Retrospective cataloguing at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge: a new(ish) professional’s perspective

摘要

In the winter of 2006, shortly after graduating with a master‘s degree in Library and Information Studies from UCL, I had the good fortune to be appointed to one of three posts of Assistant Librarian at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. The college library serves the needs of around 750 students and the fellowship (a body of over one hundred senior academics which governs the college) by maintaining and developing an extensive collection of modern books and journals (over 90,000 volumes) and other appropriate resources. The rigorous and extensive training provided by the ―cat. and class.‖ modules for which UCL is widely renowned (notorious even?) had well prepared me for the demands of cataloguing this kind of material. However, shortly after taking up the post, the library team embarked on a long-term cataloguing project of a very different nature: the online retrospective cataloguing of the library‘s collection of 26,000 early printed books.