Contemporary cataloguing policy and practice in Australian libraries

A survey of current cataloguing practice and policy was conducted amongst a structured sample of 40 Australian libraries from the academic, public, school and special sectors. Responses suggested that while catalogues and other bibliographic databases may be merging, there was still significant demand for cataloguers ' even growing demand in some cases, with records for increasing numbers of online resources being created. Moreover, these records were being created mostly by professionals, who were still engaged in traditional activities such as authority control and applying conventional standards such as MARC21, LCSH and DDC. The research found little evidence that cataloguing was being any further deskilled. There was considerable interest in the new standard, RDA, though it looks like AACR-based records will continue to be imported into catalogues for quite some time to come. Less evidence than might be expected was found in relation to the application of other bibliographic standards, such as those used for particular fields, which could point to a more generic approach. Some interest was expressed in the development of the search interface, particularly post-search, but it was clear that different libraries had very different priorities in this respect.