Facet's book table, shortly before the guests arrived

Thanks to the colleagues, friends and former and current students who attended last night’s drinks party to celebrate the publication by Facet Publishing of two books from lecturers in the department.

Collection Development in the Digital Age edited by Maggie Fieldhouse (UCL) and Audrey Marshall (Brighton) speaks to the many changes that have taken place in collection management in recent years. It suggests ways in which practitioners can take an active role in influencing strategy and includes numerous case studies. Parts cover the concept and practice of collection development, trends in the development of e-resources, trends in library supply, and making and keeping your collections active. Individual chapters have been written by David Ball, David Brown, Josh Brown, Terry Bucknell, Sheila Corrall, Bradley Daigle, Diana Edmonds, Jil Fairclough, Jane Harvell, David House, Tracy Mitrano & Karrie Peterson, Martin Palmer, Wendy Shaw, Ruth Stubbings, and the editors themselves. As the author names suggest, the book covers all library sectors and is both useful for practitioners and essential for LIS students learning how to manage libraries and information centres.

Practical Cataloguing: AACR, RDA and MARC 21 by Anne Welsh (UCL) and Sue Batley (London Metropolitan) introduces the general principles that underpin library cataloguing, the history of the international standards and a closer look at the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 2nd edition (AACR2) and the dominant library encoding format MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloguing). The book advocates that understanding general principles will allow cataloguers to move from AACR2 to new international standard Resource Description and Access (RDA) without having to relearn everything from scratch. Two chapters deal in depth with RDA (as far as we can deal in depth with a standard that is just being introduced), and another discusses Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), one of RDA’s main theoretical underpinnings. Two brief chapters discuss the current state of play in the introduction of RDA and the predicted change from MARC to a new encoding format. These, and the preface, have been written to be useful to cataloguers and managers alike. There are ten full examples at the end of the book, and countless records throughout the book. From September, Practical Cataloguing will be the core textbook for the cataloguing component of MA LIS core module INSTG004 Cataloguing and Classification.

Thanks to Facet for their support; the Department for hosting (in the Wilkins Terrace) and Dr Melissa Terras, Reader in Electronic Communication and Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, for her official welcome to UCL. Mostly thanks to everyone who came along and celebrated with us.