At a Crossroads: Cataloguing Policy and Practice in Australian Libraries

A survey of cataloguing and metadata policy and practice across Australian libraries was conducted as a follow-up on the author’s 2013 survey. Responses were collected from 86 libraries, including over half the country’s state and university libraries, as well as from 27 public library networks and 31 other types of library. On average, the libraries were spending 27 hours of staff time on cataloguing, although many more libraries reported a decline in cataloguing time than an increase. This trend was due to acquisitions being increasingly covered by record copy, and to competing demands on staff time, with retiring cataloguers not always being replaced. Nevertheless, large amounts of cataloguing, including original cataloguing, are still being performed by professional staff, with increasing attention being paid to making bibliographic access more culturally inclusive. On the other hand, libraries are presently relying on their bibliographic networks to publish their metadata as linked data, and hardly any are planning to move to BIBFRAME, while RDA’s ‘official toolkit’ is also proving problematic for some libraries. It is suggested that cataloguing in Australian libraries may be prioritised more if their metadata were made more discoverable and more usable by addressing the shortcomings of current systems and standards.