Professional development for 2015 - Introduction to Cataloging for Non-Catalogers

A few months ago I looked into going back and finishing my MBA, but honestly my heart isn't in it. So instead I decided to try and find professional development courses that would help me build specific skills sets. I took a self paced course Introduction to Cataloging for Non-Catalogers" offered by OCLC through the NYS Library. Here are my notes from this:

In 1952 S.R. Ranganthan stated five laws of librarianship:

1. Books are for use
2. Every reader his/her book
3. Every book its reader
4. Save the time of the reader
5. A library is a growing organism

In the last few years these laws of librarianship have been updated to:

1. Libraries serve humanity
2. Respect all forms by which knowledge is communicated
3. Use technology intelligently to enhance service
4. Protect free access to knowledge
5. Honor the past and create the future

Good cataloging help achieve these goals.

Cutter's Rules

1. To enable a person to find a book of which either the author, the title or the subject is known
2. To show what the library has by a given author, on a given subject and in a given type of literature
3. To assist in the choice of a book as to its edition (bibliographically) and to its character (literary or topical)

There are three parts to cataloging an item:

1. Descriptive cataloging describes the item by notating the title, statement of responsibility (who was responsible for the intellectual content), edition information, publication information (who published the item, where it was published, and the date of publication), various notes and access points.
2. Classification is assigning a call number to a work.
3. Subject analysis uses controlled vocabulary and assigns search terms to the item. 

So why is all this important to my job? Well, the laws of librarianship is something I see referenced when I read library literature, but I've never really come across them spelled out before.This gives me a sense of historical perspective, and I can see how these rules have informed librarianship. The updated laws seem to be a point of divergence in the profession, in terms of how strongly individual librarians embrace individual tenets.

Overall, understanding the concepts behind cataloging should be helpful in my daily work in Digital Commons, as I create metadata records for new items. This course, which 1.75 CEU reinforced some concepts, but did not cover a lot of new ground.