Cataloging and Metadata Commons^™

Documentary Provenance And Digitized Collections: Concepts And Problems, Mats Dahlström, Joacim Hansson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Provenance research in digitized memory institution collections is mainly devoted to documenting and mapping the trajectories of the physical source documents across time, place and contexts, primarily by developing metadata standards and data models. The provenance of the digital reproduction and its relation to one or several physical source documents is however not being subjected to much inquiry. A possible explanation for this is the face-value approach with which we tend to regard digital reproductions. Looking more closely at such reproductions and their complex digitization process suggests a far from straightforward and linear provenance relation, and begs the question of …

Matching Made In Heaven: Collections And Metadata Collaboration For Print Preservation, Alie Visser, Erin Johnson, Christina Zoricic

Western Libraries Publications

Following the trend of repurposing library space to meet modern user needs, Western University is undergoing a planned revitalization and renovation of its largest library on campus. As a result, 500,000 items will need to be shifted to other locations or off-site storage. In this session we will outline the impact of metadata work in shifting this large collection of material to a shared print preservation storage facility, in coordination with Western University’s Keep@Downsview partnership (https://downsviewkeep.org/). Keep@Downsview is a partnership of five universities to preserve the scholarly record in Ontario in a shared, high-density storage and preservation facility. We will …

Mission-Driven Recordkeeping: The Need For Rim Staff In U.S. Nonprofit Organizations, Emily Mercer

School of Information Student Research Journal

As a robust and growing industry, often with strong ties to communities served, there is much potential for nonprofit organizations to harness powerful and rich databases of cultural information not found in any other sector. Yet research shows that in most cases, nonprofit organizations operate on limited budgets, tight deadlines, and may see the task of properly managing records as counter-productive to the mission of the organization. This research examines the systems of recordkeeping in nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and argues that record keeping staff must be considered an essential component for a nonprofit organization to survive and thrive.

Genealogical Plagiarism And The Library Community, Katherine S. Richers

School of Information Student Research Journal

Plagiarism is regarded as an academic crime, but can affect hobbies that rely on research and information sharing such as genealogy. The issue is well-known within the genealogy community. However, information professionals who aid genealogists in their research may not know enough about the issue. How can the library field respond constructively to the issue of uncontrolled plagiarism in genealogy? While the genealogy community condemns plagiarism and offers resources to correct it, current library practices concentrate on services and not on plagiarism education in the genealogy context, concentrating more on copyright and legal problems. The library field can help professionals …

The Information Behaviors Of Fiction Writers: A Systematic Approach To An Understudied Information Community, Lisa Lowdermilk

School of Information Student Research Journal

Within the context of creative information communities in general, fiction writers remain a relatively understudied community. This article seeks to rectify that gap by highlighting the information behaviors of fiction writers, including the ways in which they network, as well as the processes they use when writing. In doing so, it reveals that fiction writers of all genres have many experiences in common, such as the "seed incident" that serves as the starting point when writing fiction. In addition, it examines fiction writers' impact on readers, with the implication that everyone--writers and non-writers alike--would benefit from understanding fiction writers' information …

Understanding Diversity And Intellectual Freedom As #Corevalues, Deborah Hicks

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Srj: Leading The Genre-Defying Lis Profession, Greta Snyder

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Ischool Student Research Journal, Vol.9, Iss.2

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Discover Datasets In The Library Catalog, Yukari Sugiyama, Rowena Griem, Tachtorn Meier

Yale Day of Data

As digital scholarship evolves in academia, there is a growing importance and increasing acquisition of datasets at Yale University Library. YUL has over 10,000 datasets ranging from statistical data to linguistics corpora, GIS data, and image datasets.

Information Outlook, November/December 2019, Special Libraries Association

Information Outlook, 2019

Volume 23, Issue 6

Disability And Accessibility Language In Subject Headings And Social Tags, Mackenzie Johnson, Carlie Forsythe

FIMS Publications

Mackenzie Johnson and Carlie Forsythe’s article on disability and accessibility language in subject headings and social tagging stresses the importance of involving subject experts in the creation of subject headings, and of getting the headings right to allow effective information retrieval. The authors also assess the ‘third way’, of semi-structured, moderated social tagging systems, that lies between fully controlled vocabularies and free social tagging.

