20-25 hours of online learning you can complete in your own timescale: reading, watching presentations, practising quasi-facsimile (title-page transcriptions) and collation (working out the format of the book, and how its pages were ordered and bound), and undertaking some paper-folding exercises along the way.
Example Curriculum
Course Instructor: Anne Welsh
Anne has been cataloguing professionally since 1993 and teaching others to catalogue since 1995. She is the lead author of Practical Cataloguing (London: Facet; Chicago: Neal Schuman, 2012), a core text in iSchools internationally. Beginning Cataloguing is in press at Routledge.
She first studied Bibliography as part of her undergraduate courses in English Language and Literature, and taught Historical Bibliography for over a decade.
Beginning Cataloguing training courses are, therefore, built on over twenty-five years' worth of examples and training materials, updated and refreshed regularly.
You can find out more about Anne on her profile page on beginningcataloguing.com
Course Instructor: Yvonne Lewis
Yvonne has worked in historic collections since graduating with her MA LIS in 1992. Over the years, she has taught hundreds of people how to catalogue and supervised many work placement students, often providing them with their first introduction to special collections librarianship.
Her research interests include 17th and 18th century private libraries, book ownership, the reading experience, and maps and globes. She has contributed many entries to the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) and recently added to her knowledge of Bibliography and Book History by completing an MRes in Book History at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.
You can find out more about Yvonne on her profile page at beginningcataloguing.com