Reflection on ETL505 Bibliographic Standards in Education.

What  I learned from studying ETL505, Bibliogrpahic Standards in Education

 

ETL 505, Bibliographic Standards in Education was a really challenging subject. We learned to define bibliographic description and describe its importance in providing access to information.  As information agencies, school libraries need to consider how they can be an effective, integral part of the school’s educational programs.  To enable information literacy, cooperative planning, teaching and involvement in curriculum development, Teacher Librarians need to focus on the easy recovery of resources.  The increasing availability in electronic form of information generally and of new kinds of information particularly created the need for a redefinition and integration of the different categories of "information" organisations (Rayward, 1998, p. 207).  This has prompted a shift towards bibliographic description that emphasises the intellectual content and substance of the work itself (Hider, 2008, p. 303), as well as a more consistent and powerful way to facilitate resource access (Copeland, 2010, p. 14). As school library collections include an increasing variety of resources, an important aspect of the TL’s role is keeping up to date with appropriate and efficient means of meeting users’ needs in retrieving the information held within the print, audiovisual, digital and other sources. Therefore, clear, flexible frameworks, consistent guidelines and internationally accepted standards that enable more independent student search, selection and retrieval of resources will be welcomed by TLs whose time and expertise can be utilised elsewhere.

Cataloguing and assigning Webdewey numbers to resources, then truncating them against SCIS guidelines was a challenging task.  It taught me the value in effective bibliographic organisation, the importance of knowing the resources in your collection, and of the need for make accessibility easy for those who seek the information (Hider, 2008), p. X).