Volume 39, Number 4, December 2019 Olac Newsletter, Marcia Barrett, Jennifer M. Eustis, Richard N. Leigh, Jan Mayo, Yoko Kudo, Jay Weitz, Lisa Romano

OLAC Newsletters

Digitized December 2019 issue of the OLAC Newsletter.

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 …

Language Documentation In The Aftermath Of The 2015 Nepal Earthquakes: A Guide To Two Archives And A Web Exhibit, Kristine A. Hildebrandt, Tanner Burge-Beckley, Jacob Sebok

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

We describe two institutionally related archives and an online exhibit representing a set of Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal. These archives and exhibit were built to house materials resulting from documentation of twelve Tibeto-Burman languages in the aftermath of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. This account includes a detailed discussion of the different materials recorded, and how they were prepared for the collections. This account also provides a comparison of the two different types of archives, the different but complementary functions they serve, and a discussion of the role that online exhibits can play in the context of language documentation archives.

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 …

Alumni Oral Histories: A Collaboration Between The Libraries And Development And Alumni Relations, Rebeccca Ciota

Collaborative Librarianship

This article describes a collaboration between Grinnell College’s libraries and its Office of Development and Alumni Relations on an oral history project in which college alumni are interviewed about their experiences at the college. Such close collaborations between development offices and libraries are rare. This collaboration was successful due to the equal participation of all parties.

Matching Made In Heaven: Collections And Metadata Collaboration For Print Preservation, Erin Johnson, Alie Visser, Christina Zoricic

Western Libraries Presentations

Following the trend of re-purposing library space to meet modern user needs, Western University is undergoing a planned revitalization and renovation of its largest library on campus. As a result, 500,000 items will need to be shifted to other locations or off-site storage. In this session we will outline the impact of metadata work in shifting this large collection of material to a shared print preservation storage facility, in coordination with Western University’s Keep@Downsview partnership (https://downsviewkeep.org/). Keep@Downsview is a partnership of five universities to preserve the scholarly record in Ontario in a shared, high-density storage and preservation facility. …

What We Learned: 2019 Dlf Forum And Digipres, Joshua Morgan, Jessica Serrao, Krista Oldham

Presentations

Josh Morgan, Krista Oldham, and Jessica Serrao present on what they learned attending the Digital Library Federation 2019 Forum and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance DigiPres conference. Presentation includes topics on project management, being okay with imperfection, metadata MPLP for digital collections, and digital preservation.

Six Impossible Things: Moving Kbart Into The Next Decade, Robert Heaton, Andrée Rathemacher, Noah Levin, Christine Stohn

Technical Services Faculty Presentations

Conference presentation, "Six Impossible Things: Moving KBART into the Next Decade," presented at the 2019 Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition, “The time has come… to talk of many things!” on November 7, 2019 in Charleston, South Carolina.

"KBART is one of the most successful NISO recommendations today. Formally supported by over 80 organizations across all stakeholder groups, it enables a standardized transfer of data between content providers and knowledge bases. Most recently KBART added an automated process to transfer holdings data to localize an institution's knowledge base holdings. While KBART was originally built to focus on journal …

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.

(Un)Structuring For The Next Generation: New Possibilities For Library Data With Nosql, Matthew D. Harrington, Dennis B. Christman

Charleston Library Conference

For many years, libraries have relied upon relational databases (RDBMS) to store, manipulate, and query various types of data, and this database model works extremely well when data are highly structured. As the data become more complex, however, the relational database model strains under the burden of maintaining complex joins, which can decrease a database's performance and limit its functionality. Furthermore, data are not always best represented in the RDBMS's flat, tabular format. Library data often require flexibility and extensibility to accommodate the increasing volume and variety of library resources and metadata. To address these issues, transforming the underlying structure …

Data Curation Workshop: Tips And Tools For Today, Matthew M. Benzing

Charleston Library Conference

The current state of research data is like a disorganized photo collection: a mix of formats scattered across different media without a lot of authority control. That is changing as the need to make data available to researchers across the world is becoming recognized. Researchers know that their data needs to be maintained and made accessible, but often they do not have the time or the inclination to get involved in all of the details. This provides an excellent opportunity for librarians. Data curation is the process of preparing data to be made available in a repository with the goal …

