HVCats: 8 ways to be a visible practitioner

As part of High Visibility Cataloguing I wanted to take some good ideas from the posts from Rachel Care and Lynne Dyer and bullet point them into ways to be a visible cataloguer or metadata person! Now everyone probably knows by now that I’m not a metadata practitioner anymore, but instead I work with statistics to develop service improvement.  Interestingly, it is this new role that has made me realise even more significantly, the reasons for talking about and justifying what you as cataloguers and metadata practitioners do. So, without further ado:

1. Join a committee (and not necessarily a library based one) so that you can talk about the value of cataloguing/information design
2. Present a session on cataloguing to all interested staff
3. Use statistics to demonstrate how much cataloguing/description is done and put them on to the work Bulletin. You can also use these stats to show how your service has improved!
4. Have an open day at the cataloguing department
5. Write case’s for business processes reviews of certain work flows e.g identify and review wastage areas.  Be proactive!
6. Get involved with/engage with, Voices for the Library/Savelibraries – write a blog post about the reasons for having/saving your cataloguing department
7. Join CIG/CDG – USE the facilities and ADVOCATE them
8. Come over to HVCats and share your ideas with other cataloguers

A final note would be to engage with things like CPD23 Things for Professional Development and talk about cataloguing.