Well I can know breathe a sigh of relief.  I have just got my second assignment back for ETL505 and I passed – WOO HOO – so I do not have to do this subject again.  This was a fear of mine as I struggled through this semester.

Of all the subjects I have completed in this course, this has certainly been the most challenging. While I am a seasoned veteran of using libraries, and have even been working in a school library for a couple of years before I started ETL505 I didn’t understand the complexities of cataloguing.  I knew how Dewey worked at a surface level – the number on the book tells me where to find a book on the shelf, and I understood that the numbers were determined by a set of rules, but I never thought to hard about those rules and what they meant.

Now that I have done this course I can see the complexity of the Dewey system.  Want a joke book?  Well you need to look in the literature section (the 800’s), but then to find a book with a collection of specific forms you need to move onto 808, and from their move to 808.882 to find all the joke books.  Having this course show us how we break down the Dewey system has made me understand how important it is to get it right.  By giving texts specific numbers it means that libraries share a common system and allows users to reach their ultimate goal – find a resource they want.

The SCIS catalogue is also an invaluable resource for schools.  I am now the sole librarian at a NSW DET school and have started cataloguing books by myself for the first time.  SCIS makes it so easy, but after doing this course I have a much greater appreciation of all the hard work that goes in behind the scene to create these bibliographic records, especially creating subject headings that allow end users to find books on topics they are looking for.  A library is there to be used, to provide resources for users and by having these well-developed catalogue records in our library management system it makes it so much easier to do this.

As a TL that has just started at a new school I am really appreciating the Dewey System, and the SCIS records.  I do not know my collection well yet, so when students or teachers ask for a book about dragons or extreme weather I need to rely on my LMS to provide me answers and it does.  I also need to rely that the books that have been catalogued are where they should be on the shelf.  The whole point of Dewey is to help us find resources, so simply putting the correct number on the book is not enough – we need to put the books on the shelf in the correct order.

As someone who has come into a school library where for a couple of terms a non-TL was in charge, I can see shelving books correctly, using the DDC numbers, is vital.  I have spent most of this term telling teachers, ‘yes we have that book’ or ‘this book will be helpful’ only to get to the shelf and find it not there!  It is very frustrating for both myself and the person I am trying to help.

My challenge this term has been to order my shelves (the person previously in my role didn’t understand that books are alphabetised on the shelves, so the A’s run aa, ab, ac, not just all shoved in together).  I have completed the fiction section and just started on the non-fiction.  I am hoping by the end of the term (though probably the beginning of next) all the non-fiction will also be shelved correctly so when I say ‘yes we have that book’ and I go to the shelf, it will actually be there!

Cross your fingers and wish me luck!

Currently reading: The Slightly Alarming Tale of the Whispering Wars by Jaclyn Moriarty