What is a Professional Cataloger?

Abstract

LRTS 54(4)T he roles of professionals and paraprofessionals within libraries have been in flux for more than a decade. Advances in technology have streamlined workflows, allowing staff at all levels to engage in higher-level work. Reduced budgets and the reduced staff levels that go along with them have required reshuffling of job duties and shifts in department priorities. Some of these changes have blurred the lines between professional and paraprofessional staff. Despite these shifts, the library profession still defines employees and the work they do in terms of professional librarians, requiring a master of library and information science (MLIS), and paraprofessional staff, who typically hold at least a bachelor's degree. 1 Perhaps nowhere in the library has the effect of technology on library staff been more pronounced than in technical services. As clerical tasks have increasingly been taken over by automated systems or student workers, paraprofessional staff have been assigned higher-level functions, freeing professional librarians to focus on the big picture of the cataloging department, the library, and the profession. However, these shifts have not occurred uniformly across the profession, leading to disparities in how paraprofessionals' higher-level work is regarded and whether they are compensated adequately for their new roles. This paper will examine how professional and paraprofessional catalogers view their work, drawing on findings from a survey sent to cataloging department staff in Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member libraries. By looking at performance expectations for these two groups, how their work is evaluated and their productivity measured, and their perceptions of the value assigned to their work, this study provides a snapshot of cataloging and catalogers at this point in time.

The correct language of cataloguing local publications in East Africa

“…The librarians in these two institutions have an academic status, but, in UDSM, they also double as teaching staff in the library school, which partly explains the involvement of library assistants in the cataloguing of library resources. This corroborates with the discussion by Cox and Myers (2010) and Leysen and Boydston (2005) who argued that it is common to find paraprofessionals cataloguing, leaving the more intellectual tasks for professionals. However, library assistants are usually more involved in copy cataloguing and original cataloguing a preserve of professionals.…”

PCC Training for Copy Catalogers

“…10 Finally, Cox and Myers provided the most recent snapshot on the state of professionals' and paraprofessionals' participation in cataloging in Association of Research Libraries (ARL) cataloging departments. 11 The 2010 study confirmed the positive attitude of professional catalogers toward paraprofessionals' involvement in original cataloging. As library budgets decrease, support staff's participation in original cataloging helps reduce backlogs, makes possible the redeployment of professional catalogers to more complex work or service needs, and expands work skills of paraprofessionals.…”

A Comparison of Cataloger and Non-Cataloger Responses to a Survey of Perceptions and Preference toward Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress Classification

“…Though virtually all library employees interact with the collections/cataloging system regularly, catalogers have the most intimate relationship with the scheme, given their job duties involving integrating new acquisitions into the collection/scheme. The traits of MLS-credentialed cataloging librarians (technology adoption, social attributes, and professional interests in information organization vs. retrieval or instruction) appear to differ from those of reference/instructional librarians and other library faculty and staff (Xu, 1996;Cox & Myers, 2010). Given these differences in traits, competencies, and duties, it may be possible that the findings in this study for cataloging librarians' perceptions and preferences towards classification schemes would differ from the overall findings reported by Lund and Agbaji (2018a).…”