November 20, 2025
Talking to some acquisitions managers after my session at the NAG Seminar and Forum in Leeds, one of the biggest pain points they expressed was a sense of mystery around metadata for materials that don’t come via shelf-ready routes. Obviously they know the routes – donations, backlogs of local studies materials, individual purchases of zines and small independent publications. But why do some of these things hang around waiting to be catalogued? What processes can staff take to generate the right amount of metadata for materials obtained outside the usual shelf-ready supplier route?
This is not a how-to-catalogue session. It’s a how-to-understand-cataloguing-processes webinar for acquisitions professionals who may not need to catalogue a book themselves but will almost certainly have to justify metadata activities to senior managers and explain why a local tourist information leaflet from the 1930s or the Bible that used to be used in a local church (the most commonplace-sounding Bible in England and Wales, where every local church had to have one) can take 10, 20, or even 100 times longer than the average 7-10 minutes it takes to deal with “the average book”.
This is for you if you are the person in your library who has to answer questions like “Why do we have a cataloguing backlog, how much is it costing us, and what are the people who should be cataloguing it actually doing with their time?”
Our speaker:
Anne Welsh has been trading as Beginning Cataloguing since 2020. She is the author of cataloguing textbooks and an editorial consultant for American Library Association Digital Reference, which publishes international cataloguing standard RDA (Resource Description and Access). Anne is also Secretary of the RDA Steering Committee (RSC) and the Honorary Secretary of CILIP Metadata and Discovery Group (MDG) as well as a co-opted member of both the RDA Committee for RDA (UKCoR) and the BIC Library Metadata Committee.