Cataloging and Metadata Commons^™

Conference Roundup - Code4lib 2022 Report, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Established in 2003 , Code4Lib welcomes hundreds of developers each year to their annual conference . The overarching theme of the group is to bring together program-centric librarians who are committed to the creation and use of open technologies. As you might imagine, this attracts all sorts of librarians from various environments including academic, public, and corporate sectors, and individuals carry a mosaic of titles including systems and electronic resources librarians, metadata and cataloging librarians, faculty services and research librarians, and those who work with discovery layers, online collections of all shapes and sizes, and many who care deeply about …

Big Data: Managing Large Scale Metadata Projects In A Teleworked Environment, Rachel S. Evans, Mary Miller, Kathleen Carter, Kelley Ansley

Presentations

Beginning in March of 2020, Mary Miller and Kathleen Carter coordinated the work of over 100 University of Georgia Libraries students, faculty, and staff on remote metadata projects for the Brown Media Archives. The great majority of these UGA employees were not catalogers, were not familiar with metadata concepts, and had never visited the Brown Media Archives. Yet, in a four-month period, they successfully completed a quantity of work that would have taken Brown Media two and a half years to accomplish at regular staffing levels. Miller and Carter will share what they got right, what they got wrong and …

Data, Stats, Go: Navigating The Intersections Of Cataloging, E-Resource, And Web Analytics Reporting, Rachel S. Evans, Wendy Moore, Jessica Pasquale, Andre Davison

Presentations

Do you trudge through gathering statistics at fiscal or calendar year-end? Do you wonder why you track certain things, thinking many seem outdated or irrelevant? Many places seem to keep counting certain statistics because "that's what they've always done." For e-resources, how do you integrate those with physical counts and reconcile the variations (updated e-resources versus re-cataloged physical items)? What about repository downloads and other web traffic? The quantity of stats that libraries track is staggering and keeps growing. This program will encourage attendees to stop and evaluate what and why they're gathering data and help identify possible alternatives to …

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.

Born-Digital Preservation: The Art Of Archiving Photos With Script And Batch Processing, Rachel S. Evans, Leslie Grove, Sharon Bradley

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

With our IT department preparing to upgrade the University of Georgia’s Alexander Campbell King Law Library (UGA Law Library) website from Drupal 7 to 8 this fall, a web developer, an archivist, and a librarian teamed up a year ago to make plans for preserving thousands of born-digital images. We wanted to harvest photographs housed only in web-based photo galleries on the law school website and import them into our repository’s collection. The problem? There were five types of online photo galleries, and our current repository did not include appropriate categories for all of the photographs. The solution? Expand our …

Top 5 Ts-Centric Webinar & Virtual Conference Highlights, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

The increase of wonderful, FREE programming being delivered virtually right now and available to audiences around the world is truly amazing. It can be overwhelming to sift through the options (especially if your inbox has exponentially exploded as mine has over the past 3 months). Take a trip back in time with me as I share below my favorite sessions that I feel offered the most valuable content to those of us in technical services positions.

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

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: …

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 …

Power Projects For Quarantined Librarians, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Some of us are approaching the two month mark of our library's closure to the public. Though it has definitely had ups and downs, I have found it has helped me better carve out time for professional development activities, dedicate more of my day to clean-up projects I have just not had time to follow through on, and even start new projects with the help of colleagues who found themselves needing a little more to do from home. I hope this post will elaborate on that topic to give specific project examples for those working in collection services, technical services, …

Apps For Actionable Workflows: Tools To Stay In The Loop And On Top Of Tasks, Rachel S. Evans

Presentations

No matter what member of the team you are or what type of library you are in - be it electronic resources manager, cataloger, head of acquisitions, ILS or systems administrator, or even repository coordinator - getting things done and meeting goals depends largely on how you communicate with one another and how you handle your time. Meeting goals and deadlines on both big and small projects in addition to your personal tasks can be achieved less painfully by making effective use of a few on point tools. This session will use the presenter's preferred platforms to show specific examples …

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 …

Georgia Library Association - Technical Services Interest Group, Linh Uong, Rachel S. Evans, Rebecca Hunnicutt

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

News article highlighting the activities of the Georgia Library Association Technical Services Interest Group in spring 2020.

Messy Data Secrets Revealed: How We Digitized Theses And Improved Discovery, Anne Burnett, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

The article offers information on how the digitized thesis and improved discovery. Topics include tracing its origins from accession and early digitization through to continuing consolidation and cleanup of decades' worth of data, the benefits of providing open access to the scholarship in the theses, and the inclusion in the institutional repository (IR) has been advantageous.

The Obs/Ts Summit 2020 & Linked Data In Libraries Conference, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Conference program review of all sessions at the OBS/TS Summit and Linked Data in Libraries Conference.

A Practical Workflow For Ocr Telework, Rachel S. Evans, Stephen Wolfson, Tj Striepe

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

The article informs about the strategy librarians at the University of Georgia's Alexander Campbell King Law Library used for applying Optical character recognition (OCR) to hundreds of documents during their multi-month COVID-19 pandemic lockdown; presenting a new opportunity for their OCR project because they needed work that staffers could do remotely; and how some staffers had duties that could only be performed in the building and were greatly limited after.

