Looking back, looking forward: reflections from a career in cataloguing

摘要

To paraphrase John Miles, cataloguing was my first love, and it will be my last. I learned the craft of cataloguing from George Ibbs at Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic School of Librarianship and Information Studies back in the mid-1980s. AACR2, published a few years earlier in 1978, was our bible, and I have a clear memory of Mr Ibbs intoning “1.1B1. Transcribe the title proper exactly as to wording, order, and spelling, but not necessarily as to punctuation and capitalization.” Interestingly, I have a distinct memory of Mr Ibbs speculating on the future computerisation of cataloguing and how this would free up the time of cataloguing staff for other tasks – or simply for redundancy. The use of computers in libraries dates back to the mid 1960s, but over thirty years ago in Newcastle Poly the only computer with a VDU in the department was a BBC microcomputer; our “data processing” classes involved the use of computers which looked like electric typewriters; and Windows, the World Wide Web, the Internet, and Google were in the future.