Why not send a cataloguer?

摘要

The moment when the cataloguing world and the repository world converged for me was in 2003. The place was the eleventh floor of the Livingstone Tower in Glasgow, then home of the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) at the University of Strathclyde. The reason was a JISC project called HaIRST - Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed1 , a project in which St Andrews was a partner. The amazing views of Glasgow will be forever associated with HaIRST meetings and with my introduction to “repository speak”, to the new buzzwords of metadata, OAI-PMH, interoperability, harvesting and discovery. In the beginning it was rather unclear who would represent St Andrews on the project. Perhaps this was indicative of the lack of awareness of what a “repository” could represent and what sort of data it could contain. As we now know, there is no hard and fast definition of this and content can be very diverse. Our participation had been initiated by a Vice Principal with a background in IT and there was preliminary talk among academic staff of setting up an eprints archive. The most likely project representative seemed to be our University Archivist. The project title appeared to match their job title, but our archivist begged to differ. Library managers thought about how to match existing skills and experience to this new project and came up with an answer “Why not send a cataloguer?” And so it began.