Attending cpd25’s Cataloguing with Confidence – the highlight of my learning: critical cataloguing

On Tuesday, 17 June 2025, I had the pleasure of attending the “Cataloguing with confidence” workshop held at the British Library in the Centre for Conservation, perhaps a most suited place given how the topic itself is in constant need of conservation amidst the many and rapid technological advancements that tend to cast a shadow of doubt on the (future) need for human cataloguing.

I arrived at the British Library half an hour earlier than due (in my eagerness to be there on time) and positioned myself before the gates on Euston Road—the Library had still not opened its doors to its first visitors of the day. While waiting, I took in the large London buildings, the rushed passing of cars, and the ebbing flow of people heading to work, and when a passerby stopped to look at the BL gates, I was eagerly trying to figure out if they were indeed another librarian come to take part in the cataloguing event. It turned out many of them were. Once inside the building, we had been kindly guided to the Centre for Conservation, and once settled we started the day with a warm welcome from Darlene Maxwell, Head of Library Services at the Royal College of Art.

In the following segment, we dived into the fascinating history and theory of cataloguing, led on this journey by Victoria Parkinson, Library Solutions and Metadata Coordinator at King’s College London. It might be worth mentioning at this point that my main objective for the day was to consolidate the knowledge I had gained from my initial training when I took up my current role, as well as fill in the gaps and get answers to the questions I picked up along the way. Why is the work we do as cataloguers important? And how can our cataloguing practice be improved, streamlined, made more valuable to our users? These, as well as more technical questions like what years to include in the 264 field when a title has been reprinted multiple times, were on my mind while I was listening to the presentations in the first half of the day.

The topic of cataloguing can be quite dry and technical and it’s easy to get lost in some of the vocabulary and concepts, especially if just starting out as a cataloguer. Despite this, Victoria managed to keep us all engaged, her presentation both visually appealing and intellectually stimulating. A few things stuck with me in particular: the colourful chart presenting the 5 elements constitutive of good quality metadata, the timeline of the development of cataloguing frameworks and standards (AACR2, MARC, RDA, BIBFRAME), the illustrative scheme for IFLA’s Library Reference Model developed in 2018.

What constituted the highlight of my learning, however, was hearing about the concept of “critical cataloguing.” This sub-movement of the broader push for “critical librarianship” refers to a call for a more reflective cataloguing practice, whereby we as cataloguers get to challenge the standards and frameworks we work within, especially when they fail to justly represent us and the communities we serve through our work.

It seeks to bring awareness to the valuable work of “organizing knowledge” (Mirović, 2024, p. 92) and the responsibilities placed on the person or institution doing the organising. This links to the Library of Congress definition of cataloguing that Victoria presented to us: cataloguing is the process by which cataloguers create and record metadata for describing a resource, choose name and title access points, conduct subject analysis and decide on the most fitting subject headings, assign a class number and finally, maintain the systems in which said record is preserved.

Perhaps one of the most important of these steps in the cataloguing process is classification, or the act of placing a work in a category with a body of similar works by assigning it a class number. Classification determines where a book will be found (or not) on the shelves of a library, as well as—and this is something I hadn’t consciously thought much about previously—the relationships that are being formed when a new title is assigned a specific class number. In simpler terms, would the assigned class number help library users find the book easily and logically in the subject area the book fits in or would it hinder this discovery? Would users be able to browse titles discussing similar or related topics after finding the original title they were looking for? Books, like people, tend to gravitate towards other books that approach similar subjects or are related in varied ways, and the responsibility to determine this fruitful placement falls on the cataloguer’s shoulders. This is why it is important to approach this categorisation work with a critical mind.

I have often been puzzled by why a certain topic was placed together with other topics, as the nearness of certain subjects reveals how all frameworks and standards are constructs, and hence politically charged and reflective of the times and values of the people who built them. In this regard, Victoria flagged a number of pertinent examples. It is curious how professions have been categorised in the Library of Congress Subject Headings Authorities based on gender, with professions traditionally seen as male professions being described simply by their specific designations (e.g., “physicians”, “librarians”, “priests”, “executives”), the same being applied to professions culturally seen as mostly undertaken by females (e.g., “primary school teachers”, “prostitutes”). This means that “male professions”—quotation marks are important here to signal my complete distrust in the existence of such a thing as male professions—had to be described more explicitly when referring to women undertaking those professions (such as in “female librarians,” “female executives,” etc.) and similarly when describing men undertaking “female professions” (e.g., “male primary school teachers”). Critical cataloguing challenges these practices deeply rooted in a patriarchal ideology. Cataloguing then is not free of politics, and here comes to mind Orwell’s words that “all issues are political” and language itself suffers from the influence of ideologies.

So what can we do as cataloguers to ensure our work doesn’t suffer from the biases and follies of the systems and standards that are meant to help us? A first step is becoming aware that these biases exist and it is up to us to question them. Secondly, making sure our users are always at the core of our work should help us discern what kind of metadata would be most in their service. Here, I remember Victoria’s slides on what makes for good quality metadata: it should put users first by making resources discoverable, it should be timely and work well with the library systems, and it should conform to recognised standards and frameworks. In addition to this, good quality metadata, as Victoria continued, should be accurate, informative, accessible, and most importantly, respectful and empowering. This re-evaluation is thanks to Alissa McCulloch, whose article is full of thought-provoking and inspiring ideas, and I thank Victoria for bringing it to our attention. Lastly, guided by this critical awareness and keeping in mind what kind of metadata would be most helpful for our library users, we should act on the changes we’d like to see in our cataloguing practice.

Our next session was led by Thomas Meehan, Head of Cataloguing and Metadata at UCL, who gave us an overview of the most important fields in a MARC record. Thanks to his explanations, I was able to clarify a few of the technical questions I had brought with me. For example, I have learnt that specific fields have specific rules for whether the metadata to be included should be transcribed, recorded, authorised or coded. As trivial as this sounds, this was useful as I was always puzzled by whether I should include certain words in the statement of responsibility in subfield c of field 245. Tom’s presentation helped us all get on the same page about how to create a MARC record and laid the foundation for the work we were to do in the afternoon. Lunch was a great opportunity to network and get to know more about fellow librarians’ work in their institutions.

Refreshed and eager to apply our learning in practice, we started our first practical cataloguing session. There was an opportunity to work both collaboratively and independently, and we were given plenty of British Library resources to choose from and create records for. The session was very useful as we were able to discuss our uncertainties as we were cataloguing, and were constantly supported by Victoria and Tom’s kind guidance. Many thanks to Kristina Macdonald, Senior Library Assistant (Cataloguing and Metadata) at UCL, for her equally valuable insights and support throughout the whole day. The second practical session involved us learning how to verify LC name authority records and we spent the final half hour of the workshop testing our investigative and search skills. This again proved to be an invaluable lesson, as I had previously struggled with understanding how to best navigate the LC authorities portal.

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity I was given to attend this workshop as one of the sponsored delegates, and I thank all the presenters, organisers, and colleagues for making my experience of the day so enjoyable and helping me get the most out of it.

References

McCulloch, A. (2019) ‘We need to talk about cataloguing: the #NLS9 transcript,’ Cataloguing the Universe: A work in progress, 11 July. Available at: https://lissertations.net/post/1177 (Accessed: 2 July 2025).

Mirović, D. (2024) ‘Bringing order to chaos ethically: “Cataloging Code of Ethics” and critical cataloguing,’ Bosniaca, 29(29), pp. 91-108. Available at: https://doi.org/10.37083/bosn.2024.29.91

Blog post by Ioana Bonaparte, Content Services Assistant, University of Essex