Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Second National Conference on Library Cataloging held in Nanjing, May 31-June 1

The Second National Conference on Library Cataloging is held in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, May 31-June 1, 2010. 120 participants attended the conference.
The conference is sponsored by the National Library of China, co-sponsored by Information Organization Committee of the Library Society of China, Nanjing Library and China Library Weekly, and supported by Ex Libris.
Yesterday, Prof. Wang Songlin gave keynote speech, and some experts from various libraries and library schools in China spoke about hot issues in international library cataloging and information organization community.
During the first session of the second day (June 1), about 10 speakers presented their papers for the conference, which are already published in the conference proceedings in May 2010.
Major topics of the conference are: outsourcing, roles of catalogers, ICP, FRBR, FRAD, FRSAD, name authority file, VIAF, Chinese Library Classification, Classified Chinese Thesaurus, SKOS, RDA, etc. Managing Director of Ex Libris China Office introduced the newly development Union Cataloging System of Aleph500 system.
During the first conference in Wuhan in 2006, participants discussed seriously about the unification of cataloging rules in China. The situation has been improved very much.
Both the first and the second conferences is mainly coordinated by me. I spent quite a lot of time for call-for-paper, review of submitted papers and arrangement of presenters. About 10 of my colleagues from the Acquisitions & Cataloging Department volunteered to do all the arrangements for the conference. I am glad that the conference is very successful, and is much better than the first conference in 2006.