Immaculate catalogues, indexes and monsters too…: David E. Bennett reports on the three-day residential CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Annual Conference, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 13-15 September 2006.

Cataloguing and classification was revealed as an area of library and information science that has survived years of neglect by most library schools to reveal itself as the much-needed solution to online resource accessibility. Cutting-edge advances in information technology were showcased, including the promising prototype AUTINDEX indexing software for indexing digital and digitised documents, the latest research into novel methods for automated image compression and indexing, searching and retrieval methods, and reviews of user-operability studies of image retrieval search interfaces. Traditional print material cataloguing was not neglected. The development of the powerful yet simplified set of cataloguing rules known as the Research Development and Access protocol, set to supercede and replace the current Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2 rev.) in 2008, was reviewed and the latest developments modelled. The technology behind the newly released union serials catalogue SUNCAT for attaching and tagging minimally described institutional holdings records to full bibliographic records using uniquely-tailored MARC bibliographic fields and bibliographic record retrieval was explained.