Library and Information Science Commons^™

Cataloging Manuscripts And Archival Collections, Rebecca A. Wiederhold

Faculty Publications

Catalogers are increasingly responsible for creating metadata for a variety of unusual items. In the Beyond Books: Cataloging Special Format Items preconference at ULA 2019, participants learned how to catalog manuscripts/archival collections, artists’ books, zines, and posters. This webinar will reprise the Manuscripts and Archival Collections segment of that session, educating participants on when it’s appropriate to catalog special collections material archivally as a collection versus on an item level. Whether you have finding aids to use as a base for your catalog record or you are working directly with the materials, guidelines for using DACS and RDA for manuscript …

Customizing The Connexion Client To Work For You, Rachel S. Evans, Emily Williams, Kelley Ansley

Presentations

OCLC’s Connexion Client has a number of built-in tools to help catalogers save time and energy through customizations that provide controlled automation and ensure consistency. We’ll review a few of these tools, specifically Text Strings, Key Maps, and Macros, along with some resources that provide additional shortcuts.

Conference Roundup: Smart Cataloging - Beginning The Move From Batch Processing To Automated Classification, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

This article reviewed the Amigos Online Conference titled “Work Smarter, Not Harder: Innovating Technical Services Workflows” keynote session delivered by Dr. Terry Reese on February 13, 2020. Excerpt:

"As the developer of MarcEdit, a popular metadata suite used widely across the library community, Reese’s current work is focused on the ways in which libraries might leverage semantic web techniques in order to transform legacy library metadata into something new. So many sessions related to using new technologies in libraries or academia, although exciting, are not practical enough to put into everyday use by most librarians. Reese’s keynote, titled Smart Cataloging: …

Review Of Arranging And Describing Archives And Manuscripts, Cory L. Nimer

Journal of Western Archives

A review of Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts, by Dennis Meissner.

Linked Data For The Real World: Leveraging Metadata For Cataloging, Rachel S. Evans, Robin Fay, Linh Uong

Presentations

Will the promise of linked data actually save us time? How will catalogers and machines work together to streamline recording of data and authority maintenance work, allowing catalogers and metadata practitioners to focus more on data stewardship and less on being data scribes? Will Real World Objects (RWOs) and linked data help bridge the gap between traditional cataloging and the larger semantic web communities of practice, ensuring that library metadata supports our users’ search behaviors, those FRBR User Tasks? Or will it just provide more maintenance work down the road? This session will explore the potential of linked data and …

Telling Your Story: Articulating Your Value As A Technical Services Librarians, Leslie Engelson, Christina Torbert

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

If you can translate your skills and achievements so others see their value and impact, everyone wins.

Whether justifying the need to fill an open position, writing a tenure or promotion narrative, or even carrying on a conversation with a colleague, librarians who work in Technical Services are often challenged to articulate what they do and the value it brings to the institution they serve. In this webinar we will discuss:

• The challenge of defining value in the context of technical services
• Assessment measures that determine the impact of technical services “products” on users
• Connecting the impact of technical services …

Review Of Ethical Questions In Name Authority Control, Itza A. Carbajal

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Ethical Questions in Name Authority Control is a new and thoughtful addition to the metadata and cataloging field of study and practice. Consisting of eighteen essays written by a number of libraries, archives, and information scholars, this edited volume investigates and responds to a number of ethical questions regarding name authority control.These include topics such as the privacy of the creator, use of geographic names for contested lands, critique of the use of gender in authority control systems, as well as considerations around multilingualism, to name a few. While the title mostly appeals to a particular field of work and …

Richardson Collection Of Toy And Movable Books, Cindy Cline, Katie Caton, Alyssa Coon

Library Presentations

This presentation will focus on the Richardson Collection of Movable Books, including: what are movable books, how is the collection processed, and review different fields in the bibliographical records. We will also provide a preview of our new LibGuide for the collection.

The Zine Union Catalog, Lauren S. Kehoe, Jenna Freedman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lauren Kehoe and Jenna Freedman have been working on the Zine Union Catalog, aka ZineCat or ZUC, since their Introduction to Digital Humanities course in Spring, 2017: MALS 75500, Digital Humanities Methods and Practices. ZineCat is the home of a union catalog dedicated to zines. A union catalog is a resource where libraries and other cultural institutions that collect materials can share cataloging and holdings information from their individual collections. The most familiar union catalog is probably WorldCat which is used to locate books, journals, CDs, DVDs, and other materials in the world’s libraries. ZineCat facilitates researchers' discovery of zine …

Cleaning Up Messy Records: Uncovering Match-Points In Ils And Repository Data, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Evans shared the process and learning takeaways from a recent project, comparing and cleaning up the data in both a repository and library catalog for items from a single collection. This post discusses the need for knowing how to pull good lists and the benefits of solid control fields in the data from multiple different systems. It also shared candidly the challenges one faces when fixing errors and attempting to make fields more consistent for platforms with very different records and standards.

TechScans is a blog to share the latest trends and technology tools for technical services law librarians. The …

Best Practices For Cataloging Objects Using Rda And Marc 21, Julie Renee Moore, Robert B. Freeborn, Scott Dutkiewicz, Sarah Hovde, Jessica Janecki, Jessica Schomberg, Trina Soderquist

OLAC Publications and Training Materials

This best practices document is intended to assist catalogers in creating bibliographic records for objects, which RDA refers to as three dimensional forms, according to RDA instructions. This document provides guidance for the most common object situations encountered in libraries. Each section includes examples that reflect the RDA instructions. A list of resources and a selection of full MARC record examples illustrating common situations encountered in cataloging objects (of various types) completes the document. The Objects Task Force especially worked on the examples to provide a variety of materials that fall bibliographically under Objects. The Task Force found at least …

Diversity, Inclusion, And Social Justice In Library Technical Services, Rhonda Kauffman, Martina S. Anderson

Published Works

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries recently embraced a large-scale initiative to incorporate the values of diversity, inclusion, and social justice (DISJ) into library practices. In early 2017, the MIT collections directorate task force on DISJ released a report with recommendations for embedding DISJ values into the daily work of archives, technical services, preservation, scholarly communications, and collections strategy staff. This chapter focuses on the challenges and opportunities in undertaking a sustained effort to achieve DISJ specifically within technical services. The authors highlight how technical services staff can use their unique position within libraries to dismantle existing structures of …

Going Beyond Book Displays: Providing Safe Spaces For Lgbtq Youth, Lisa Gay-Milliken, Jeffrey Discala

STEMPS Faculty Publications

School libraries should be a space where students of all ages feel welcome and safe. I (Lisa) can speak from experience when I say this is not always the case, not in the 1980s and not today. Even in the school library, a place I now cherish, I was fearful of ridicule and harassment. I was frustrated because I did not see myself—a young, questioning, and confused lesbian—in any of the books. Gay and lesbian characters didn’t exist on those high school shelves. “But that was the 1980s,” you say. It hasn’t gotten much better for much of the LGBTQ …