Collaborative cataloguing now!

Abstract

This article reflects on the “Collaborative Cataloguing Now!” workshop held at CILIP MDG’s March 2026 conference held in Bristol.

The workshop aimed to both enhance the discovery of resources at a library that is delivering services without a cataloguer, and to test our professional capacity to create good quality bibliographic metadata, without specialist tools.

Together, we catalogued resources for the publicly accessible Drawing Room Library in Bermondsey, London and these can be found in the online catalogue. This was nice to do but, it makes only a small dent in the library’s cataloguing to-do list. This article suggests, however, that the potential takeaways lie not so much in the results of this small intervention, but in its implications.

We catalogued these books using laptops, digital surrogates and access to a shared document drive. We created high-quality structured metadata that was easily imported into the Drawing Room’s library management system.

In a context of significant change in our field – with Official RDA and Bibframe developments looming - this article asks us to strip back our understanding of bibliographic description. It argues that wherever we do it and whichever tools we use, we bring the experience and expertise.