From The Winter Of Messy Data Into The Spring Of Standardization: E-Book Vendor Data Reenvisioned, Bonita Pollock, Brian Falato, Xiying Mi

Charleston Library Conference

The University of South Florida (USF) Libraries run several projects which involve the collection and display of ebook vendor metadata including seven evidence-based acquisitions (EBA) programs, one patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) program and the eBooks for Classroom Plus (EB+) database. These projects are the main focus of the Libraries’ Textbook Affordability Project (TAP). The TAP initiative’s goal is help reduce textbook cost to students by providing faculty with ebook alternatives. The metadata used in these projects is collected from a variety of vendor sources including titles lists, K-Bart files entitlement lists and Marc records. Compiling data from various sources into a …

An Alternative Method Of Title Authority Control: The Shifted-Authority Control Model For Chinese Classics, Maiko Kimura

Journal of East Asian Libraries

This study investigates the effectiveness of a library-cataloging model developed by the author, namely, the shifted-authority control (SAC) model, for retrievals with fewer omissions in the field of Chinese classics. Since there is almost no title authority data for Chinese classics in Japan, the normal authority control model is unsuitable. To determine whether the SAC model can address this problem, a prototype authority database for searching the titles of Chinese classics was constructed. Then, three bibliographic databases were searched using work/item titles from the prototype database; this facilitated comparisons of the recall performance and the precision of the following three …

Connecting Collections With Equitable, Diverse, And Inclusive Metadata, Jessica Serrao

Presentations

Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives are becoming commonplace as a strategy to address bias, racism, discrimination, oppression, and privilege in the historic record and improve discovery and access to rare and unique materials. SAA’s Statement on Diversity and Inclusion and Core Values of Archivists reflect the importance of these initiatives. This presentation will explore some of the practices archives employ to improve EDI in digital collections metadata, which may be the key to connecting related materials of underrepresented groups across disparate collections. Attendees will then learn about an in-progress quantitative research study that will evaluate academic archives’ practices aimed …

Spaceport: A Finding Aid Launchpad, Rebecca B. French

Libraries

JMU Libraries distributes its Special Collections finding aids to a number of discovery platforms, a process which historically has involved a significant amount of hand-encoding and manual data entry. We recently developed and implemented Spaceport, a Python app that has revolutionized this workflow. This presentation provides an overview of the app's functionality, which includes generating EADs for Virginia Heritage, HTML files for upload to the Libraries website, and MARCXML records for our catalog and OCLC. It also describes the efficiencies and other benefits we have observed from Spaceport's use.

Citations Needed: Wikidata And The Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem, Megan Wacha

Publications and Research

Since Wikidata’s launch in 2012 as an open, collaboratively edited knowledge base, it’s held great promise for the library and scholarly communication community more broadly. Institutions and individual information professionals turned Wikidatans are using Wikidata to build a community-owned infrastructure for the bibliographic ecosystem, including open source tools that generate profiles of scholars, organizations, and publications. This workshop will introduce participants to Wikidata and its linked data infrastructure, including opportunities for hands-on editing and an overview of tools that facilitate data contribution and use. Participants will leave prepared to connect with existing Wikidata initiatives, and with entry points to launch …

The Espy Project: From Paper Archives To Digital Scholarship, Mark Wolfe, Melissa Mcmullen, Amanda Partridge

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

The M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives has digitized the most complete existing collection of execution records and is making them available for digital scholarship. M. Watt Espy spent his life documenting the death penalty in the United States. He created over 24,000 index cards and over 100,000 pages of reference material to document each case. The project connects this source material to a problematic 1980s-era execution dataset. We implemented Samvera’s open source digital repository software, Hyrax, which provides online access to all of the digitized materials. Hyrax allows users to query digital collections for online viewing or …

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 Great Csu Weed Of 2019, Amy B. Parsons, Emily Crews

Faculty Bibliography

We kicked. We screamed. We coped. We survived. We will tell you how. In early 2019, The Columbus State University Schwob Memorial (Main) library faced a MASSIVE weeding project like nothing they had coped with before. In this presentation, two librarians, Amy Parsons from Technical services and Emily Crews from Reference services, will share their workflows, public relations challenges, a few best practices, and changes that will be implemented. Oftentimes, libraries have to be torn apart to build them back better. This will be a lighthearted conversation on how we handled this challenge. We will also share a fall update …