report on approaches to teaching RDA in the LIS classroom (Sze, 2022) identified this problem in introducing RDA after 3R and the new official RDA Toolkit, as well as what cataloguing teachers should keep in mind and what approaches educators who have already used the new RDA 3R Toolkit have followed.Considering the aforementioned, the new RDA Toolkit was introduced in cataloguing courses at the University of West Attica’s Department of Archival, Library, and Information Studies (ALIS) for the academic year 2022–23. The course was offered to the department’s undergraduate students over two semesters so that they could understand all of the cataloguing concepts and tools. Along these lines, this study seeks to elicit information about the course taught and students’ thoughts and feelings about cataloguing after completing the two-semester course. The information gath-ered will guide the further development and improvement of the course to fully meet the needs of students and the requirements of the market, especially with the emergence of new resource description standards. To achieve this, students were given a questionnaire at the end of the second semester to evaluate the courses in terms of difficulty, learning outcomes, comprehension of curricular concepts, and recommendations for enhancing the courses. The survey was based on the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) (Ramsden, 1991) and it was expanded with additional questions (self-assess-ment questionnaire) mainly focusing on students’ perceptions of the course and suggestions for improvement (Kyprianos et al., 2022).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-598
Read Full Text: https://jlis.fupress.net/index.php/jlis/article/view/598
