Under a cataloguing spell

Walking over to the UL this morning, heading for a course on AACR2, I met one of my colleagues who kindly asked me where I was going, and then was brave enough to even ask what the course was about. I mumbled the words "catagoguing" "librarian" "tech stuff", and thus scared her off. I met her again when I came back and she asked how the course was. Well, there was no way of lying: it was great. So, with a big smile on my face, I told her that I liked it a lot, and probably put her off for good (!).

Now, given that You My Lovely Readers hopefully share my (profession and) passion, here's a little blurb about my reasons for attending the course, and the highlights from it.

History:
I've had two cataloguing spells in my career so far: the first in France, cataloguing the most amazing hidden collection of early printed books at the Bibliotheque Municipale Julien de Laillier in Valognes; the second in Italy, working at the retrospective conversion of the KHI-Florenz catalogue, where we were using German rules. For obvious reasons, neither of these libraries used AACR2 and MARC21. When I moved to the UK and was looking for another job, I managed to get hold of a MARC manual and I remember reading it - and trying to make sense of it - while packing all my belongings at the same time. However, the job I found didn't require the use of national cataloguing standars, so I put everything on hold and almost forgot about it.

Now, after five years of user interaction, in-house cataloguing, filing, devising ways of attracting users, web work, outreach events and all sort of not-purely-library-work-but-still-library-work, I'm trying to get my librarianship career back on track and I'm finally filling the gaps.

What I got from the course:
1) Most of the people attending were working at the UL, so it's not true that to pass those gates you have to be The Perfect Cataloguer - this was quite reassuring as I always tend to think in terms of "everyone else knows everything already and I'm the only one who doesn't". I know it's a wrong idea but it's always good to have proof of that.
2) Rules are the way they are because they were created for card catalogues. Funnily enough, I had never thought about that before.
3) AACR2 are organised wonderfully. Flicking through the manual, I loved the labels (printed on both sides!) and the indexes. The idea that once you've got the structure you are half-way through the bulk of it was really reassuring. And...do I really need to tell you that I love systems and structures?
4) A fantastic quote from J.H Bowman, author of "Essential cataloguing", who apparently used to say that a good cataloguer must have sense of humour; and must pretend to believe that what s/he is doing is the most important thing in the world. I'm very good at pretending this, so good that sometimes I DO think that what I'm doing is going to save the planet from chaos and ignorance, so the good resolution coming from this is to keep cataloguing in perspective.

Additional highlights: Anne Hughes lent me a manual on early printed books cataloguing, which I can't wait to put my eyes on; and one of the attendees was also my neighbour! We see each other in the garden all the time but I didn't know she was working at the UL and didn't even know her name. She is also the owner of Betty The Neighbourhood Cat.

Many grateful thanks to You My Lovely Readers from my husband Alan, who - thanks to this blog post - has been spared a full description of the AACR2 course.