Conference Roundup: Workshop Report On Digitization For Small Institutions, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Evans reviews a recent Georgia Library Association (GLA) preconference workshop presented by the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG). Evans shares takeaways from the half-day experience including resources related to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the Digital Library Foundation (DLF). The report also presents learning objective in the context of the author's own work responsibilities and details how they will be useful and relate to current projects. Topics discussed include metadata, digitization, archiving digital-born photographs, repository standards, cataloging standards, and more.

Technical Services Law Librarian (ISSN 0195-4857) is an official publication of the Technical Services Special Interest Section …

Here Come The Bots: Six Tips When Designing Your Ir's Metadata For Improved Discoverability, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Rachel Evans draws from her experience as a web developer and a recent webinar on discoverability to compose a list of six tips for creating and maintaining strong metadata in digital repositories with SEO in mind. Each tip includes a personalized summary for why it is important, especially when Google bots crawl your site. The tips include a mix of best practices and common sense advice for rising to the top of search results.

TechScans is a blog to share the latest trends and technology tools for technical services law librarians. The official blog of the TS-SIS and OBS-SIS AALL …

Gla Conference Review: Workshop On Digitization For Small Institutions, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Rachel Evans summarizes the recent Georgia Library Association (GLA) conference held in Macon, GA in October 2019. Specifically Evans reviews in detail a workshop on digitization for small institutions. The workshop and by extension the blog post review share valuable resources for project managers working on digitization in their libraries and within their digital repositories as well as information about metadata standards and best practices.

TechScans is a blog to share the latest trends and technology tools for technical services law librarians. The official blog of the TS-SIS and OBS-SIS AALL groups.

Comparison Usability Testing: Classic Online Catalog Vs. Ebsco Discovery Layer, Marie Mize, Rachel S. Evans, Jason Tubinis

Presentations

For years we have offered our EBSCO discovery layer service (EDS) as a secondary search tool in addition to our traditional online catalog (GAVEL) linking to both from the library website. However, the traditional catalog search, also known as “Classic GAVEL”, is always listed first while EDS, also known as “GAVEL & Beyond”, is listed second. Although maintenance has continued for populating EDS with library records on a daily basis, customization for this interface and sharing it with our users has not been prioritized. Before making any decisions related to changing the primary location our users experience when searching the …

The Future Of Security, Yesterday: All About Authentication, Authorization And More…, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Rachel Evans crafts a summary of useful terminology aimed at other new CS-SIS members and attempts to demystify by way of definitions and explanations the tangled concepts of authentication and authorization.

The CS-SIS Blog Committee is charged with providing CS-SIS members with timely and useful information through an official yet informal medium about relevant subjects for the membership, including the activities of the members, committees, and Executive Board.

Reflections From Calicon19: Two Best Sessions, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Rachel Evans summarizes the recent Computer Assisted Legal Education (CALI) conference held in Columbia, SC in June 2019. Specifically Evans reviews two sessions related to automating work in institutional repositories and using eResources for more affordable course materials.

TechScans is a blog to share the latest trends and technology tools for technical services law librarians. The official blog of the TS-SIS and OBS-SIS AALL groups.

Quick Question: What About Conferences?, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Rachel Evans targets other merging technical services librarians in this blog post for new members. The post shares personal experience with conferences and other advice as well as offers other members to contribute their own advice and memories in response.

TechScans is a blog to share the latest trends and technology tools for technical services law librarians. The official blog of the TS-SIS and OBS-SIS AALL groups.

Quick Question: What’S With All Those Acronyms?, Rachel S. Evans, Keelan Weber

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Rachel Evans and Keelan Weber break down the key acronyms and related terminology for other new technical services and online bibliographic services special interest section members in this blog post.

TechScans is a blog to share the latest trends and technology tools for technical services law librarians. The official blog of the TS-SIS and OBS-SIS AALL groups.

My Own Private Library: A Peek Inside The Personal Library Of A Librarian, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

The author shares the scope of her personal media collection, detailing home collection management and cataloging practices, and item organization. Stories are given for special items in the collection throughout the piece and photos are included.

“Who Is This?” Moving From Authority Control To Identity Management, Suzanne Graham, Dong Joon Lee, Erik Radio, Hannah Tarver

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

This article provides practical guidance on the successes and challenges from three large institutions dealing with creative cataloging of intellectual products and the maintenance of those records.

I'M Not A Librarian, I'M A Curator (Como), Sharon Bradley, Thomas J. Striepe

Presentations

A curator collects, organizes, and shares information. Librarians have always been curators. In the ever changing information environment we now need to acknowledge our inner curator and bring those skills to the social media efforts of our institutions. Social content curation is about collecting, organizing, and sharing information in new ways that aid our patrons; they want to follow trusted “filters” of information to save them time. Effective and useful curation can highlight the value of the library in a new way. Identifies skills and tools needed to become social content curators and develop a curation program