Two years at the British Library…and counting

Abstract

My first CIG conference was at Retford, about 30 years ago. I am very honoured to have been invited to give the keynote today. If this presentation has a theme, it is that collection metadata is a key organisational asset for any library. This has been the core message of the British Library’s Collection Metadata Strategies from 2015 to the present day. Obviously, metadata is essential for discovery and management of collections and, as was recently acknowledged by George Osborne, uncatalogued collections are not secure. The title of the presentation refers to my intention that, after a couple of years working as a cataloguer at the British Library, I would leave and return to Scotland to work in a university library. Thirty-six years later I have retired from the British Library. So, what went wrong?